A Love Letter to Joanna Macy
"The Heart That Breaks Open Can Contain the Whole Universe"
One of my most beloved mentors, heroes and teachers is currently in hospice. At 96 years old, Joanna Macy is approaching the final threshold of her wonderful life.
If you don’t know who she is, let me gush. Joanna is a leading environmental activist, a prolific Buddhist scholar on deep ecology and systems theory, and a seminal translator of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry. She has been a catalytic international spokesperson for anti-nuclear causes and a tireless advocate for peace, justice, and nature. She is a legend, and her legacy of loving communion with the Earth, the courage to feel grief and despair over the world’s suffering, the alchemy of that material into compassion and gratitude and her signature warm presence, is an offering of limitless measure to us now.
Her wisdom and her voice have shaped me profoundly in the last twenty years. I am in a profound debt of gratitutde to her. Gratitude, after all, is one of her seminal teachings.
When I saw a Caring Bridge page set up by her children about Joanna’s declining health one week ago, my heart stopped. It was like her passage is a bell, a clarion call. Remember.
So I picked up her memoir, Widening Circles, and maybe you want to do this with me—spend some time with her teachings and see what medicine she has for us today in the midst of “the great unraveling.”
The heart that
breaks open can
contain the
whole universe.
-Joanna Macy
I know I am not alone in this week’s peak excruciating hard. Watching USAID shut down officially—which a new study in the Lancet said will result in upwards of 15 million additional deaths by 2030—the construction of a concentration camp (yes I use that word intentionally without hyperbole) in the Everglades to cage immigrants, the floods in Texas and loss of innocent life, and the passage of a bill that is anti-environmental and anti-clean energy, rips funding from national parks and will strip children of life-saving food benefits in the largest rollback of food and health assistance in US history, leaves me, well, bereft.
It’s too much. It’s far too much.
I feel anger, I feel despair.
How are you metabolizing? How are you coping?
We know these decisions will certainly harm millions of people. We know cutting funding for renewables and clean energy is going to increase fossil fuel emissions and catapult us further into climate collapse. We know increasing the debt deficit is bad economics. It does not take a policy wonk to understand that the short-sightedness and flagrant fiscal irresponsibility is dizzying and dazzling in its scale.
Yet, here we are.
And in the midst of this, Joanna Macy is dying.
Her life’s work, in many ways, is exactly for this moment.
Her teaching traced two main threads: how to feel pain for the world and how to alchemize compassion into action, and stay engaged, no matter what.
Joanna, what do we do?
She always started with gratitude.
We don’t need hope,
we need to be the Earth now,
we need evensong,
we need the great knowing,
unknowing and knowing enough.
-Joanna Macy
No matter what pain she faced, she never lost sight of cultivating a mindful, heartfelt appreciating for the wonder and beauty of the living world.
What about the Earth are you grateful for?
What is one animal, botanical wonder or landscape that touches you?
“The great open secret of gratitude,” Joanna writes, “is that it is not dependent on external circumstance.” And it gives us much energy and courage to keep going. Gratitude roots us to the life that is still living.
To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe— to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it—is a wonder beyond words.
- Joanna Macy
I have had so many friends reach out, sharing the news of her decline, too. She is a beloved elder, and I am appreciating grieving together, sharing in the ripple of her teachings.
As she transitions, I invite us to light our candle for her. To honor her light even as it fades, at least in this form.
I know the world will miss her when she goes. But then again, because of her endless love for this same world, I know she wouldn’t have gone far.
Joanna, what would you have us know?
You are here for the sake of Earth, you are here by the authority of Earth,
and you are here because you are Earth,
right here, in this time.
- Joanna Macy
Joanna, everything is so overwhelming. What would you want to tell us?
Joanna taught people how to be with suffering. She made no distinction between personal and collective pain. Joanna would often lead her talks reminding people of Buddha’s First Noble Truth. We will suffer. Suffering exists. Suffering is real. This is a pain that can not be wished away.
The following is causing me pain, and maybe you, too: Disappearing funds to protect our national parks, missiles and bombs dropped on innocent people, food aid held back from the hungry, families being ripped apart in ICE raids, legislative pathways to increase oil and drilling, rollbacks of social services for those who need it most, racist rhetoric blasted from the national stage and degradation of life. The list goes on.
The reality has started to seep into my senses and synapses instead of staying buried in my mind. I’ve sat with the trees in the last few days and just wept.
Reading her words is like swimming in the clearest mountain river. Joanna’s voice is one of crystaline integrity, a stark contrast to the vitriolic and hateful rhetoric of the status quo.
Joanna started her environmental and deep ecology work in a different time, but with urgent existential threats to planet and people. And yet, she knew that moving through such terror must begin by feeling the pain around it. Enveloping it with our soft animal bodies.
How do we do that? Won’t it swallow us whole?
She always offered poignant questions to help people speak the feelings they carried for what was happening to the world. She called this the Open Sentence practice.
What if we tried what Joanna suggests?
Some ways my heart is breaking, and breaking open are….
Some feelings that are arising as this happens are…
What I do with these feelings is…
Perhaps take some time in a quiet place and write down your responses. Let it come. Prentis Hemphill, who wrote “What it Takes to Heal,” writes that in the face of suffering, “I don’t stay calm. Sometimes I sob uncontrollably, sometimes I scream, We can still fight and build and feel human emotion. There’s no way around it and nothing wrong with it. Sometimes that’s the practice.”
If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear.
-Joanna Macy
In her memoir, Widening Circles, Joanna Macy tells a story about one of her very first workshops, when she was nervous about what she had to offer, if anything at all. Imagine that!
As people gathered and she felt all kinds of nerves, she said she was reminded of the prophecy Choegyal Rinpoche had given her about what are called the Shambhala warriors. She remembered the story and have used this teaching ever since.
In the story, the first weapon of the Shambhala warrior is compassion. Joanna writes that becoming intimate with this tool teaches us to not be afraid of our pain for the world.
The second weapon is insight, and Joanna says it teaches us to see our interconnectedness with all life, along with “the power to act that arises from our mutual belonging” (Widening Circles, 212).
This is not just emotional catharsis, Joanna taught. Compassion and insight opens us to the web of life and its self-healing power.
But are these weapons really powerful enough? Look at what is at stake?
She wanted to take this idea further and not fall way to anthropomorphism (centering the human experience). Power, true power, is shared amongst all life, is not held by humans alone, and always, always, seeks to benefit the web of living beings.
Out of that tension, the idea of the Council of All Beings came to her. In this ritual, people gather in a circle to step outside of their human identities and to speak on behalf of other life-forms. To practice taking the perspective of an animal, a mountain, a river. To embody wisdom, intelligence, fears and hopes that are not human ones. To listen beyond our bodies and to the ancient perspectives of organic life.
Doing so helps us feel the compassion and insight of the entangled web of life, not just human concerns. From Widening Circles:
“I am Wild Goose. And I speak for migratory birds.”
“I am Mycorrhizae, the fungal network interconnecting the roots of trees in the forest.”
“I speak for Weeds. . . I am vigorous and strong. . . I bring moisture and life. I heal the burned and wounded Earth.”
Shall we practice the Council of All Beings?
If you were in a council of living beings, what being would speak through you right now?
What do they want to say?
John Seed and Joanna Macy wrote a book about this practice, Thinking Like a Mountain (2007). Soon, they found themselves leading councils around the world.
These councils, and her workshop The Work That Reconnects, which guides people from despair to compassionate action, have grown an immense following over the decades. So many have been transformed by these practices.
Because these practices give our heart the courage to stay engaged in compassionate action. To remain curious, to remain tapped into love—not hate —as the fuel for our care.
Joanna writes that she often thought of Indra’s Net during these councils. Indra’s Net is a vision of reality from the Hua Yen scriptures of Buddhism. “In the story, the jewel at each node of the net reflects all the others—sarvasattva, all beings—and catches its own reflections in them, too, back and forth in an ongoing display of our interconnectedness.” (Widening Circles, 224).
Why does this matter, Joanna?
It is an epiphany to know oneself in all beings.
-Joanna Macy
Interconnectivity, or entanglement, is the doorway to great compassion. When we feel the pain of others, human and more-than-human, a portal opens. And its not just their pain we can share in, Joanna implores, but their joy and love, too.
Oh, Joanna, who devined these practices thirty years ago, how needed they are now.
The contrast of the passage of the big, bad bill that will cause harm to so many people and to our Earth, and the fading of her luminous life, happening at the very same time, feels like the exact polarity we have been stretched to contain.
On one end, the world descends further into dehumanization, inequality and extraction, with overtones of blatant cruelty, and on the other, quiet voices gather in number to remind us that compassionate love is what we’re made of, and that living from that place is never a waste.
Active Hope is waking up to the beauty of life
on whose behalf we can act.
We belong to this world.
-Joanna Macy
Indeed, perhaps such active hope is powerful. Moreso, even, than the limited galvanization of adolescent tyranny that can only fathom domination, that has forgotten they, too, are connected to everything and everyone else.
In the face of impermanence and death, it takes courage to love the things of this world and to believe that praising them is our noblest calling.
-Joanna Macy
I am taking immense solace in Joanna’s teachings. I am remembering her glowing face in the zoom graduation at the end of my Buddhist eco-chaplaincy training. I’d spent 16 months learning her teachings. I will never forget her signature laugh, and the effervesence of her warm heart. She pointed me to love then, and she does so now. What a beacon.
Joanna is also a life-long lover of poetry and language. In fact, she translated my very favorite Rainer Maria Rilke poem. These words have been a close companion to me for many years (hear her read this poem - a gorgeous experience).
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it. I circle around God, around the primordial tower. I’ve been circling for thousands of years and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?
Thank you Joanna. For your leadership, your clear compassionate insight, your immense equananimous heart, your willingness to be so deeply touched by pain you’d spend your life fighting for clean waters, healthy forests, the end of nuclear warfare and so much more. How you never lost your beginner’s mind, or your capacity to experience wonder again, and again, and again. We stand on your shoulders now, we follow your lead.
As you approach the ineffable nextness of whatever is waiting for you, know there are millions of us blessing you, wishing you well, as you let go into the infinite expanse of the interconnection you have spent your life showing us how to see.
At the end of her memoir, she writes, “I find myself praying, not only for the future ones, but also to them. I ask them to help us be faithful in the work that we, their ancestors, have been given to do. For a book called Prayers for a Thousand Years, I wrote:”
You live inside us, beings of the future
In the spiral ribbons of our cells, you are here. In our rage
for the burning forests, the poisoned fields, the oil-drowned
seals, you are here. You beat in our hearts through late-
night meetings. You accompany us to clearcuts and toxic
dumps and the halls of the lawmakers. It is you who drive
our dogged labors to save what is left.
O you will walk this Earth when we are gone, stir us
awake. Behold through our eyes the beauty of this world.
Let us feel your breath in our lungs, your cry in our throat.
Let us see you in the poor, the homeless, the sick.
Haunt us with your hunger, hound us with your claims,
that we may honor the life that links us.
You have as yet no faces we can see, no names we can say.
But we need only hold you in our mind, and you teach us
patience. You attune us to measures of time where healing
can happen, where soil and souls can mend.
You reveal courage within us we had not suspected,
love we had not owned.
O you who come after, help us remember:
we are your ancestors. Fill us with gladness for the
work that must be done.
I don't know how we're going to do the work of despair and compassion for a hurting world without her, but maybe that's the point—we do it together, the way she taught us.
Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā, blessed Joanna.
Thank you, thank you, thank you,
Lindsay
~ Consider donating, visiting and witnessing the collective love and tenderness on Joanna’s Caring Bridge page put together by her children.
~ Support The Work That Reconnects, the groups she started around the world who are practicing, facilitating and carrying the Work forward in their local communities.
~ In honor of Joanna, support Plum Village, a community committed to engaged Buddhism and non-violence.
~ Read her books! Widening Circles (2000), World as Lover, World as Self (1991), Active Hope (2012), Coming Back to Life (2014) and many more.
Thank you for this rich tribute to Joanna and for reminding us all of her lessons in how to live with compassion and insight in whatever ties we find ourselves. When her spirit moves on, we will still have each other, a community of beings engaged in spreading what Quaker George Fox called four centuries ago, "the ocean of light" overcoming the ocean of darkness and fear. That is our sacred work. Blessings to you, Lindsay.
What a beautiful tribute. I’ve been thinking of Joanna, of all she has contributed, of my deep gratitude for her presence and her work. Thank you for lifting up so many important highlights and for inviting us into practices that make them come alive.