Joanna Macy, prophet of the Great Turning, and one of the fiercest, bravest, most inspiring people I’ve ever known, entered hospice this week

If you haven’t heard of her, now’s the time to discover her work

I’ve been trying to remember the first time I heard her name. Someone referred to her in the offhand way you do when you’re talking about someone so well known, so essential to transformation work, they’re certain you’ve known about them for years. “Joanna? The Great Turning? Yes?”

I’d gotten my start in organizing work that focused on people: on racism, sexism, economic injustice, whereas Joanna’s focus was deep ecology. Maybe that explained why the people who taught me didn’t know about her work. I was clearly behind the eight ball on this one.

I tracked down some books to try to catch up. I picked up Coming Back to Life. I thought I had a pretty complex analysis. I thought I knew what movement work looked like, sounded like, what a meeting structure might involve, and a successful project require. I say this as background: I was already calcified in my thinking, even though I was aware of how little I actually knew or had experienced. I thought I had a foundation and I needed to build a house.

So when I picked up Coming Back to Life I wasn’t ready to receive it. In the introduction, she talked about the Great Turning—the possibility that, with time, there could be a wholesale refutation of late capitalism and alienation from the natural world, allowing the collective emergence of an entirely new way of being. The remainder of the book outlined a list of practices that were so simple, so decontextualized, that I couldn’t see how they could possibly lead people to surrender their reliance on the dominant culture. They seemed almost childlike in their simplicity. They were too clear, in the Buddhist sense, for me to receive them.

I had expected an elaborate political argument. I knew she was a scholar; a Buddhist teacher; that she had trained in a Christian seminary before she rejected it because she found it too patriarchal. She’d written a book on systems thinking. She was a world traveler. She’d trained others and taught countless workshops, and now she had an entire cohort of trainers who were bringing her practices to an even wider community. The Work that Reconnects—the umbrella term under which her practices are organized—was being used all over the world to take on incredibly complex social and ecological problems.

I couldn’t make sense of the difference between her history, her institutional training, and the practices she had created. I didn’t know how to enter. I knew that often, these kinds of techniques don’t translate well on the page. I knew there was something important to Joanna about grief, and the practices were designed to pull the grief up and out, into the space between and among people. Grief needed to be witnessed, shared, and acknowledged in its intensity. It had often been transmitted across generations; it saturated the past and shaped our expectations about the future.

Ok, so people are sad, I thought. These exercises? Something to do on the side, maybe? But I was impatient: there was so much violence; so much terror happening right now. Who had time to grieve? Let alone sit with a group of strangers and cry? How was that going to make anything better? I put the book back on the shelf.

Some time after that, I read Malidoma Patrice Somé’s The Healing Wisdom of Africa. At his birth, the ancestors revealed Somé’s purpose—to bring the healing traditions of the Dagara culture of Burkina Faso to the West. Some of the most powerful and necessary healing practices, he explained, were communal grief rituals. These rituals often went on for days, were held regularly, and were almost universally recognized by the community as essential to the functioning of the whole. Without the regular expression and recognition of grief, nothing else was going to happen properly.

Griefwork wasn’t private. It didn’t happen “outside” the work that in the West is often designated part of the “public sphere.” It was intense, it was individual, and it was also collective. But it was expected. It wasn’t scary. It wasn’t even “special.” The problem wasn’t the intensity of grief. The problem was the suppression, the refusal to be with grief, and the unwillingness to join together with others, as the grief poured out.

I had never participated in a grief ritual like this. I tried to stretch my imagination; to envision myself participating monthly, for days at a time, in the excavation and communion with my own sadness, longing, loss, and pain. Doing so publicly, with others. Being in a space designed for this process; that made it ordinary and significant at the same time. And afterwards, there would be a feast.

I lay on my bed, trying to imagine who I would be if that was my life. Then I saw how utterly insane the United States must appear to the Dagara people of Burkina Faso. Which meant I was likely suffering from a form of insanity, myself.

One of the things Joanna Macy says is that until you access your grief, your ability to act is likely to be blocked. The fear of grief—really of the pain and sadness and powerlessness that fuel it—makes it almost impossible to harness the energy necessary to resist the power structures that rationalize and enforce violence. If even coming into brief contact with others’ suffering is too much to bear, the person will do everything in their power to avoid their fear and grief. Their energy will stay locked up in the effort to compartmentalize and deny what they know. Any call to action will be received from this place: of terror, uncertainty, and often, cynicism.

What is needed are practices that help people feel how devastated they are that others are suffering. To help them encounter the ways they are often complicit in others’ suffering, not from malice or ill will, but rather from acceptance of the status quo. And once those feelings emerge in their vastness, to help people become capacious enough to hold the grief and the hope and possibility for something entirely different to emerge. Once they have that, action will follow, because it will be obvious to that person what they must do. And the kicker: they must act from a place of radical uncertainty. No guarantees. Just the knife edge of what she calls “active hope.”

I’m lucky that, as a slow learner, it took a number of years before I heard that Joanna was coming to Portland to offer a day-long workshop. She was 88 years old. She’d been doing the work since the ‘70s, starting with the anti-nuclear movement. Finally, I thought, I’ll be able to see what these practices feel like in person. I gathered with the people and sat on the floor of the room. Joanna walked out on the small stage and opened the day. Her presence was so powerful and relaxed that she created the emotional container for our work within minutes. She broke us into pairs and we started with a simple exercise, speaking back and forth to a stranger, making eye contact, answering the question she’d posed, one of the exercises I’d read years ago in that book.

It was the summer of 2016. What I didn’t know, because I couldn’t feel it, was that my body had been in a months’ long, silent, state of emergency. I’d been blindsided by the election. That night, after I heard the result, I knew I was seeing clients in the morning and I would need to do something to be present and hold space for their reactions. So I pulled all my energy in, and up, and I walked into my office and just kept going.

I’d been intensely focused on my clients; I’d been tracking and watching and responding to what was happening; I’d been strategizing and analyzing . . . what I hadn’t done, not once, was cry. I was still so naive—so sure that I could hold it all, and that “holding it all” was somehow the best way to make sure others could rely on me—that it hadn’t even occurred to me that in attending the workshop I might be confronted with my own grief. But somehow the second I felt Joanna’s presence and sureness, I just started crying. My tears had nothing to do with the exercise, which wasn’t designed to induce grief. I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular before I started crying. It was like they’d just been waiting for Joanna to show up.

You won’t be surprised to hear that once I started crying, I couldn’t stop. The relief to be in a space held by Joanna Macy, to feel that I could relax into my own sadness, that I could cry my way through every exercise, regardless of what it was about, and no one would ask me to explain myself, or be frightened by my sadness, was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had.

Because Joanna Macy started her work in systems thinking and deep ecology—and because the interconnectedness of all beings is a fundamental tenet of Buddhism—her work is best known in the communities of engaged Buddhism and ecology/climate justice. She is internationally renowned, and yet there are still many justice-based organizations and communities that do not know her work. Now, when it is me who says “Joanna? The Great Turning? Yes?” to other people, I am both surprised and not surprised when they say “Who?”

When I look back and marvel at the fact that Joanna Macy already knew in the 1970s that this moment was coming, and knew what it would take to be able to stay with it, and that she wrote and practiced and did it again, and again, over and over for the entire remainder of her life—with skill, and courage, and humor, and singing and poetry—I think: what must it be like to be a prophet and have to get up every day and occupy a beginner’s mindset? How did she patiently and rigorously and fiercely explain all of this, over and over, never knowing if it would be heard in time?

And though I can come up with speculative answers to these questions, I still can’t know what it feels like to be her, and what she had to wrestle to the ground to keep going. All I can say is Thank You. May your legacy continue to spiral up and out, and may the Great Turning you saw coming arrive, in good time.

If you want to learn more about Joanna Macy. If you want to learn more about the Work that Reconnects. If you want to leave an appreciation for Joanna, who is hearing them and being buoyed up, on her Caring Bridge, it’s here.