#4 Thank you Joanna Macy
Or I live my life in widening circles
Joanna Macy changed my life. I first heard her speak in the middle of the dark days of 2020. I was living in Yorkshire, listening to this podcast, walking home along the Rochdale Canal through the Calder Valley at dusk.
Two things are happening at once, she says. There is The Great Unravelling: the collapse of our ecosystems, the destruction of our communities, the assault on our bodies. Then there is The Great Turning: a slow, seismic shift towards a world of flourishing for all. Joanna presents this second event prophetically. It’s happening. It might take hundreds of years but it’s happening. The ship is being turned around.
I remember excitement, and I remember relief. God, we don’t need to exhaust ourselves trying to figure out what the exact best course of action is. We only need to open ourselves up and trust in something bigger unfolding.
This opening up is the heart of Joanna’s teaching. Our multiple crises are fed by our disconnection from the world. “The greatest danger of our times”, she says, is not the climate catastrophe, nuclear armageddon, or genocidal imperialism, it’s “the deadening of our response”.
Her proposal? Repair that rift. How? Do the ‘Work That Reconnects’.
These are a set of practices Joanna and her friends have developed over decades to help us connect with the reality of what’s happening in our world. At the heart of it is a spiral, a circle that never ends but widens each time you do it.
It starts with gratitude. What in this current situation brings you joy, hope and life? Then you honour the pain. What is it that breaks your heart about what’s happening now? Then see with new eyes. How does really allowing space for this love and this pain change the way you see our world? And finally, go forth, and ask what are we going to do with what we’ve learnt?
I always check in with this pattern when I write here, and the most surprising thing I’ve found is the power of beginning with gratitude. My instinct is to start with what’s wrong. That’s the default format for writing things about the state of the world, you go: ‘here’s a problem I’m (very smart for) noticing’ and maybe eventually move into, ‘here are some possible solutions’. But starting with gratitude changes the whole thing.
You shift from the defensive and the begrudging to paying attention to what’s here. It’s a relief. You realise that what really moves you to act in the world is not just disdain for what’s not here or even the fantasy of what could be, but the joy of what’s already happening.
I first heard Joanna in Yorkshire, but I first heard of her a few years earlier. I was staying at la zad, 3000 acres of forest, field and wetland, which thousands of activists had squatted and saved from being concreted over and turned into an airport. They’d spent 10 years fighting the French state for the land, and a year before I got there, they won.
I arrived at the end of a long winter, and what, by most accounts, had been the hardest year of the whole occupation. The rifts between the occupiers which their common enemy had held together had burst apart with their victory. It’s a fascinating, devastating story, not for here, but I find it meaningful that in this dark time, the wisdom of Joanna Macy was circling.
What she knows is that to let rage be the sole glue that holds your movement together is untenable. This is why the spiral starts with gratitude. From the air we breathe, to the plants that feed us, to the sun, to our friends, to all of our ancestors, the density of care that keeps our world together means that gratitude is always possible. And because of its place in the spiral, this is not a kind of toxic positivity that distracts you from the tragedy of the world today. It’s something that prepares you and insists on staying with the pain of watching our homes be destroyed.
These zadists knew this pain well. The state destroyed their homes countless times. And even after enduring that, there was no Great Victory. How do we face that without descending into despair, cynicism or apathy? To watch them go through that in one piece -or more accurately breaking into many pieces and then build themselves back up into something new- gave me a glimpse of a specific kind of hope. I struggle to find the words to describe it. Maybe it's hope beyond hope. Or hope in the dark. Or maybe just grace will do. Anyway, I think it’s here in this conversation between Andrew Boyd and Joanna Macy, where I’ll leave you till next week:
Andrew: What do you say to those who ask: If there’s no hope, if we have no chance, why should I spend my life fighting for an impossible cause, a hopeless cause?
Joanna: Because it’s too late for you to do otherwise. You’re already worrying about how much trouble we’re in, so there would always be in your mind, in your heart-mind, the realization that you’re avoiding something, and so you’re not going to be fully present. You’re going to be at odds with yourself. Instead, I found that just about the most fun in life is to work with people on something that matters, even when you lose.
(...)
Joanna: Who knows. If it’s the End, I want to do it well. Who in hell anywhere is ever again going to hear a line of Shakespeare, a phrase of Mozart, the sound of Bach? It’s been a great run. So let’s go out with pride, instead of just going, “I’ll grab what I can.”
Andrew: You’re saying: if it’s over, let’s at least exit the stage with dignity, with nobility, with head held high —
Joanna: And have somebody doing some wonderful somersaults along the way! We’ve been able to do incredible stuff as earthlings, and with our friends, our older friends, the elephants, the owls, the mountains. For Christ’s sake, let’s treat them decently at the end! Let’s pull it together!
We should have funerals for the mountaintops, you know. You need funerals for things, too. And, if you’re going to a funeral, you wouldn’t go with food smeared all over your vest. You’d have some beautiful music. You’d want it to be like: Boy, they couldn’t save their planet, but they did have a certain something.