Grieving the Great Griever
Paying Homage to Joanna Macy
“There’s nothing that can happen that will ever separate me from the living body of earth.”
— Joanna Macy
I’ve not been feeling the need to write of late. I’d even begun to wonder what the subject of the next Dharma Beat might be concerned with. As my mind settles into quiescence, maybe I won’t feel compelled to write at all - writing is an intuitive process for me, not really something I ‘set my mind to.’
Then as June became July one rainy morning word came from Joanna Macy’s long-time, kind friend Anne that she was entering home hospice, surrounded by the love of her family there on Cherry Street in Berkeley. Joanna recently turned 96, so her graceful exist stage left has been a stepwise process. Still, taking the cushion for my morning sadhana, inviting Joanna into my merit field along with many other dharma friends and family, and visualizing tantric deities dancing in the shamanic clouds over the mountains here in Himachal Pradesh, the tears began falling to the steady purr of monsoonal showers. I could already sense the light of this revered elder shining up there with Vajradhara and consort. Separation is just a mental construct.
As with most of my hospice experiences, the tears were mostly joyous appreciation mixed with awe for the immense beauty of human nature when it gets expressed so thoroughly. It’s hard to sustain the feelings of sadness that arise at the end of a life so well lived as Joanna Macy’s. While she is best known for her decades of deep ecology activism and grief work on Mother Earth’s behalf, Joanna is also a serious Buddhist scholar and practitioner, with a special affinity and affection for the Shambhala prophecy she loves to share.
So I have the comfort of knowing that she’ll approach the end of this mortal coil, when the moment finally arrives, as an immense opportunity to merge with the clear light nature of mind - often referred to as the Mother Light - like a mighty river of life emptying itself at the end of its long run from the mountaintops into a vast ocean of universal love and generativity. All mahayana Buddhist practices are designed to prepare us for this sacred transition, when the mind takes leave of the body on its long journey through deep time.
It’s notable that I’m writing this just above McLeod Ganj, where Joanna herself first came across Buddhism while helping Tibetan refugees in 1965, on the occasion of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday. Like His Holiness, or like Jane Goodall for that matter, Joanna is just one of those rare humanitarians whose names are recognized in every kind of social circle, and whose mention always elicits expressions of appreciation. Beloved all over the world, these luminaries are stellar teachers as well, shaping and transforming the minds of all those with whom they interact.
So I’m sending Joanna healing light and love this week, as I know so many others are as well. Friendly reminder from my hospice training: never presume anyone is going to die before you do just because of appearances! I have a dear dharma sister in Missoula, Montana I’ve been doing hospice with since 2011 Kalachakra, and though bed-bound for many years now she’s managed to outlive at least two of her dharma practice caregivers!
And I would be remiss not to mention that on the same day I received word about Joanna, I learned that another revered spiritual elder, Planetary Peacekeeper Suzanne Lewis of the Global Grandmother’s Council, has also embarked on hospice in her Boise, Idaho home. I’ve known Suzanne for many decades from my own time in Boise’s dynamic healing community. I even had the advantage of watching my partner apprentice with her in the course of studying holistic healing therapies. Suzanne’s a powerful spiritual pillar in that community, and one of the most authentic shamanic Western healers I’ve ever come across. She’s helped so many people become more whole and more alive, a real wishing jewel in the Treasure Valley, as that part of Idaho is known.
She, too, is surrounded by love right now, reaping a life’s rich harvest.
So these are two bright feminine lights ascending in our midst, as all the spiritual planets transition into new constellations. What a moment in time! While it’s easy to think of this as our great loss, and for sure these two will be missed dearly from our side, I also happen to believe that when powerful spirits like these cross over and fully realize their human potential and altruistic intentions in the process of ‘waking unto death’ - at long last freed from the confines of their mortal bodies - we all benefit.
Certainly that was the case with Buddha.
I can honestly tell you that I would not be the person I am today, and you would not be reading this now, were it not for Joanna Macy’s meddling in my life! Of course, there are thousands and thousands of people out in the world right now who can say the same thing. She’s been such a consistently fierce ray of ‘active hope’ in this darkening world, one of Gaia’s favorite daughters for sure, always shining forth and illuminating the path with the vital force of her wisdom. If you’ve ever been in Joanna’s presence, you’ve had the privilege of witnessing the beams of sparkling light that generously stream forth through her eyes, emanating from the very depths of all this world’s joy, sorrow, love and loss. Joanna contains multitudes.
I remember how small she appeared in front of a crowd of hundreds on the occasion of dedicating the Joanna Macy Center at Naropa University - but still, she radiated like sunlight nourishing a big field of sunflowers all tilted in her direction. She could’ve just stood there beaming silently for thirty minutes, and everyone would’ve walked away feeling loved. I’ve never seen anyone command a room and bring people together quite like Joanna can, especially in smaller workshop settings. She’s a phenomenon of human nature, that one. We love you, Joanna!
The Circle of Life & The Work that Endures
On a more personal note, hearing of Joanna’s transition into hospice care feels like yet another big circle closing in my life, though she’d probably call it a spiral! My journey as a climate psychologist and advocate for Gaia began with writing a paper called “Planetary Hospice” back in 2014, for a class on the Psychology of Death & Dying, while I was also actively training at Zen Hospice. My advisor, Craig Chalquist, and the teacher of that class, palliative care expert extraordinaire Alessandra Strada, were urging me to turn my paper into a book, perhaps even a dissertation. But I was already five chapters into a book on spiritual purification at the time, and had written that paper just to come to terms with the climate crisis myself. It wasn’t really my intent to become an ecopsychologist, as natural as that seemed to everyone else because of my career as a legal advocate. I was more interested in hospice from the perspective of a dharma practitioner, and imagined myself becoming a chaplain or social worker as my boomer generation approached death and dying.
Since I didn’t know how to say no to Craig and Alessandra, I instead bought myself some time by proposing to circulate the paper for peer review. I remember thinking that move rather clever of me! But one of the people I sent it to for comment was Joanna, who was adjunct professor at CIIS. At first, she informed me that she was in the throes of finishing another book, and didn’t really have the time to spare. She didn’t know me then, and so I didn’t give it much thought. But a few days later I received a second response from Joanna that she’d picked it up and couldn’t put it down. She asked if it’d be okay to share it with some of her ‘colleagues’ - I specifically remember her using that term - and I said of course, the more feedback the better.
Oops!
By ‘sharing it with some of her colleagues,’ Joanna meant publishing it on her website! The paper quickly went viral, and before long I was getting requests to translate it into other languages for publication overseas, persistent requests for interviews, an invitation to lead a 2-week retreat on Zen Mountain in the Catskills of NY, and another to present a model of climate grieving at the Mind & Life Institute at Harvard, a conference that would include the Dalai Lama, Joan Halifax, and B. Alan Wallace!
I never looked back after that because, as I know Joanna would agree, if and when one is so called, the ethics of the bodhisattva vow compels one to answer the cries of the Earth. There is just too much potential for suffering at stake here to turn away. “How then must one live?” No! More like: ‘What can I do to be of service?’ Because we are active cells in a planetary organism, Gaia tends to have an answer when we pose that question.
Certainly that’s the bond Joanna and I share to this day. For me personally, she has been a continuing source of inspiration, moral support, and wisdom at key transition phases in my life, especially my transition from the legal sphere to the psychosphere and the blogosphere. Thank you, dear.
I’d been holed up in Old Colorado City writing the book Climate Sense that night when they dedicated The Joanna Macy Center for Resilience and Regeneration just up the road in Boulder. I got a note that she’d requested to be escorted out on the town afterwards by myself and the great Buddhist philosopher David Loy - another hero of mine. Just the three of us! I consider that thoughtful gesture to be one of the greatest honors of my life, and certainly it was one of the most memorable “dates” I’ve ever enjoyed! She left with a galley copy of my book, and read it on the plane ride back to Berkeley. So yes, my first book includes a generous blurb from Joanna Macy!
David Letterman used to have an audience participation segment on his show called ‘my brush with greatness’ ~ and this was mine. I once went on a date with Joanna Macy! The smartest, loveliest and most charming woman I’ve ever gone out with, too.
“Shine on you crazy diamond...”
There’s no comparison, of course, between my modest contributions to the field of climate psychology and Joanna’s ginormous contributions to the fields of human endeavor - which in her case included extensive scholarship spanning systems theory, Buddhism, poetry, being a leader in the anti-nuke movement, and perhaps her most important and lasting contribution of all: The Work that Reconnects.
According to the San Francisco Zen Center’s website, in that decades-long global effort Joanna “has created a ground-breaking framework for personal and social change that brings a new way of seeing the world as our larger body, freeing us from the assumptions and attitudes that now threaten the continuity of life on Earth.” That’s the seed of “Gaia Psychology,” quite obviously.
In her own words:
The Work That Reconnects is informed by Deep Ecology, systems thinking, Gaia theory, and spiritual traditions (especially Buddhist and indigenous teachings), as well as group wisdom from earlier workshops. Common to all of these is a non-linear view of reality. It illuminates the mutuality at play in self-organizing systems, and unleashes the power of reciprocity.
Perhaps the most important idea I attribute to Joanna is this: the Great Unraveling and the Great Turning are simultaneous phenomena, something she’s been talking about at least since the turn of the millennium. You can tune into the Great Unraveling simply by turning on the news or, today, scrolling your social media. The Great Turning doesn’t grab the media’s attention in the same way, because we’re wired for threats, and climate trauma makes us hyper-vigilant. As I’ve heard Joanna put it, the unraveling is happening over our heads, while the equally significant turning is happening under our feet, largely unnoticed. It’s something I always try to bring attention to myself, as in the Dharma Beats on Tranquility in Disturbance here and here, which coincidentally turn out to be my most widely read posts.
And, of course, we have to work through our grief over the Great Unraveling before we can really find our footing in the Great Turning:
The critical passage or hinge of the workshop happens when, instead of privatizing, repressing and pathologizing our pain for the world (be it fear, grief, outrage or despair), we honor it. We learn to re-frame it as suffering-with or compassion. This brings us back to life.
That’s where Joanna’s workshops come in, and I’m guessing tens of thousands of people all over the world have done their work now because of Joanna’s visionary leadership on that front, and are now collectively building up towards the critical mass it will take some day to transform society amidst the growing rubble of industrial civilization’s slow-motion collapse.
Some of us can feel that regenerative shift taking root right now, with this great cosmic pivot, and while it’s impossible to predict the shape of the future, the day will surely come when human society looks back at Joanna’s books World as Lover, World as Self (1991) Coming Back to Life (1998, with Molly Young-Brown), and Active Hope (2012, with Chris Johnstone) as early, important, and lasting catalysts for the kinds of systems change that eventually saved higher forms of life on planet Earth.
And that’s quite a legacy, don’t you think?
Buddha teaches us that life is impermanent, and self is empty. Empty of what? Because of subtle impermanence and interdependent origination, our self is empty of not being full of those we label ‘other.’ In fact, when we look deeply and honestly within, all we can really find are gifts that came to us by the grace of others - beginning with our parents loaning us a body, of course, and continuing with teachers, friends, authors, and artists. And if we are truly our mindstreams, and not our bodies - which was my takeaway from Zen Hospice - then elements of the mindstream of a luminary like Joanna Macy get taken up and integrated by hundreds of thousands and millions of mindstreams around the world, taking on an entangled, nonlocal life of their own. She certainly lives in my mindstream, I can tell you that much.
There’s even a term in Buddhism for this kind of idealistic force: zhigpa, loosely translated as the ‘disintegratedness’ of an idea or event, but more helpfully thought of as the ‘just having happened-ness’ of an event. It’s a life force carried on the currents of mindstreams, and the greater the zhigpa - Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speech being a prime example - the more it ripples out and comes alive. Joanna has given off a lot of zhigpa in her 96 years!
And will continue to do so.
I know she would appreciate me closing this heartfelt tribute with the epigraph to my paper that likely is what caught her attention all those years ago, and prompted her to give it a read after all:
“Truly the blessed gods have proclaimed a most beautiful secret: death comes not as a curse but as a blessing to men.”
- Ancient Greek Epitaph from Eleusis