The Great Turning as a Way of Being: A Tribute to Joanna Macy
By Rebekah Hart
When I first met Joanna Macy, as a 20-year-old in 2002, the world looked very different. And yet in many ways, she foresaw this time. In systems terms, she described the inevitable “positive disintegration” or dark night of the soul of the Industrial Growth Society, founded as it is on social injustice coupled with ecological exploitation of a finite planet. This disintegration, or Great Unravelling as she later called it, was and would be accompanied by the Great Turning, which would hopefully lead us to the building of a Life-Sustaining Society. But she never made promises that the Great Turning and the Life-Sustaining Society would win out. In fact, she would often point out, that is just the fun of it – we can’t know—and it’s in this uncertainty that we can come alive to our greatest creativity, ingenuity, solidarity, and power to take action for our world. She thought of this time as a great adventure, the way heroes must give themselves to a quest, against all odds, and find allies along the way.
It’s been a month and a half now since Joanna Macy left this earthly plane. I was lucky to have studied closely with her and to have developed a profound friendship with her over more than two decades. Joanna is known as a scholar, prolific author in the fields of Buddhist studies, systems theory and deep ecology, a social/environmental activist, translator of several volumes of Rilke’s poetry, and the root teacher of the Work that Reconnects. In many ways, Joanna’s work is foundational in our field of climate psychology. Decades before terms like “eco-anxiety”, “climate distress,” and “solastalgia” even existed, Joanna was developing ways of working with groups of people to help them feel and share their despair or pain for the world, and recover a sense of empowerment to take action on behalf of life on Earth. It’s nearly impossible to capture the breadth and beauty of her contributions in a short tribute, but over the many years I spent with her – with the privilege of attending many long retreats, keeping in touch regularly, and in her later years, traveling to spend a week with her whenever I could – one central insight stands out to me as the core gift that she left us.
The incredible thing about the Work that Reconnects is that it offers us a set of practices and insights that can support us in these times, no matter how bad things get. And that’s not to spiritually bypass or let us off the hook to continue undertaking the immense and heartbreaking tasks that lie before us. In fact, the opposite is true. I think one of the great teachings that Joanna left us is about how to maintain and nourish our intentions – how to fully embody our values, renew our energies, and engage with our hearts, no matter the outcome.
In the last years of her life, as climate news began to look more dire, I asked her if she still related to the idea of the Great Turning in the same way. The Great Turning, when I was younger, seemed like something we could hope for, something that could win. And now I wasn’t so sure. The Great Turning, she told me, is not a goal. It’s a way of being. And just like her teachings on gratitude, it’s not dependent on external circumstances. Joanna’s work, at its essence, is designed to aid us in returning us to a felt experience of “our true nature”—that is to say, our visceral sense of deep belonging in the web of life, even as the web of life becomes more tattered. In one of her many guided meditations, she writes: “Out of that web you cannot fall … no stupidity, failure or cowardice can ever sever you from that living web. For that is what you are …. Rest in that knowing. Rest in the Great Peace…. Out of it we can act, we can risk everything … and let each encounter be a homecoming to our true nature . . . Indeed it is so.”*
May it be so. Rest in power, Joanna Macy. Thank you for the many gifts you have given us. May your work live on through the Great Turning.
*See “The Four Abodes” in Macy & Brown, Coming Back to Life, 2014.