Joanna Macy will be leading two workshops: the first, Friday–Sunday, for everyone, and the second, Sunday–Friday, May 9–14, a retreat for people who have studied with Joanna before and want the opportunity to go deeper. Click for details.How will I go on?” I ask myself, as I drive up the long road to the retreat center on the hillside. I am here to spend a week with the multitalented Joanna Macy; scholar, writer, translator of Rilke, ecological activist, and spiritual teacher. Perhaps I will find out.
In spite of my best efforts over the past 30 years, the world is not becoming a happier place. Every hour on planet Earth, a thousand people starve to death (three quarters of them children), elephants and people step on Vietnam-era landmines in Southeast Asia, and children in faraway countries are born with birth defects from the long-lived dust of weapons I helped to pay for: depleted uranium munitions in Iraq and Agent Orange defoliant in Vietnam. The Earth heats up and species die — I won’t go on with this catalog of sorrows.
Into the blizzard of my confusion walks Joanna Macy, Berkeley eco-philosopher with deep eyes that remind me of a 95-year-old Navajo grandmother. There is a way, she says to all of us. We will explore it together. You have resources within you that you have not yet touched. Life calls you to become courageous and compassionate guardians of the Earth and all Her creatures. The Web of Life is a web of connections. I offer you the work that reconnects.
Early on in our time together we do the Elm Dance, holding hands, swaying, moving in circles, singing along with the music, lifting our arms up toward the sky, kneeling down and reaching toward the earth; all symbolic gestures of reconnecting with one another and reconnecting with the Earth, this Fertile Being of which we ourselves are an expression.
In the late 1980s, Joanna popularized the Elm Dance as a practice of reconnecting in communities across the swath of territory that had been contaminated with radioactive ash and dust from the Chernobyl meltdown. The people downwind of the meltdown were, and still are, living through an ongoing, slow-motion catastrophe of cancer and birth defects that is beyond any straightforward fixing or healing. This new idea echoes down the hallways of my mind, how to stay human in the middle of an ongoing, slow-motion catastrophe. It actually takes a couple of months for the meaning of the dance to sink in for me: we are all downwind of the troubles. We are all living through an ongoing, slow-motion catastrophe called the industrial growth society. And our great challenge is to stay human, to stay open to one another. Take the hand of the person next to you, she invites us, add your voice to the song. One of the deepest gifts we have to give to one another is also one of the simplest: “You are not alone, I am here beside you.”
Joanna introduces us to what she calls “the spiral of the work.” If there is a strength within us that we could open to, what would be the first step of such an opening? For Joanna, the first step is gratitude. In spite of everything that is going desperately wrong in the world, it is still possible to be amazed and grateful for the gift of your own existence. Although at first glance gratitude would seem to require some positive event, Joanna wants us to explore deeper levels of gratitude that are not conditioned by external circumstances. We are continually bombarded with intensely manipulative messages that we are “not good enough” in some way that can only be fixed by buying a specific product. The practice of being grateful for simple things, grateful for the universe, and grateful for one another, according to Joanna, are revolutionary acts, the soul’s repudiation of the central “I shop therefore I am” dogma of consumer society.
Joanna walks across the meeting area and traces, with her steps, the four quadrants of a medicine wheel. This becomes a mandala of truth telling, a place to express the feelings that the captains of our sinking ecological ship don’t want to hear, and perhaps that we ourselves don’t want to hear. In the first quadrants she places dead leaves; these will represent our grief and sorrow. In the second quadrant she places a stone the size of your hand; this will represent our unspoken fear and how easy it is to become immobilized by it. In the third quadrant she places a strong stick about a yard long and perhaps an inch and a half in diameter; this will represent the rage we feel when we look at mountains covered with stumps or schools robbed to pay for aircraft carriers. In the fourth quadrant, she places an empty wooden bowl; this will represent our desperate sense of insufficiency, of being powerless to protect the people and the animals and the Earth we love.
Joanna Macy will be leading two workshops: the first, Friday–Sunday, for everyone, and the second, Sunday–Friday, May 9–14, a retreat for people who have studied with Joanna before and want the opportunity to go deeper. Click for details.She marks the center of the circle with a large hand-kerchief made of four colored squares. Then she turns to us, and invites us, one by one, to come into this circle and share a set of feelings that are beyond the boundaries of ordinary conversations. The grief comes in many forms, and the four emotions blend into complex chords. A parent laments, “no matter what I do, I can’t protect my children from the culture of violence and consumerism in which we live. Even if we don’t have a TV in our house, the kids will see endless murders and advertisements on someone else’s TV.”
The purpose of this exercise, Joanna explains, is more than simply discharging pent-up emotions. And it is more that achieving the sort of catharsis or working through that would allow a person to let go of their painful feelings and move their attention to other concerns in their life. Joanna is fiercely determined to show us a different way. Your pain for the world, she insists, arises out of your love for the world and your deep connection to the web of life. Your pain for the world is neither a mistake to be corrected nor an illness to be cured. The way forward does not consist of getting rid of your pain. The way forward is to enter deeply into the heart of your pain for the world, and to discover the powerful love that is hidden there. Energized by that love, you will find new ways to join with others and participate in the healing of the world around you.
Yesterday’s Truth Mandala has two paradoxical effects. First, because we are not holding back our various distresses about the fate of the Earth, we are also not holding on to them (and inadvertently amplifying them) as much either. That gives us some extra energy and attention to explore and learn. Second, our expressions of grief and anger show us how much we are woven into the world, and suggest to us, once again, that the billiard ball model of the isolated self is completely unworkable.
As Joanna explains this phase of our time together, I get the sense that “seeing with new eyes” is true on many levels. Seeing with new eyes is part three of Joanna’s four-part lesson plan. And it points toward a body of exercises in which we embrace by gradual degrees our connectedness with everything and everyone. It is also the process inside of people that we hope most to encourage, the shift in identity away from separation and toward connectedness. And, at the world level, it represents what Joanna and many Deep Ecologists call the Great Turning, a global recognition of connectedness.
The Great Turning represents the moment when you realize that we have drawn our circle of consideration too narrowly. Our powerful technologies and our escalating consumption have given human beings a giant footprint; now we need to be a lot more careful about where we step. This is not just a matter of scolding people to be more polite. What will we ourselves eat when we have paved over all the farm lands, or wrecked them with chemicals and Frankenfood seeds that are programmed to die?
A Council of All Beings is perhaps the best-known group exercise associated with Joanna Macy and her colleague, the deep ecologist John Seed. A Council of All Beings is an exuberant celebration of letting back in all the elements of nature, of humanity, and of reality, that have been shut out by our bean counting money madness.
We each make a mask and sit in a circle, passing around a talking stick, and taking turns. One person speaks as River, and cries “Set me free me!” “Let me breathe!” “Where are my children, where are my life forms?”
Glacier takes a turn and invites us to consider a being whose life stretches across millennia: “I nurture the rivers, I nurture the valleys, I bring food to all the people who live in the variegated plume of my abundant waters as they rush to the sea. How will they live, when I am gone?” And so it goes around the circle.
I know it would be easy to ridicule all of this as bleeding heart liberalism run amok, but wait, slow down. Every time we shut out one of these voices, we shut down something important in ourselves. How much can we shut down in ourselves and still have a life? Every time we shut out one of these voices, we become blind to the world from which that voice came. How much blindness can we tolerate, and still survive as a nation?
The news is full of stories that illustrate the walled-off separate self as it runs to madness. Children die in China because milk producers put white plastic powder in the milk to give falsely high protein readings. Here in the U.S., farmers and agribusiness corporations are feeding tons of antibiotics to farm animals penned up in unhealthy conditions. This is breeding a new generation of drug-resistant super-bacteria that will probably cause horrific epidemics among humans -- all for the sake of higher profits right now. (Each year in the U.S., 18,000 people a year die from a growing list of drug-resistant bacteria infections.)
This is what happens when people feel disconnected from one another, disconnected from the natural world, and disconnected from ancestors and future beings (trapped in a rootless and windowless present). And these outrages, repeated a thousand-fold, add deep elements of moral challenge and spiritual depth an exercise like the Council of All Beings. The industrial growth society wants us to become passive, silent and uncomplaining accomplices to the tearing down of mountains and the poisoning of the seas: really, to be passive in the face of our own undoing. In Council we break the silence and give voice to a creative and compassionate defiance.
A workshop with Joanna Macy comes close to a shaman’s journey. You enter into a different dimension, a time outside of ordinary time. In this time outside of time, you receive the seeds of new life from ancestors and future beings. The challenge then is to return to your village and plant a new garden. Toward the end of her book, Coming Back to Life, Joanna restates an inspiration from the novelist and minister Frederick Buechner:
To find our calling is to find the intersection between our own deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger.
“I can’t tell you what to do,” Joanna says on our last morning together, “and I can’t assure you that we will be successful either in promoting the Great Turning, or in preventing more ecological catastrophes.” That is the gift of unknowing, she explains, that shifts our focus from the results we want to obtain to the wisdom and compassion we want to embody. The previous evening, we had built a ramp in the middle of our meeting room, a symbolic leaping-off place that ended with an eighteen-inch cliff. One by one, to the sound of applause and shouts of encouragement, we each marched up the ramp, declared our specific intentions, and leapt into the unknown. Now we sit in meditation, and the morning sun filters through the tall windows into the quiet room.
The day unfolds into an afternoon of leave taking, each of us challenged, by this extraordinary teacher, to make our hearts large enough to contain both joy and sorrow, to make our hearts large enough to hold all life.
Eco-philosopher Joanna Macy, Ph.D., is a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology. respected voice in movements for peace, justice, and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with four decades of activism.
Dennis Rivers lives and writes near San Francisco, and edits many public service web sites, including: www.NewConversations.net, www.LiberationTheology.org, www.TurnTowardLife.org, www.Prayer-Evolving.net. He notes: “This article draws on my experiences in several of Joanna Macy’s workshops and retreats. These experiences have been imaginatively recreated as if they happened in one setting.”
James Hillman is leading a workshop June 3-6. Click for details.
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