Honoring Joanna Macy
Joanna Macy—a beloved activist, Buddhist teacher, systems thinker, revolutionary, and author of numerous books including Active Hope and World as Lover, World as Self—is now 96 years old and in hospice. She is one of our great Ecodharma elders that I will be forever greateful to meet and learn from in this life. Someone captured her influence on me here a short 1 minute video.
As we navigate times when cruelty is being normalized everyday, Joanna’s words continue to guide me back to the fierce love and deep interconnectedness. Below is a compilation of some of her timeless quotes—on grief, love, and choosing aliveness in a dying world.
It is not enough to know what is wrong. We must also experience our pain for the world and the love that arises from that pain. The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe. The refusal to feel takes a heavy toll. Not only is there an impoverishment of our emotional and sensory life... this psychic numbing also impedes our capacity to respond.
Grief is a doorway, not a dead end. Through it, we recover our capacity to feel—and act—from love. Letting ourselves be broken by the beauty and suffering of this world is not a weakness—it is how we remember that we belong to everything. In a world that numbs, Joanna urges us to feel deeply and fully. That is how we stay human. Joanna's life reminds us: Emotional presence is power. Feeling is not weakness. Grief is the ground of transformation.
The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world... It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.
This awakening, painful and beautiful, is what Joanna called the Great Turning: the shift from industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization.
“Hope” is not wishful thinking. Active Hope is not waiting to be rescued by some savior. Active Hope is waking up to the beauty of life on whose behalf we can act.
Hope is a verb. It is something we do—together.
You don’t have to do everything. But what you do, you must do with all the life that is in you.
This is her call to sacred action—rooted in love, not driven by burnout.
May we carry her teachings as lanterns. May we live our one wild and precious life in the great turning of the world.
With love, grief and gratitude for Joanna Macy. Please join me in sending prayers of gratitude and gentle blessings to her.
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