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Year End, 2007
Easter Sunday, April 12, 2009 Dear People, The flood of messages pouring in since Fran's death on January 20th has been profoundly nourishing. The loving and insightful words go straight to my bloodstream. They accompany me as I cope with the shock and the huge, sudden loss. They lift me up again and again, which is good because often I fall into an unrecognizable, empty place. Your words lift Fran up too, hold him high to show the brilliant goodness and class of the man. The memories of us that you describe bring our life together back into focus for me--and put ground under my feet. I'd like to tell you a little more of what happened than you will find in the memorial website (www.francismacy.com ) No one was with Fran when he died. I had gone down to work in my cottage in the garden, after he and I dragged ourselves away from watching President Obama's inaugural parade, and gave each other a long, strong hug of jubilation. The doctor says the heart attack was instantaneous, but we don't know exactly when it struck. Daughter Peggy, coming upstairs about an hour and a half after that last hug, found him lying back across our bed with one hand, already cool to the touch, resting on his heart and the other holding a copy of The Nation. Within minutes firemen and paramedics from the fire station down the street were attempting to revive him, and grandson Julien was running to find me, screaming "Something happened to Opa!" Imagining they detected a flicker of a pulse, the medics took Fran to the ER at the hospital some five blocks away. Peggy and I followed, with Jack, Barbara, Anne and Enid joining us. We didn't wait long before Fran's death was confirmed. Given the shock of the suddenness of it all, it made a huge difference to bring Fran's body home. It took some doing, but I was determined--and finally succeeded, thanks to the green burial cemetery in Marin which Fran and I had already joined. They sent a mortuary vehicle to which the hospital could legally surrender the body--and then brought it to our house. It was a surreal and exquisite night. Our bedroom filled with flowers, candlelight, music--Russian liturgies and Bach cello suites. With scented water and rose petals in a Palestinian bowl he'd given me for Christmas, Fran's beautiful body was washed slowly, caressingly, reverently by his son, his daughter, and his wife. Then we dressed him, choosing sweatpants and a faded denim shirt I loved, and tucked bags of dry ice under his neck and back and sides, and covered his legs and torso with a sheet of royal blue. He looked calm, handsome, and noble, like a Viking chief on his funeral boat. The next two days from ten in the morning till ten at night people came to pay their respects. No idea how many came, all told, in that steady flow of friends and neighbors, some returning more than once. No need to ring or knock, just come in and up the stairs. Go straight ahead to the bedroom and sit in silent meditation with Fran, or read to him, or join in a song. Or turn right into the dining room where more bounteous food appears by the minute or join in a quiet chat at the kitchen table. Or turn left into the living room and sit down to draw messages or pictures on muslin to be appliquèd to Fran's shroud. The sewing of that was in Peggy's domain downstairs--two friends took turns stitching long strips from her quilting fabrics, while the grandchildren and their friends kibitzed, choosing colors and making more decorations for Opa. What struck me above all was the atmosphere that reigned. I can still almost feel it, the softness and buoyancy of the air, a sweet lightness around us and inside us. On the morning of the third day we smudged Fran's body with sage and wrapped him fully in the finished shroud. The burial took place at Fernwood Cemetery with family and a handful of friends. First a lovely spare service in the chapel, beyond its glass wall a tumbling stream. Between Kurt Kuhwald's prayer of welcome and Jennifer Berezan's closing chant ("She Carries Me") people came forward to speak directly, spontaneously to Fran. Then we all circled up for the Elm Dance around his body. Up on a hillside about a quarter mile distant, the grave was ready. Six men--sons, nephews, friends--took hold of straps and lowered the shrouded body into the earth. No coffin, no box, just cloth and dirt. Prayers. Dona Nobis Pacem. Flowers tossed in, then handfuls of loose soil. A gentle rain. The hillside looks out toward Mount Tamalpais to the northwest and due west to a rolling ridge and the great ocean. On February 21st hundreds of Fran's friends, colleagues, and kin joined us at Berkeley's First Congregational Church to honor his life. What a great outpouring of heart that was, with tears, laughter, wonderful words, and a wealth of music. Chris, our first-born, was on hand, returning from four years in Amsterdam. Now that he's back in Berkeley he's ready to stay for a while, making us very happy. Another memorial, unplanned and ongoing, is in the training DVD for the Work That Reconnects. That film, to be seen on this web site and ordered from it, would not have been made without Fran's belief in its importance as a teaching tool, and his determination to pull it off and raise the needed funds. How fitting that it now carries him forward in a scene of his teaching the Great Turning. Like others who have noted this, Louise Dunlap writes me:
One of the many hardest things about losing Fran was the sense of losing myself as well. Disinterest in my life and work would sweep over me at moments, and then it was hard to see any value in the teaching and writing that for decades had imbued me with purpose and joy. At those awful moments everything seemed pointless and I'd wonder if I could or even wanted to continue. Then, just a month after the memorial, that changed. I had a kind of visitation from Fran. Awaking in the middle of the night, I looked up through our high bedroom window to see two stars grow brighter and brighter as they seemed to move toward me. Then every cell of my body was flooded with warmth and energy. I recognized that it was Fran, his love for me, and then, just as strong a charge, my love for him--I couldn't tell the difference, and kept weeping on and on with thanksgiving. Then, in the thought chamber of my mind, these words: "I stayed as long as I could." Given the cardiological history of Macy men, that's true: he made every effort to keep his heart ticking and succeeded till almost 82, twelve years longer than his father and his brother. A second communication followed, and more insistently. "Continue the work, it's needed. You must keep on." Since that night the terrible lostness is all but gone. I still get ambushed by grief. The hollowness in my stomach still comes, without warning. I would still crawl on my hands and knees to the ends of the Earth to find him and be with him, even for the shortest while. I want so badly to talk with him about what's happening to our country, our world. But a lot of the time, I'm okay--steady and willing. And when I meet with groups and teach, the old glee erupts. Each time I teach and share the Work That Reconnects, folks come forward who feel drawn to deeper learning and to facilitating the work themselves. This is cause for great gladness in me. Fran's insistence that I continue the work is an invitation to me and also to others. I want to respond to everyone who feels called to carry the work forward, and many young people who want to work with me are struggling financially, especially in today's economy. My 80th birthday is coming up on May 2, and I will enjoy it with a modest, family-organized, picnic-style celebration. I will surely tune to the love and support I know you feel for me, and my gratitude for your lives. I invite you to send me your blessing on May 2. If you are inclined to celebrate with a gift, I would be honored to receive contributions to my scholarship fund, which will support more young people to learn and facilitate the Work That Reconnects. I have lots more to tell you--about forms the courses and workshops are taking; about the 365 page book for Harpers, A Year with Rilke , that I'm hurrying to complete with Anita Barrows; and about the measureless gratitude I feel every single day for my daughter, sons, their spouses, and children living close at hand. But that can wait for now. Blessings on you, everyone. Joanna
"Can
the human male overcome the violence that has been the hallmark of
patriarchy and act responsibly on behalf of future generations? … Is
the definition of masculinity and what it means to be a man changing?
During a three-day retreat with a remarkable group of men, lead by one
courageous woman, these questions and others were addressed in open
discussion and group process.
 Earl (pictured to the right below with Joanna) describes how these men-only events originated. He, along with Kurt Kuhwald, Dan Walters, Doug Seeley and others, became impatient with the gender disparity at our workshops. "Where were the men? Where were our brothers in the Great Turning? If there is to be the birth of a sustainable and just society men need to be working too. Our sisters could not do it alone, yet there they were, doing what they could with limited support from us, the men. It was not that there were no men, we were there, but there was an imbalance. Somehow we needed to get more men involved."  So they began to organize the first all-men's retreat, holding it at Lost Valley near Eugene, Oregon in April 2007. "Some twenty-five
men registered and came… The weekend was amazing, inspirational, and
valuable beyond measure. Possibly for the first time as an adult I was
proud to be a man, proud of my brothers, and more motivated to keep
working to build
my community. As each man spoke the rest of us listened, we held space
for each other, supported each other, expressed encouragement, gave
comfort, touched without fear or shame. Guided by Joanna and Fran we
looked into aspects of ourselves often left unexamined as too painful,
too personal, too feminine, too otherly. In doing so I believe many of
us found strength, wisdom, compassion and love within ourselves and for
each other, we did not know existed. We were able to look beyond, or
through, the layers of societal male patterning and into something
greater, something beyond our imagination."At some point, during the second day of this first retreat, I had an epiphany which shook me to 
my core. Superimposed over this group of men I saw, in my mind's eye,
an energy form, a male figure hovering in the air over our heads. I
felt it resonating with pure male energy, undiluted by fear,
aggression, envy, greed, lust, or any of the negative energy I had come
to associate with the males of my culture. I sensed a completeness in
the figure. It was grounded, balanced, strong, and exuded a
compassionate, nurturing energy that brought me to tears. I felt I was
witnessing an energy pattern depicting a whole and integrated male. I
was reminded of the work of Dr, Carl Gustave Jung, who introduced the
concept of archetypes into our collective understanding. I became
convinced I had witnessed the birth of a new male archetype, that of
the complete male, unwounded and whole, reflecting both the male and
female faces of God."It has been nineteen months since our first meeting at Lost Valley. At this second gathering [in November 2008] six of our original group attended along with thirty-three new faces. This group was dynamically different from the first in that there were many more young men in attendance and two father-son pairs. This made the energy in the room vibrant, youthfully alive and expectant. There was a sort of seeking-ness displayed among the men, an abundant, open-hearted attitude. They were there to work and they were there to play. During the activities, which included exercises in gratitude, expressing pain for the world and its inhabitants, deep time work and creating community for action, these men, young and not-young, displayed a depth that was grand and inspirational. Strength, wisdom, compassion, fierce passion for justice, care for each other, care for our world, and more came from the group.  "By
the end of the weekend the younger men looked at us who are older as
elder brothers and role models. I felt humbled to be considered so.
Seeing this younger generation stepping up, taking responsibility,
envisioning a better world and looking honestly at their roles in the
making of a just society gives me faith we can pull civilization back
from the brink of disaster. In them I see the continuing development of
the new archetype, the Complete Male, and they are anchoring it in
their lives. I also see that it is the responsibility of us older men
to light the way by challenging the social stigmas of what it means to
be a man in this, the beginning of the Twenty-First Century…"Knowing that we men can be strong and be compassionate, that we can nurture life instead of dominating it, show tenderness instead of numbness, to love unconditionally, to be vulnerable without being weak, we will become whole. And we will change the world around us. We will be able to join our sisters in service to Gaia… "I know now there are many good men out in the world who are seeking ways to become healthier and more capable of a sustainable and fulfilling life. It is imperative that we, all of us, reach out to them and let them know they are needed and welcome. "For me, I am basking in the knowledge that I am a man living in the most challenging times the world has ever faced, with brothers containing the depth and breadth of Being necessary to meet the crises head on." As a woman at the men's retreats, I too felt within myself a new "completeness"--and in two ways. First, there came an inner ease as my body registered that these men could feel the full range of their emotions without my assistance, goading, or protection. Then secondly, unexpectedly, I found myself acknowledging an emotional need of my own. It is one that I'd carried my whole life: the need to be seen by the two men whose daughter and sister I am. Entering the Truth Mandala, I gave the men who were encircling it with such full and generous attention the names of my father and my brother. And I asked them to let my father and brother see me through their eyes, for just this once. The genuineness of their response and the quickening in my own body-mind were so real that that reality seemed to flood back through the years, as if changing my very perception of the past. Fran, for his part, relished the way the retreat liberated the men's energy. "In a mixed workshop men who are feminist tend to hold themselves back. It feels good to let out the natural boisterousness and raunchy humor, and not worry about taking up too much space."  A lovely, dignified Ladakhi nun, who is also doctor of Tibetan medicine, was reading aloud from her prepared Power Point presentation on the treatment of women in Buddhist Sanghas. On and on, point by point, she read, all of it dismal, none of it surprising. Gradually I became aware that she was crying. A woman appeared quietly to stand beside her, and the nun proceeded to finish, right to the end. She showed us that you can read aloud and weep at the same time--and that it can be appropriate. High suicide rates continue to plague Japan. A growing number of Japanese priests, customarily preoccupied with ritual matters, are devising ways to connect with and counsel those who are trying to take their lives, be they children bullied in school or desperate middle-aged "salary men." Rev. Shinohara tries to meet them in person, keeps his temple open 24/7, broadcasts his message: "Before you die, come to the temple." Rev. Nemoto works with the Internet. He has created an on-line forum where people can discuss depression, suicide plans and after-effects of attempted suicide--and sometimes even meet together to talk. I was glad to get to know young Rev. Nemoto after the congress, at the 3-day retreat I gave to share the Work That Reconnects. There I met another young priest who is devoting himself to a related phenomenon, the hikikomori. That is the name given to the young people (predominantly male) who close themselves up in their rooms, refusing to go out or participate in life in any way. Their families feed and shelter them. Rough estimates put their number at two million. If you can get them out at all, the best way to hold their interest, I learned, is involve them in physical activity. Words are ineffective, but the gritty reality of hands-on work reaches them and gives satisfaction. I'll not soon forget that retreat, the beauty of the setting, the beauty of the people. The 68 participants (34 men and 34 women--how's that for gender balance) worked in a spacious 
tatami-carpeted room with a wall of glass doors looking out over the
water. Floating high above the hills across the bay, when the
light was right, Mount Fuji would appear from time to time.
Nothing had prepared me; it entered my senses like a blessing running
through my whole being. Each sighting of Fuji-san felt like an
epiphany, a glimpse of the sacred in all its luminous grandeur. Kathleen Sullivan, veteran facilitator and nuclear educator, accompanied me on the whole trip, so she was there as well as Hazuki Yasuhara of our 2008 training intensive, who led the interpreters team. Tamio Nakano, former student who organized my '95 workshop tour of Japan, was also on hand. After the retreat he took us to his beloved Yakushima, a semi-tropical island in the south, a World Heritage site where he leads some of his deep ecology workshops. Great place for viewing giant cedars, waterfalls, and monkeys, and for soaking in hot mineral baths. Tamio, still an executive at Hakuhoda working with Toyota, is starting a new book. It's on the Heart Sutra and Sustainability.  Then Kathleen and Hazuki took charge, having prepared in exquisite detail the meetings, workshops, interviews of my first-ever visits to Nagasaki and Hiroshima and Kyoto. The hours with some of the hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) featured in Kathleen's film The Last Atomic Bomb, and the stark exhibits I studied in the peace museums of those cities will be with me from here on out. They deepened my sense of what the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has done to the perpetrators. The two cities have risen  from the
ashes, with hardly a trace of the war, but the American psyche has been
affected in enduring ways, gone numb and stupid, prey to fear and more
capable of atrocity. On the brighter side, I am freshly struck by the moral beauty of those who bear witness. Those survivors, teachers, and museum directors are indispensable culture workers who would preserve for us all the meaning of what happened in 1945 to change the world forever. With their stories and exhibits, they are committed to remembering, because only remembering can redeem us. May the blessings of our essential solidarity bear fruit in 2009. Love, Joanna
Nov 11, 2008 Dear People, Like many of you I'm still trying to believe what happened last week. Even though I have issues with some of Barack Obama's stated views, especially in foreign policy, the miracle is that he was elected--and by a landslide. I hadn't dared to hope for that. And now each day's news and photos still deliver such a charge, I hardly know how to speak my gladness--except to repeat how grateful I am that I've lived long enough to see this. My heart is moved by so many dimensions of this amazing moment in our history. My heart is moved by Barack and Michele's courage from the start. And by the hundreds of thousands of women, men and youngsters who worked tirelessly for months in every corner of the country, many taking leave from jobs and school to devote their efforts full time. And by the massive, joyous celebrations that continue to erupt. This outpouring is more than about winning; I feel it coming from the soul of our nation, even showing me that our country has a soul--a hunger for decency that those who wielded power have for so long not perceived or understood. Right now I am feeling especially thankful for a diligent bunch who, over the last four years, set themselves the task of determining and proving how voting machines were rigged to allow the theft of the 2004 election, so that it wouldn't happen again. They call themselves Velvet Revolution, and for the breathtaking story of how, in the nick of time, they brought their accumulated evidence to legal action to compel testimony from Karl Rove and his key operative Mike Connell, see their web site www.velvetrevolution.us and www.rovecybergate.com. Last Saturday Harriett Crosby described their goal: "We at Velvet Revolution were running defense for democracy, tackling those who were coming at Obama from the shadowy sidelines, people like Connell who were using secret computer IT networks to manipulate the vote count at the tabulation level. While Robert Kennedy and Greg Palast were publicizing voter disenfranchisement, intimidation, purging voter registration lists and all the visible ways of suppressing the Democratic vote, Velvet Revolution was going after the invisible corruption, election tabulation fraud." On November 1, a Federal Judge in
In celebration and solidarity, Joanna
Dear People, Well, it's happened. The financial meltdown so long predicted has begun for real. Even if we knew it had to happen, it's scary. Stock markets crashing, foreclosures skyrocketing, the biggest banks going belly up, jobs disappearing. With so much suffering for so many, and more losses foretold, it's hard not to feel the panic. I'm scared of what that panic will do to our country--corroding our trust in each other and in the future, when we need it for the Great Turning. At moments I feel fear about my own life, wondering what it will mean for Fran's and my work for the world, if the cushion of savings he's so carefully husbanded evaporates. So I am grateful for teachers who, at just the right moment, remind me to hold a larger perspective. Here are three who have been of particular help: Minqi Li, Robert Reich, and Granny D. Minqi Li is economics professor at University of Utah. He shook me awake to the realization that this economic collapse, far worse than anything since 1929, is what life on this planet needs for the survival of complex life-forms. He says that in order to cut greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to avoid irreversible climate disaster, "the world economy must contract at a historically rapid clip--at an annual rate of -1 to -3.4 % between now and 2050…. Economic growth will have to be thrown into reverse." The retrenchment he sees as necessary is about 55% over a span of 40 years; that is what occurred over four years in the Great Depression. As Stan Cox of AlterNet points out, everything depends on how the economic contraction is handled. If chaotic efforts are made to restore capital accumulation, life on Earth will continue to deteriorate. To cure the malignant economic growth that we've unleashed, new ways of thinking and acting must come from the bottom up and from both hemispheres of this ailing planet. The turbulent times that lie ahead may offer the opening we've been waiting for. According to Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under Clinton, the "deep recession" he foresees is the direct result of the economic inequality we've created. His analysis suggests that this economic failure is the price of moral failure. The top 1 percent of American earners take home about 20 percent of total national income. Reich says the last time that happened was 1928; after that the economy caved in. "The wealthy," he reflects, "devote a smaller percentage of their earnings to buying things than the rest of us because, after all, they're rich and already have most of what they want. Instead of buying, they're more likely to invest their earnings wherever around the world they can get the highest return… The underlying problem of such imbalance in earnings has been masked for years: first by sending more women into the work force, till working mothers with school-age children almost doubled since 1970, to more than 70 percent. The second coping mechanism was working more hours, till Americans became veritable workaholics, putting in 350 more hours a year than the average European. Then came a third way of coping: to borrow... But now with the bursting of the housing bubble, we've reached the end of our ability to borrow, just as lenders have reached the end of their capacity to lend. That means there's not enough purchasing power in the economy to buy all the goods and services it's producing. "We're finally reaping the whirlwind of widening inequality and ever more concentrated wealth… The long-term answer is for America to invest in its working people--health insurance, good schools and higher education, while also investing in the clean-energy technologies of the future, and adopting progressive taxes at federal, state and local levels. Call it bottom-up economics. It would be a sad irony of the Wall Street bailout robs us of the resources we need in order to do that." Nine years ago at the age of 90, Doris Haddock, known as Granny D, walked 3,200 miles across the country to promote limits to corporate rule. Two weeks ago in Philadelphia, she shared her memories of the Great Depression and urged us to stop viewing it as a time of horror. "Maybe we were hungry sometimes, but did we starve? No, because we had our friends and family and the earth to sustain us. Our memories of that time are more round and golden than sharp-edged. My husband Jim made an ice rink from a little meadow, and he made a few dollars extra those winters of the Depression. I learned to put on one-woman plays and performed in women's clubs here and there, making the rest of what we needed. We were fountains of creativity. We were fountains of friendship to our neighbors. As a nation, we were a mighty river of mutual support." Read on. Granny D's words are such wonderful medicine for us all right now that I'll not interrupt her till I sign off. "Imagination! Let me suggest that a generation raised on books and storytelling, where one's own imagination had to fill in the colors and details, made us a generation quite able to imagine marvelous ways to fill our family dinner table in those years. Let me suggest that the power of imagination was essential to the rise of all the grand improvements we achieved for each other and called our New Deal. Imagination allows the citizen and the politician to connect with people of every situation and condition. "The foundation of right-wing politics is a grand absence of imagination. If you cannot imagine what people need until it happens to you, then I suggest you have never read a mystery book under your covers by flashlight… "I want to tell you - especially if you are young and have not experienced true hard times - that there is nothing much to it, if you will insist on creatively and ferociously loving the friends and neighbors around you. And fifty or seventy years from now, if you are blessed with a long life, you will count those years as being some of your best, as indeed I do… "Fear for the loss of material things is but the jitters of an addict, and the jitters go away once we relax into whatever new world we find ourselves come into… "If you own stocks, you own a small percentage of the nation's economy. It's like owning a family business. Some years your shares will be worth a lot, some years they will not. But they are your piece of the action and you should hold onto it. You might even use the current low prices as an opportunity to increase your share of the pie. "Our real challenge is not the disaster caused by the deregulation of Wall Street, for which my friend Senator McCain must answer, but instead it is the dislocations -- economic, food supply, coastline and weather dislocations -- caused by our continued use of fossil fuels and the resulting warming of our atmosphere that is our real emergency and the true challenge for our character. "And I want you to understand that you must see beyond the distraction of these present headlines to the true challenges ahead, which have little to do with Wall Street and everything to do with changing the very ways we live, so that intelligent life on earth might prosper and survive." Amen! Yours in glad solidarity, Joanna
Dear People, This year's ten-day training intensive in the Work That Reconnects took place once again at Land of Medicine Buddha, southeast of Santa Cruz, California. Earlier this month, amidst redwoods and prayer-wheels, thirty-nine of us from five continents moved through the spiral of the work. It was like entering the heart of the world, and finding it in the depths of our own being. That stemmed, I believe, from the exquisite, almost excruciating tension between our awareness of unbearable suffering and a dawning sense of unbelievable promise. Truth-telling bred such trust and respect between us, I imagined our heart-minds as interlinked as neurons in a neural net. As usual my co-teachers were Fran Macy and our veteran intensive coordinator Doug Mosel. Doug, in his commitment to local food sustainability, has become a full-time farmer and organizer. His offering to our group's altar this year was freshly harvested grain, including the first wheat to be re-introduced to Mendocino County. As usual the goals of the intensive were clear from the start. Since they have guided us well, I'll list them for you here: 1. To sharpen our perceptions of both the unraveling of the industrial growth society and the emergence of a life-sustaining society. 2. To understand cognitively and to integrate psychologically and spiritually the Work that Reconnects. This includes: a) conceptual learning (e.g. living systems theory, deep ecology); b) spiritual practices from several traditions, especially Buddhist; and c) interactive processes (including despair work, deep ecology and deep time exercises, rituals, and collaborative small group work. 3. To build strong, lasting connections with sister and brothers warriors for life on Earth, that can provide mutual support under conditions of political repression, economic breakdown, and ecological collapse. 4. To review our lives, reflect on our gifts, and clarify our intentions for taking part in the Great Turning. Except for our mid-intensive solo in nature, each day together begins in the same fashion. The collective quiet, or Noble Silence, that begins the night before at 10:30 and continues through breakfast, is not broken until we start the morning's plenary at nine with the Elm Dance. It is like a spontaneous prayer in motion, the way places and beings we want healing for are called out into the music as we dance. Then, after anchoring those prayers by deep bows to Earth, we receive an offering by one of the participants, in the form of song or poetry or movement. Next comes a five-minute newscast by our own radio-journalist, who rose early to listen to the BBC. Fran likes to balance the day's headlines by weaving in an item or two reflecting the Great Turning. This "News from Earth" is an important ingredient, bringing the outside world into focus and keeping our experience together from becoming a self-referential bubble--especially since our intensive is cell phone and laptop-free. The morning session that follows blends oral teachings and experiential practices. The rich mix is like being in a combination of monastery, think-tank, and psychological laboratory. We begin with meditation practice: basics of and variations on anapanasati or mindfulness of breathing in and breathing out. Merging mind with body, it unites the group in a quiet, rapt attention to the present moment. It is excellent for heightening our sense of belonging to Earth, as we experience ourselves being breathed by life. Opening to the newness of each breath, we attune to our nature as flow, learn to befriend uncertainty and lessen fears of our own impermanence. Ah, the knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance. Rilke's Sonnet to Orpheus, Part 2, 27. Toward the end of one morning session, Doug led a new version of the Wheel of the Great Turning. After a very sobering presentation and discussion on the food crisis, from genetically engineered seeds to the effects of oil scarcity and climate change, he had us assemble in circles of 13 or so. In the middle of each large circle he placed three objects. First, a roll of gauze bandaging or other first-aid material, to represent holding actions. Then a little jar of his fresh grain (in the classic version of this exercise it's usually a green vine or leafy stalk), to symbolize systems change and new ways of doing things. And thirdly a crystal for the third dimension of the Great Turning, the shift in consciousness. In each circle we took turns randomly to reach out and take the appropriate object in our hand and speak of something we are doing or taking part in doing for the health and security of food. After each sharing, we all repeated "So it is with the Great Turning!" We were still going strong when Doug called a halt after twenty or thirty minutes, to wrap up the morning session. At our closing circle on the last day, a participant from New Zealand singled out that particular experience as having given her the most hope for the future. The summer began with a gathering that was equally rewarding, though half as long and five times as big. In June in Germany a mega-workshop took place, called Konferenz des Lebens: dem Wandel Kraft geben (Conference of Life: Giving Power to the Turning). Mornings were my time to guide, in fresh ways, two hundred of us through the spiral of the Work that Reconnects; then afternoons and evenings some dozen assistant facilitators took over, taking charge of seven or eight different "home groups" and drawing on their own special skills and experience. It was a joy to be with them and see them work, for we've been on the path together for a long time. I've been walking with some of them since the mid-80's, and my life and work have been hugely enriched by them. They have developed an impressive model for developing and disseminating the Work that Reconnects: called "Holon-training," it takes place over a year of bimonthly residential sessions, one of which is expanded into a vision quest in wild nature. For information about it, you can write gabibott@siebenlinden.de and in english,too. A high point of the Konferenz des Lebens was an evening devoted to a Markt den Moeglichkeiten (marketplace of possibilities), which turned the final Going Forth stage of the spiral into a kind of festival. With only one hour free to prepare the space, and with zero coordination from the leadership team, the participants turned the huge hall into richly decorated fairground, where paths wound through several dozen stands displaying the ventures and activities they are undertaking for the Great Turning. Music, art, and dancing enlivened the scene. As I wandered about with this old friend and then the next, I thought to myself, "this is what heaven is like." Fran and I are winding up a week's holiday. It was originally planned for the high Sierras, then canceled because we thought the altitude might be too much of a challenge for my lungs, which had been affected this summer by the smoke of California's wildfires. We decided to take a holiday anyway: right here at this lovely B&B on Cherry Street. A neighbor of ours called it a "staycation." We weren't sure how we'd steer clear of our computers, phones, and usual piles of overdue work, but; we did! We read in the garden--my nose deep in an engrossing new biography of Albert Einstein by Walter Isaacson, and Fran's in Bill Plotkin's Nature and the Human Soul. We walked around Oakland's Lake Merritt, hiked in the hills of Tilden Park, and swam in its Lake Anza. We went to the movies (don't miss Edge of Heaven) and a brilliant out-door matinee of Tchekhov's Uncle Vanya by Cal Shakes. And we became tourists in San Francisco, taking the BART into the city to soak up paintings by Frida Kahlo and a quartet of Women Impressionists including Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt--and even showed up one night at Beach Blanket Babylon, the raunchy, goofy musical still going strong after forty years. On Friday, picking up son Jack at the Department of Environment where he works, we walked with him up the street and into United Nations Plaza, now entirely given over to the displays and celebrations of Slow Food Nation, the first such event in the country. Stalls of fruits and veggies thrummed with life, color, and young people. The whole lawn in front of San Francisco's City Hall was transformed into raised-bed gardens bursting with native flowers and food plants from tasseled corn to juicy tomatoes, chard, melons. The avenues of plane trees on either side sheltered stands of good things to eat and straw bales to sit on while you ate --slowly, of course. The rewards of staying home were described to me in a letter last winter from a woman in western Canada. After explaining why she and her husband were not coming to an intensive despite their great interest in the Work that Reconnects--no passports, for one thing--she went on to say: . . . We have given up the ownership of a vehicle. Life without the car gives us a wonderful intimacy with our surrounding world. We are immersed in the selfsame finite landscape that Fran speaks about on the Workshop DVD. It is our daily life and it grows into our full beingness. In sacrificing our 'wings' we have found an entirely new way to fly and we are infused with an extraordinary sense of liberation. In saying No to the commands of the Industrial Dogma we are saying Yes to the Great Turning. . ." One of the things I most love about the Work that Reconnects is the way it can give voice to the spiritual teacher within each person. We become each others' guides, bestowing learnings, steadiness, and inspiration. So let me share with you some nourishing words from students and colleagues. "I'm starkly aware of planetary suffering these days. I can't ignore it even if I wanted to. Sometimes it feels like a mounting tension pulsing beneath the surface of everything. I've been having disturbing dreams. . . I've found it helpful to move the fear and grief from my throat down into my lower body--it feels more spacious, more connected and grounded, less personal from that place. And I've also been calling upon future beings and ancestors, and feeling their presence also helps me widen my perspective and sense of self." Young teacher of environmental studies. "The Great Turning is rooted within the planet herself. And it begins within each of us. It is our planet (be)coming through us." Student at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). "Just as a near-death experience can result in the expansion of normal awareness, so too can this [planetary crisis] precipitate the emergence of a new relationship between humans and the natural world." Andrew Beath. A former student of mine also speaks to the relevance and significance of the death experience. Nate writes: "Faced with the reality of our present condition and holding even the vaguest sense of how enraptured and embedded in our modern industrial way of being in the world we humans truly are, one comes to the same conclusion as French philosopher Edgar Morin: the situation is 'logically hopeless.' "The situation is logically hopeless, not because we lack the innate creativity to remedy our ills, but because we refuse to enter the depths of our own sickness. . . "We believe the world is ours to save, that because we are the direct and tangible cause of its destruction, we must also be its savior and rescuer. We believe, in our modern hubris, that human ingenuity is the primary essence of Earth's expression and the ultimate product of its evolution. . . In this delusion we have come to believe ourselves as the grand redeemers, destined to save the world from its demise. . . "To live through this moment we must fully enter our own death. . . Only by embracing the uncertainty of our moment and stepping fully into our unknown future, in an ultimate gesture of surrender, will we ever live to be reborn. . . "Surely Earth is in need of our dying. . . The journey into our dying is the surrender to our becoming the fullest expression of ourselves." In a CIIS course on the Great Turning, I shared experiential work in deep time. Graduate student Sean Ellsworth gives me permission to quote from his paper. I do so here at considerable length because deep time work is becoming more and more important in the Work that Reconnects, more and more generative of insight. About the practice called "Harvesting the Gifts of the Ancestors," Sean wrote: "As I wound my way back through time. . . back to the African forest we all came from, I was overwhelmed with the power, struggle and love embedded in all the acts of the ancient ones. As I stood looking across the savanna into the deep future, I was glad to know that the feelings in me would be able to find deeper expression in art, language and society, and was able to forgive the damage and pain that I also saw in the future, knowing that pain and suffering would natrually arise along the path towards balanced expressions of loving relationship. . . "Retracing the journey of the ancients out through the ages, I noticed so many different kinds of personalities. . . the timid and cautious as well as the rash and dominating. I was surprised that I felt gratitude, not judgment, for all these ancient ones, whose interactions brought us here today. I do not like domination and the oppression that goes with it, but this exercise gave me a sense of how all these ways of groping into being were involved. . . Thoughts and impressions such as this were coming up as I neared my body again, and wave after wave of gratitude surfaced. "It wasn't until I stepped back into myself that fear, anger and hatred again emerged. It was quite surprising how distinctly they emerged, like slipping into old shoes that fit well. I now reflect that part of my practice. . . must be to try holding the fear, anger and hatred that I experience in this body in respectful gratitude. This steppping back from the "me-ness" of negative emotions, I feel, is a part of our emerging Gaian consciousness, one that looks at all life processes from a greater perspective that can hold them and allow space for healing. . ." Reflecting on the Seventh Generation exercise, called the Double Circle in my book Coming Back to Life, Sean notes that he was assigned the role of a future human, and writes: "I was surprised to see how I could receive the responses from each of the humans of the Great Turning more compassionately from the future. I received messages of pain, confusion and hope. When I was asked to give a message back through time I was surprised that the answer came easily, if heavily. . . I saw the pain and love in each of their hearts as the seeds of the future, the intuitions of what could or should be. It was in this experience that I most profoundly felt the pain and suffering in my own life. . . The feeling that we each can be grateful for our struggles in the knowledge that they are part of the creation of the future, its karmic roots perhaps, is one I am trying to carry with me." Reflecting on the re-organization of self that the Great Turning invites and requires, Sean writes: "The process of remembering who we are and where we are. . . promises to be a painful one. The image of psychic birthing comes to mind. The exercise we learned of 'Breathing Through' the pain and suffering of our time resonated with me as a form of Lamaze for human consciousness's birth into Gaian consciousness (my emphasis). It is a way for us to hold onto ourselves and not get lost in the pain and suffering around us. And more than that, it is a way that we can use that suffering to let us stand in the chaos of life, thereby facing suffering and respecting it. "This remembering who we are, and whose voice is trying to speak through us, does not in any way diminish our personal struggles. . . (or) the societal and biological burdens. . . But I feel this remembering is necessary to make our burdens lighter, to make our daily lives more livable, because we can have hope that there is a voice in us that can speak in the power of wisdom, and a voice that can speak in wise action." * * * Alert to all lovers and doers of the Work that Reconnects: a network of facilitators in North America to be posted on this web site is in process of creation, thanks to Barbara Ford of Portland, Oregon. For explanation and application see the menu on Work That Reconnects page of this web site. Yours in solidarity and gratitude for Earth, Joanna
Dear People, Back home from much travel this spring, Fran and I celebrate by having the grandchildren overnight--Jack and
So we take joy in our families while across the world other families, by scores of thousands, are buried by mammoth earthquakes, drowned in cyclones, lost to each other in floods and rubble, crying for food in makeshift camps. Their suffering is beyond my capacity to conceive; but maybe I can try to breathe with them. We are linked to each other like cells in the living body of Earth. I can almost feel that connection, like an ache in the heart. It reminds it is for them, as much as for our own children and grandchildren, that Fran and I keep taking our work out into the world. Climate change and peak oil were the focus of this year's weeklong Easter conference at the Findhorn Foundation in
On the web site www.Findhorn.org/events you'll find a pretty full description of the conference, which included the 2-day, 5-session workshop we conducted at the outset. The descriptions were posted nightly without opportunity for presenters to check their accuracy, but they do convey the flow and the fare as we followed the spiral of the Work That Reconnects. With 250 people participating, we were challenged to invent new forms, especially for the part that's most intense: Honoring Our Pain for theWorld. That session began with poetry and spoken reflections on the power, liberation, and solidarity that comes with owning our collective grief. Then people clustered in foursomes to tell of their experience of the "great unraveling." After that they sang together, over and over like a chant, words of Adrienne Rich put to music by Carolyn McDade. My heart is moved by all I cannot save. So much has been destroyed. I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world. The second half of that session is omitted on the Findhorn web site, so let me tell you what we did. With lights lowered, images of suffering and breakdown in our world were projected on a large screen, while a wordless, choral lament (from the same "My Heart is Moved" CD by Carolyn McDade) played over and over. On the hall's large, central floor space were set three glass bowls half-filled with water. The ritual consisted of people slowly, randomly, coming down from their seats around the hall to kneel by a bowl, and let its water trickle from their hands and their tears for the world be spoken ("My tears are for…"). As their forms moved about in the semi-darkness, resting here and there on the floor, or returning to their seats, we all seemed to be held by the music, the murmuring around the bowls, the splash of water. Then, when movement had stilled, we slowly processed out of the hall, carrying the Bowls of Tears. Into a garden pond outside the entrance we formally poured them out, reminding ourselves that the pain we feel for the world is no private pathology; it connects us with Earth and each other. "Let us remember: our tears for the world are the tears of Gaia." The depth and beauty I experienced in the conference as a whole is conveyed in an interview with Rob Hopkins, which is on his web site (www.transitionculture.org/2008/04/21/). It starts: Rob: "What has been special for you about this conference?" Joanna: "You. And the people who are here. The beauty of Universal Hall. The coloured lights in the ceiling. The earnestness and the intention of the people stir me greatly. The willingness, the sense of unpanicked urgency. The deep goodwill. The dancing. The humour. That these folks are all doing it for the love of it without seeing the results of their own actions. That they are freed from continually computing our chances of success." Let me signal Rob Hopkins' engaging new book, which you can order from his web site. Its title: the Transition Handbook: from oil dependency to local resilience. Sharing stories and lessons from his work in
The events I took part in after Findhorn--in southern
An April "consultation" weekend near Bristol gathered thirty such facilitators, including veterans like Pat Fleming and Alex Wildwood, who first joined me back in 1983 when we called it "despair and empowerment work," and educator Jane Reed, who joined us in 1987 when we called it "deep ecology work," and then founded the Institute for Deep Ecology Education. Thanks to such a history and to Chris Johnstone's Great Turning Times e-newsletter, not to mention keen participation of folks in the Network of Engaged Buddhists and Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, Great Britain is a hot bed of workshops and trainings--and thirty more facilitators and would-be facilitators would have come if there had been room. In
The
After staying on in the
In
The work is spreading on-line as well. In addition to the internet goodies noted above, let me tell you about an engaging, illustrated course based on my book Coming Back to Life. Created by Stuart Carduner for a Buddhist-oriented web site, it uses arresting visuals as well as clips from my DVD to illustrate the book's key teachings. The course is called Reconnecting to Life and you'll enjoy taking a look at it on www.ashokaedu.net/coursesM/34/1.html, and telling friends who may not be into books (or even those who are). Flash to all Elm-Dancers and Nuclear Activists! New reports on the situation in Novozybkov (due East of Chernobyl) come in from biologist Ludmila Zhirina, who has been distributing radiation monitors on our behalf through her organization Viola. Since 2003 teachers, families, and farmers have received these hand-held Geiger counters, as well as training in their use. They have learned to check food stuffs and gardens for radioactivity, and to measure changing patterns of contamination in school yards and farm fields. They appreciate having these tools that help them feel more in charge of their lives. With our help (including contributions often collected when we do the Elm Dance), Ludmila and her team have written, printed and distributed a first-of-its-kind Russian-language book on "Living With Radiation." Now Ludmila reports a recent discovery made public by medical researchers. In the western part of the
To
Ludmila and her Viola team these findings help explain the morbidity
they continue to see in and around Novozybkov. In response they
are undertaking bold, new plans for 2008. The have decided to
establish an educational center on ecological medicine in
Novozybkov. Here programs and teaching materials will alert the
population to the problems caused by lack of iodine, fluoride and
selenium, and undertake remedial projects. These include seminars
with medical doctors, exhibits of iodine-treated staples (salt, bread,
milk, water, a porridge) as well as products naturally high in iodine
(seafood, kelp, certain plants), and a wide array of posters and maps
showing sources of these depleted elements. To extend the
center's outreach, a mobile van will carry these exhibits into
neighborhoods. Last month on April 26th, anniversary of the
I'm
building a new web page for Viola's work in and around Novozybkov,
click on Nuclear Project in the side column. Take a look at the
photos of their trip to With gratitude for your life in this time of Great Turning, Joanna Dear People, Another big storm is predicted, with likely slides, floods, and outages, but right now the sun is making a surprise appearance. It catches in the drops and drips from last night's rain. The soggy grass I squish across on my way to my cottage is strewn with glitter. The leaves of my winter kale display fat, transparent pearls that, when I lean over and look, reflect the world. This
new year feels like that. Beauty and radiance amidst all the
dangers and dire predictions. Even the numbers, 0 and 8, have a
comfortable, promising look, round like the shiny globules on the
kale. "8 sym-bolizes good fortune in The lightness I feel must have some connection to the primaries. It's like old times, the notion that we might have a real choice, limited as it is. The refrain I sing in my talks and workshops, after all, is the power of intention, the privilege of being choice-makers and channels for change. But I'd about given up on seeing that in electoral politics. When Fran and I were courting fifty-five years ago, we took the NY Times along with our picnic basket and read Adlai Stevenson's campaign speeches aloud to each other. We never tired of his eloquence, wisdom, and wit. Now, watching Obama's speeches, we feel the same excitement. It's all the greater now, because that kind of honesty and intelligence has grown so rare as to be almost extinct, and because I'd thought the American people had gone to sleep. Also, I am deeply stirred by Obama's courage--running for president in a violent and racist nation. Courage is contagious; so every day his campaign continues we'll be braver for it. The year was bright from the beginning, as I think of our weeks in
While we were there, Beth Sawin of the Sustainability Institute and Jay Meade, who like Beth is a resident of Cobb Hill, tried out their new, double-feature presentation on climate change. Beth, a scientist, is founder of an innovative educational project called Our Climate Ourselves (http://sustainer.org/oco). Jay is a painter and installation artist, whose street dramas, stage sets, and giant puppets enlist all ages to enliven the Great Turning. Their teamwork grows out of the realization that the challenges of climate change are so vast, and still so remote from our daily lives, they are hard to contemplate. And it expresses their conviction that the scientific data must be accompanied by art in order to engage our imagination and our will. Their double feature consists of a slide show by Beth presenting up-to-the minute information on the crisis, followed by a shadow-puppet drama that looks back from the future on arduous but eventually effective human responses. The combined show was presented twice, and I noted quite a contrast in the way it was received. The first time, at our Cobb Hill-centered workshop, the shadow puppet show followed directly after the slide presentation with its sobering graphs and timelines. And we all thought the program quite effective. The second performance was scheduled to take place on the Friday evening of a large public weekend. Since it was the overture to a workshop where people came with expectations of experiential work, we decided to interpose an interactive process between the two parts of the show. Over a hundred were present in the old
Everyone in the audience turned to one other person to work in pairs, and the three Open Sentences were these: (1) Of the facts I just heard about climate change, what strikes me most is… (2) The feelings that come up in me as I hear this information are… (3) What I appreciate about having this information is… That third one made people laugh--which was a nice release; but it was good to take seriously too, and realize that after all we do want to know. After 15 or so minutes of that process, the shadow puppet show erupted with Jay's antic silhouettes, jazz and marching band music, and a script both earnest and fanciful. It evoked cheers, tears and laughter as it echoed the message of Beth's report--and helped us digest it within a framework allowing for hope in human ingenuity and perseverance. I was struck by how much livelier and more appreciative the response was than at the first performance, when it followed straight after the science. The whole evening was pretty strong medicine, and set the tone for two days of wonderfully determined and high-spirited work. As I write, Kalli
Rose Halvorson stops by for tea. She tells me how auspicious is
the year of the Earth Rat, which we are now entering. In The mantra for an Earth Rat year, she says, is "Break It Down." Break down old habits and obstacles. Break down problems into discrete pieces and tasks. The image: a family of glossy-pelted rats are looking at a large warehouse packed with rice. They know they can take the huge structure down. Each will focus on her own immediate job, her bit of the wood to chew. This is not a time for multi-tasking, Kalli emphasizes, but just working away sequentially, consistently, in the most ordinary fashion--for real change. Politically, she says, entrenched incumbents can forget it. Their defenses crumble; familiar biases get deconstructed; this is the time for a fresh start. I just discovered a new saint, and the kind of strength he evokes is similar to Earth Rat's. I have been reading about
To tell you his story, I'll just quote from the book, which is Voodoo Queen
by Martha Ward. "As beloved in the city as St. Anthony, St. Roch,
the Virgin Mary (and others)…, this saint, however, does not belong to
the Catholic church…. It seems that a statue of a Roman foot
soldier intended to be part of a crucifixion tableau became separated
from its companions. When the missing piece turned up on the
levee of the "St. Expedeet wears the garb of a Roman soldier and crushes a raven beneath his foot. The bird manages to croak Cras! Cras!--Tomorrow, tomorrow--wait, procrastinate, do it later, mañana. Espidee, however, points firmly to a sundial inscribed HODIE. Today. Do it now." There are some fine stories of how the saint, when you call upon him, immediately helps you get things done. I am also glad to know the Latin word for tomorrow and the etymology of procrastinate. What fine spirit for this year! May Earth Rat's and St. Espidee's blessings abound in your life and mine. Cheers, Joanna Dear People, Last week of 2007: time to think of the gifts this year has brought. I'll drop my preoccupation with calamities--the endless war-making, the betrayal of the poor, the evisceration of Earth. The litany of shame should not surprise: in the death-throes of the industrial growth society, the Great Unraveling accelerates. But that's not all that is under way. As I've seen and said a thousand times, the Great Turning is happening, too. Time to reflect on what that invisible revolution has meant to me this year. It is most immediate to me in the people who've come into my life, bringing priceless companionship and revealing fresh forms of creativity and courage. From scores of workshops, retreats, and gatherings this year, their faces appear to my mind's eye. Weaving through our shared experiences come insights to inform my heart and mind--and I want to remember them now, as 2007's gifts to my soul. The gift of uncertainty.
This came with fresh clarity during the last two months: in a course on
the Great Turning at the California Institute of Integral Studies
(CIIS) and in a workshop-cum-intensive organized in To quote from Edgar Morin, whose book Homeland Earth was part of our CIIS course: "Yet if the situation is logically hopeless, this indicates that we have arrived at a logical threshold at which the need for change and the thrust toward complexification can allow for the transformations that could bring metasystems into being. It is when a situation is logically impossible that novelty and creativity, which always transcend logic, can arise. Thus, it is when the chemical organization of groups of millions of molecules became impossible that a living auto-eco-organization first appeared." The gift of intention. Uncertainty, when accepted, sheds a bright light on the power of intention. That is what you can count on--not the outcome, but the motivation you bring, the vision you hold, the compass setting you choose to follow. Hence the essential importance and beauty of bodhicitta, the motivation of the bodhisattva. In the Buddha Dharma it is also called adhitthana, which connotes resolve and steadfastness in choice, and also the physical foundation of a building. As we explored together how intention can work in our lives, other images arose: we saw it as a rudder by which we can steer, as a vehicle we can ride, as refuge, the one thing we can be sure about. Resolve can save us from getting lost in grief. In
And I saw how the activists are held steady by sheer intention. Though the nation seems oblivious of this tragedy, though state and federal governments look the other way, and major environmental organizations give no priority to the issue, these men and women persist in the vision that Appalachia can somehow be saved. They hold to their resolve that future generations may know slopes of sweetgum, sassafras, magnolia, the stirrings of bobcat and coon, and, in the hollows, the music of fiddle and fresh flowing streams. The gift of devotion. Intention is nourished and illumined by love. Last week in our home, on Winter Solstice, a ritual took place, which I'll not soon forget. Nine of us gathered to honor the power of the goddess Kali as experienced by a devotee engaged in what she calls the "dance of cancer." A good thirty years younger than I, my friend is suffering an aggressive lung cancer, and coping with intense chemotherapy and radiation treatments. Through lore, chanting, and scholarship, she shared with us the liberation she finds in the presence of Kali Maa, Mother of All That Is. Through my friend's words and vitality, I saw how uncertainty, when fully accepted, can deliver us into the only real time we have to live: the present moment. Here, in the priceless Now, my friend is sustained by her devotion to Kali, sees her as encompassing everything--the cancer itself and the chemo drip into her veins and her body's will to heal. I want my own love for life to be as strong as that. I want my devotion to Gaia to be that joyous and sufficient. I think it is, if I put my mind to it. And, finally, this year has been graced with the gift of books. Of the four I would note, these first two are mine. World as Lover, World as Self
came out this fall in a lovely and leaner form than the original 1991
edition. For six intense weeks last winter I rewrote,
reorganized, added new sections and chapters, culled others. To
keep from drowning I hired my young colleague Aryeh Shell, who had just
returned from a year in For
almost two decades, Norbert Gahbler, a trainer in the Work That
Reconnects and translator of several of my books, has served as
interpreter for my workshops in German-speaking Given the work I've been
doing to open up our experience of time and expand the temporal
context of our lives, I delight in the new book by Buddhist scholar
Taigen Leighton. His Visions of Awakening Space and Time (
The last week has brought into my hands a remarkable work by depth psychologist and wilderness guide Bill Plotkin. In Nature and the Human Soul (New World Library 2008) he offers a groundbreaking, ecopsychological matrix in which each successive stage of maturation is presented in terms of challenges offered by both the natural world and the Great Turning to a life-sustaining culture. Plotkin's work bids fair to transform the way we see our lives. It has done that already for me, especially since it draws illustrative material from interviews with me and from my memoir Widening Circles. At this gateway to a new year, alive with uncertainty and adventure, please receive my warmest and most companionable greetings. Joanna Dear People, Every
once in a while a book comes along that excites me so much no friend
escapes hearing about it. I passed it immediately to Fran who took it
on our mini-vacation in the Sierras last week. As passages were
read aloud beside the It's Paul Hawken's new book, Blessed Unrest--and it's about the Great Turning, though he doesn't use that term. He calls it "the movement with no name." Though this movement is global in its sweep and unprecedented in its scope, it's as invisible to politicians and mainstream media as the ground under our feet. Without any leader, guru, unifying platform or ideology, it arises locally in small discrete endeavors and astronomical numbers, "like blades of grass after a rain." It manifests through people, groups and networks acting "to save the entire sacred, cellular basis of existence--the entire planet and all its inconceivable diversity." Sound familiar? As we discover in the Work That Reconnects, it takes a shift in perspective to bring new phenomena into view. For Hawken it was the dawning realization of the sheer quantity and variety of nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations arising in our time for the protection of life. Following a hunch, he started compiling lists, indices and databases, and soon estimated their number as well in excess of a million. Sprouting from the ground up without any apparent coordination, and interweaving to collaborate without any central authority, their concerns embrace the full range of environmental causes and social justice issues. "Social justice and attending to the planet proceed in parallel; the abuse of one entails the exploitation of the other… Our fate will depend on how we understand and treat what is left of the planet's lands, oceans, species diversity, and people." And in learning to do that, our greatest present resource lies in the practical wisdom of those native cultures still managing to survive the assault of corporate globalization. "The quiet hub of the new movement--its heart and soul--is indigenous culture. Just as a wheel cannot turn without a stationary hub, the movement reaches back to the deep and still roots of our collective history for its axle. For indigenous people, the relationship one has to the earth is the constant and true gauge that determines the integrity of one's culture, the meaning of one's existence, and the peacefulness of one's heart." Some five thousand of their distinct cultures are still seeking to protect their homelands, which constitute one fifth of our planet's land surfaces. Their contribution to humanity's survival is not their lifestyle so much as their experiential knowledge diligently gleaned from generations of interaction with the natural world. We are fully capable of learning from these primal traditions thanks to teachers that have graced our own, more recent history. Hawken gives me fresh appreciation for the brilliance and relevance of Emerson, for example, in helping us re-find our place in nature; and his chapters on contemporary science do the same with engaging clarity. Here, as he interweaves recent discoveries in biology and immunology with global activism in defense of life, I find the book's greatest and most startling gift. After describing the extraordinary intricacy and effectiveness of our body's capacity to protect itself, he says this: "The immune system is the most complex system in the body… The movement, for its part, is the most complex coalition of human organizations the world has ever seen." "The hundreds of thousands of organizations that make up the movement are social antibodies attaching themselves to pathologies of power. Many will fail, for at present it is often a highly imperfect, and sometimes clumsy movement. It can flail, overreach, and founder; it has much to learn about how to work together, but it is what the earth is producing to protect itself." (my underlining) "Five hundred years of ecological mayhem and social tyranny is a relatively short time for humanity to have learned to understand its self-created patterns of systematic pillage. What has changed recently is the use of connectivity. Individuals are associating, hooking up, and identifying with one another… They are forming units, inventing again and again pieces of a larger organism, enjoining associations and volunteers and committees and groups, and assembling these into a mosaic of activity as if they were solving a jigsaw puzzle without ever having seen the picture on the box." "But immune systems do fail; this movement most certainly could fail as well. What can help preserve it is the gift of self-perception, the gift of seeing who we truly are… What it takes to arrest our descent into chaos is one person after another remembering who and where we really are." Cheers and blessings to you all in the Great Turning, Joanna Dear People, What I love about the Work That Reconnects is the voices that come through. I mean the voices of our ancestors, the future generations, and the other species with whom we share this planet. They are rarely evoked or even mentioned in public debates about policy options, as relating, for example, to climate change; but we need to hear them if we're going to meet the crises of our time with any moral intelligence. These voices are right here. Given the deep connections that interweave us with the web of life, they are within us. No special magic is required to call them forth. Those of you who have come to workshops know how simple it is to sit down together, set a shared intention, and by the power of our imagination, speak on behalf of another being. Each time this happens, I am awed by the clarity and authenticity of the words that come through. I think I have never loved people more than at the moment when they slip aside from their persona and lean forward in utter concentration to let another perspective be communicated. In that moment, as we shift our perspective to that of a different being and give it our full attention, the walls around the separate ego dissolve into wider contexts of space and time. Afterwards we are never quite the same; notions about our needs and entitlements have shifted a bit, and so, to some degree, has our sense of who and where we are. Since the Council of All Beings began happening over twenty years ago, many thousands of people have had the experience of speaking on behalf of another life-form, be it an animal or plant species, or a feature of the environment like a river or mountain or the wind. More recently, as "deep time" work becomes ever more relevant and rewarding, it has brought an array of practices that breed felt connections with past and future generations, and that let us speak to them and for them. Such use of the moral imagination is urgently needed right now. In response to oil depletion and climate change, the campaign for a new generation of nuclear power stations is gaining ground. In the name of assuring a supply of "clean" energy in amounts deemed essential for a vital economy, this campaign is being waged not only by the nuclear industry and its servants in government, but also by reputable figures allied with environmental causes. These pundits soberly "crunch" the numbers and argue that to maintain an operative economy and tolerable lifestyle, nuclear power is the only "rational" alternative before us. I'm tired of talking back to
these people in my own voice. I'd rather make other voices
audible. I'd like the ancestors to chime in and remind us of the
millennia they managed without refrigerators, and still crafted lives
of nobility and purpose. And how the art and wisdom and discoveries
they've left us required no turbines or transmission towers. As
for the future ones, who will live with the radioactive wastes we leave
behind for ages longer than life on earth, it is not hard to imagine
what they would have to say. If they can trace the causes of
their suffering, they'll surely wonder at our level of humanity.
They might ask us to look at victims of contamination in our
present-day world, at uranium miners and down-winders from test sites
and children of Those
native to this land have known for a long time how to listen to the
future ones. That each choice and change of policy be weighed by
its consequences for the next seven generations was a teaching of the
Great Peacemaker a thousand years ago. Observed to this day
by the Onondaga and Mohawk Nations, it is similar to indigenous
practices across the continent. The recently established
Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) is giving fresh fresh emphasis
and institutional form to this regard for the future. At a
gathering last year in At the outset "the first mandate" is set forth: "to ensure that our decision-making is guided by consideration of the welfare and well-being of the seventh generation to come" Then, after addressing the harm that has been done in recent times to the natural world and its indigenous peoples, the statement concludes in this fashion: "Who guards the web of life that nurtures and sustains us all? "We tend the relationships. "We have the sacred right and obligation to protect the common wealth of our lands and the common health of our people and all our relations for this generation and seven generations to come. We are the Guardians for the Seventh Generation." The Science
and Environmental Health Network, which we can thank for
conceptualizing and promoting the Precautionary Principle under the
inspired leadership of Carolyn Raffensperger, worked with
the IEN to catalyze the Blessings upon you of this present moment and all our companions in deep time. Joanna Dear People, I am writing on Twelfth Night, a dozen days since Christmas. That means it is Epiphany, or Drei Königstag, the day the three kings arrived, bearing gifts, guided by a star in their search for the sacred. They found it new-born in a cowshed, and worshipped it. Our holiday gift-giving stems from that story, but what I treasure most is captured in its name. Epiphany: the manifestation of the sacred. I love this day. I love it for what it declares as possible and what it reminds me to do. To let what is holy appear to my eyes, to discover it right here in the midst of life, igniting into radiance when, for a moment, I pay attention. Perhaps because so much of our world is endangered now, appearing more fragile, more impermanent than ever before, the beauty of it can be excruciating. Walking to my cottage to write this, I catch, for the first time in months, the fragrance of jasmin; see on a cloudbank overhead the sunset's last reflections; pick up from the grass a cardboard airplane Julien had been flying from the upstairs deck. You know those moments, when even the most ordinary pierces the heart. When I was a boy, each week On the last morning of our workshop in
I was in
The Green Sangha consists of chapters which meet monthly in people's homes so they can meditate, then share information, then plan actions to carry out together. One of their chapters' initiatives, Rethinking Plastics, teaches people how to give PowerPoint presentations on the hidden dangers of plastic, provides a Traveling Display to take to grocery stores on Saturday mornings to educate customers, and organizes Nature Ware parties describing the ecological and health costs of plastic and showing healthy alternatives that are already available. (www.greensangha.org) [Between half a trillion and 1 trillion plastic bags are used worldwide per year – an average of 150 bags per year for every person on Earth. These bags are made with petroleum (or genetically engineered corn) and virtually indestructible; they leech their toxins into the food chain, and kill more than a million birds and huge numbers of sea mammals and fish.] Along the same lines of matching actions to Dharma teachings, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship has an award-winning magazine, Turning Wheel. The last issue, inspired by BPF's founder, Robert Aitken Roshi, and entitled "A Call to Action," includes an interview with me. I'd like to quote here from my opening remarks. TW: This issue of Turning Wheel is a "call to action" in a time of urgency. What actions would you call people to? Joanna: The phrase suggests sounding the bugle and getting everybody to run to the barricades. That's the response we've become habituated to: urgency, urgency, urgency! At this point, I'm convinced that it is too late to turn around the collapse of the industrial growth society, and that the task we all have, and one that I find worthy and exciting, is to help each other through it, saving what we can, and making sure that the collapse destroys as little as possible. There's so much to save. There are many mental, spiritual, and psychological tools that we can give each other, as well as linking arms to slow down the destruction and to create new forms, new structures, new Gaian ways of doing things. The Great Turning, as a concept and perspective, helps us understand that the industrial growth society is doing itself in. There's no way to save it, and why would we want to? There's also no point in buckling on the armor and heading out to destroy it, because it's doing that job very well itself. So what we want to do is focus on serving life as best we can in this time of unraveling and destruction… TW: Do you think some fronts are more urgent to work on than others, or do you think it's all equally urgent? Joanna: Some clearly have more repercussions, deeper levels of causality in our planet's system. Rising sea levels and shifting ocean currents caused by melting arctic ice, for example, could bring on famine quite rapidly. It's just common sense that some issues are more urgent than others. But the problem with prioritizing is that we can start to compete in urgency, to say, "My issue is more important than your issue." If we are fully, undividedly responding to this time of crisis, we won't try to harangue each other. We won't say, "What are you doing just working for women at the rape center when there are…blah, blah, blah." I find that tiresome in the extreme. All these concerns are interrelated. An attitude that says: "I'm doing this, but I totally respect what you're doing" will serve us better in the long run. Also we need to realize that we may not succeed, and to actually take that in. Because we suspect it, so we might as well bring it around from behind our left ear where we don't want to look at it: We may fail. Like everything else in life, the Great Turning comes with no guarantee we'll pull it off. But this is our chance you know? The very dire nature of our situation helps us drop our dependence on seeing the results of our own actions. Once we drop that, then we're almost unstoppable. It's very liberating. The
Work That Reonnects lends itself to any issue. This is certainly
demonstrated Down Under. "Stillness in Action" retreats,
combining this groupwork with Dharma talks and sitting practice, were
invented in the 1990s by Bobbi Allan and Simon Clough in |