[Oe List ...] Fwd: In Honor of Joanna Macy, 1929-2025

[Diann McCabe]

Another tribute to Macy

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From: Meditations in an Emergency <meditations-in-an-emergency at ghost.io>
Date: Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 4:13 PM
Subject: In Honor of Joanna Macy, 1929-2025
To: <diann.mccabe at gmail.com>


I write while staying in one of the great forests of British Columbia, a
forest in which the inextricability of life from death is gorgeously
evident. Several kinds of fern spring from this soil, some taller than me,
birds move among the branches, many kinds of berries abound. It is lavish,
almost hectic with life, and with the inextricability of life and death.
Magnificent fallen trees turn back into soil as younger trees reach
downward to twine around their ancestors' trunks and upward toward

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Meditations in an Emergency
<https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/r/18998f28?m=8f94996a-96a2-4017-bf1f-d03d2d085645>
In Honor of Joanna Macy, 1929-2025
<https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/r/2bbc9be7?m=8f94996a-96a2-4017-bf1f-d03d2d085645>
By Rebecca Solnit • 21 Jul 2025 View in browser
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I write while staying in one of the great forests of British Columbia, a
forest in which the inextricability of life from death is gorgeously
evident. Several kinds of fern spring from this soil, some taller than me,
birds move among the branches, many kinds of berries abound. It is lavish,
almost hectic with life, and with the inextricability of life and death.
Magnificent fallen trees turn back into soil as younger trees reach
downward to twine around their ancestors' trunks and upward toward the sky.
The roots growing around and gripping these decaying logs look like veins
and tentacles and fingers clutching and reaching toward an anchor in the
soil. Some of the mature cedars and conifers stand on mounds that must be
fully decayed trees or rather once were trees and are further along in the
process of becoming soil. Often a great tree that's fallen over still has
at its base a tall shield that is its roots still clinging to rounded
stones and soil, and from this the trunk stretches across the earth. These
trees from which trees grow are known as nurse logs
<https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/r/dff02f4a?m=8f94996a-96a2-4017-bf1f-d03d2d085645>.

Two trees reaching into the soil from atop a fallen giant, British
Columbia.

It was a good place to be when I heard of the death of Joanna Macy on July
19 at the age of 96. I had met her only a few times, but I knew her work,
knew she was beloved by many I know, and important for many tens or
hundreds of thousands more. Because 96 is a long life for a member of our
species, if not for a tree, because I know she had a rich and full life, I
am sad for all those who are grieving and will miss her, sad because every
death is a reminder of my own and everyone's mortality, sad that I didn't
spend more time with her, but not sad as if her life was in some sense
incomplete or cut short. She died, by all reports, surrounded by those who
loved her best and was lovingly cared for, and she lived about as fully as
anyone can.

Macy once wrote, "It is good to realize that falling apart is not such a
bad thing. Indeed, it is as essential to transformation as the cracking of
outgrown shells. Anxieties and doubts can be healthy and creative, not only
for the person, but for the society, because they permit new and original
approaches to reality." She was talking about falling apart emotionally,
letting the grief and despair and fear come through, not in order to drown
in them but to let them flow and keep moving and maybe to not let them
paralyze and let you or me or us, not to prevent us from doing the work
that addresses what those emotions respond to.

But in those lines, she could also have been talking about forests, in
which things are forever falling apart and working together. I think of
what a forest without death would be, imagine trees that grew endlessly and
never died, never gave their nutrients back to the soil and the next
generations so wholly, never fell to create openings in the canopy younger
trees could reach toward. Macy also spoke of our civilization as falling
apart, and in doing so making room for new versions of who and what we can
and must be to cease destroying the planet: "But what's amazing now for us,
why you can be glad, is that it is falling apart. It is encountering the
limits itself, and some of them have to do with climate as well, of
course." I was in British Columbia, on this forested island, for a women's
climate retreat, and nothing could make me feel better about the future
than meeting the brilliant young women from Mexico, Columbia, the
Philippines, the US, and Canada committed to this work.
A hollowed stump with mosses and young huckleberry bushes growing from what
remains of a once-massive tree.

If you don't know Joanna Macy, she was many things: a translator of Rilke,
a Buddhist and scholar of Buddhism whose dissertation was on alignments
between Buddhist thought and systems theory, an antinuclear and an
environmental activist, a teacher and trainer whose creative and deeply
interactive workshops helped many people face grief and fear in the face of
environmental and then climate catastrophe and keep going, the author of
seventeen books, and the mother of three children. I visited her at her
home late last year, and she was joyful, funny, brilliant, warm, living
with a wall of scholarly books and a sunny deck looking over a shared
garden.

When I was younger, I was taught what an artist or writer was supposed to
aspire to was immortality, the kind that Dante and Li Po and Shakespeare
have, so that in centuries to come memory of your name and attention to
your creations continue. Later in life, I realized that there was an
entirely different thing to aspire to, an entirely different kind of
creative success: to be so much part of your own time, of the present that
is making the future, that rather than remaining what people think about,
you become in some way how people think, how they value, what they
prioritize. You stop being what's in front of their eyes and become part of
what is behind their eyes, how they see the world, how they live, act, what
they aspire to, what they hold close, what they resist.

You you become a nurse log on which new life can grow as you compost into
the soil we call culture. And maybe this is the mindset of moist places, of
an ecology of vivid decay and regeneration rather than of the arid places,
where death dessicates and the mummies, skeletons, ruins, Dead Sea Scrolls,
last for centuries or millennia. Macy was raised as a Christian, had a loss
of faith, and found another kind when she worked with Tibetan refugees in
India in the 1960s. I believe she contributed hugely to the richness of the
soil in which many people grounded their work as climate activists or
engaged Buddhists. Or rather I know she did.
A tree atop a stump, ferns, mosses, and small plants all around it.

In 2010, in an interview with Krista Tippet, Macy described being a young
woman in Germany  in the 1950s, a young woman who had become fluent in the
language and was becoming a translator: "And one day, I walked into a
bookstore on Adalbertstrasse near the university, and there on a table was
this little cloth-bound book in rag paper. It was exquisite. It was *Das
Stunden-Buch*, *The Book of Hours*. I picked it up, and the poem that it
opened to was the second poem of the first part, “Ich lebe mein Leben in
wachsenden Ringen,” “I live my life in widening circles” — and that
something immediately rearranged in the furniture of my mind.

Here it is in a translation I believe she made with Anita Barrows: :

*I live my life in widening circles  *

*that reach out across the world.  *

*I may not complete this last one  *

*but I give myself to it. *

*I have been circling around God, that primordial tower.  *

*I’ve been circling for thousands of years *

*and I still don’t know: Am I a falcon, *

*a storm, or a great song?*

She told Tippet of the encounter with the poem: "I identified completely
with it, and I saw — it was just eight lines in that poem — that it could
redefine that I was on a spiritual path, that because I wasn’t on the
linear road, up the ladder, up Jacob’s ladder to get closer to God, that
God had been there all the time, and I was orbiting around him, and that it
had been happening, actually, for thousands of years."

The woman that was Joanna Macy is gone. And still here as books, teachings,
in students, friends, and through broad influence even beyond those who
know her and her work. She's a tree that's fallen; she's a tree that trees
have grown out of; she's now part of the past, but also she fed and
nourished and loved and guided a possible future, a hopeful and demanding
future, demanding in that we would have to change ourselves and our society
to make it.

It's almost strange to think about her integrity, her compassion, her
generosity at a time when the news is full of stories about cruel and
corrupt men and the wreckage they've strewn all around them, but she's a
reminder that their opposite is also present in the world and even in the
nation; the same society produced them both. Joanna Macy is gone. Joanna
Macy is with us in a thousand ways and even if she fades from the
conversation about who we are and what we can do about our relationship
with the planet, she will be underneath the effort of countless others,
feeding and anchoring their work.

There's a Jewish response when hearing of a death: "May their memory be a
blessing." With Macy there is no need to wish it be so; we know her life
was a long blessing as out of love for the earth and tenderness toward what
impairs our care for it, she toiled, studied, created, translated from
other languages into English but also translated from inchoate emotions
like fear and grief to clarity and action, translated the riches of Tibetan
Buddhism into what she believed might be useful to us in the Western world,
and what might make us useful to the survival of the natural world.

Berries of many kinds are ripening in this forest on the shores of an
inland sea; I eat blackberries, both Himalayan and native, red
huckleberries of a kind new to me, a couple of salmonberries whose
drupelets look like golden-red fish eggs, see again and again the trunks of
cedars curving before rising, like the prow of ships sailing through the
deep time of these forests, see the roots that reach for darkness, the
trunks and branches that reach for light, see this place in the gentle
weather of summer, see the great trunks of trees that washed ashore in the
storms of winter, see ravens, an owl, robins, eagles, buzzards, seagulls. I
see love in the signs of how people have cared for and protected and walked
these woods. I see deep time in the old trees and the cycle of life.

Macy said to Tippet in that 2010 interview, "But actually, we’re made for
that. There’s a song that wants to sing itself through us, and we’ve just
got to be available. Maybe the song that is to be sung through us is the
most beautiful requiem for an irreplaceable planet or maybe it’s a song of
joyous rebirth as we create a new culture that doesn’t destroy its world."
She invited us to sing both songs or maybe to know they're the same song,
to sing the requiem for a dying world that could welcome what remains
possible.

She is present, she is gone beyond, she has become a falcon, a storm, a
great song.

*p.s. Joanna recently recorded a series of conversations with her young
friend Jessica Serrante, which you can listen to here: *
*https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-the-great-turning/id1740825892*
<https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/r/46d3f63c?m=8f94996a-96a2-4017-bf1f-d03d2d085645>

*Her conversation with Krista Tippett in 2010 is here (and can also be
found there as a transcript): *
*https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/on-being-with-krista-tippett/id150892556?i=1000436480200*
<https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/r/3ffd1919?m=8f94996a-96a2-4017-bf1f-d03d2d085645>


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