Tribute to Joanna Macy

The Great Lady of Deep Ecology has left us.

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.

Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell.

As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength.

Move back and forth into the change.

What is it like, such intensity of pain?

If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,

be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,

the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,

say to the silent earth: I flow.

To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Reiner Maria Rilke

I awoke for no reason at 11:45 on Saturday night, July 19, just as the message notifying us of her passing landed in my inbox. But it wasn't until the next morning, opening the Caring Bridge thread, now with over 130,000 visits, that I had a good and solid cry...for her loss, for the world without her, for a moment of feeling utterly bereft and so profoundly alone, as if I had lost my footing and was now falling into empty space; tears of resolve to embody the Turning; tears of grief and tears of healing. Tears of love given new footing.

How do we live with such great loss? The same way Joanna encouraged us to meet every issue, every new beginning, every setback. First with gratitude, for life, for all we have, for all that is not lost. Second, by honoring our pain for the world, going into it, meeting it, allowing ourselves to be enveloped, not only by personal pain, but by the universal pain of all sentient beings, witnessing the contortions of climate and all the social and psychological dislocation that has already occurred and all that has yet to unfold. Finding compassion for the one who is in such pain, for the multitudes struggling with fear, uncertainty and their own losses, recalling our kinship with all life, a path forward begins to appear.

Gradually, our eyes are opened to new possibility. Joanna often expressed the three possible responses to the crisis: throwing our bodies into the gears of the Machine, creating new institutions, and changing our own consciousness. Here at Resilience.org we mostly see blossoming evidence of new institutions and increasingly sophisticated strategies to resist the capitalist juggernaut. Woven throughout those initiatives is the continuously awakening and highly articulate refinements of consciousness that must accompany everything else. Indeed, it is consciousness that drives the creativity we see here.

With that new awareness, with every breath of effort to disengage from the narratives of empire, we meet ourselves, cracking the egg that now limits our growth, birthing a new vision. As Joanna put it, seeing with new eyes.

Chogyam Trungpa famously said, ‘Dharma is the realization that ending is not possible.’ To put it another way, Buddhism continuously negates arrival because at the completion of the Path, there is no ‘place’ to arrive and no ‘one’ to be there. There can be no finality.

The entire Buddhist path is about perpetually arriving at a non-existent destination. Joanna embodied the union of Path and Result, the awakened nature of love itself. Being with her, there was no distraction, no retreat into ego. The only attachment possible was to that love and to share it naturally, fully. With her, we stepped into the spell of becoming love for the world.

The disappearing destination puts identity on very shaky ground, just where it belongs! The paradox of there being nothere there lays bare the modern world’s desperate pursuit of permanence in a vast field of impermanence. Everything must end, yet existence & non-existence are coexistent, entwined as lovers, as often depicted in Tibetan iconography, reciprocally transforming. To embody this is beyond path, beyond destination, beyond conventional activism or advocacy. This is the paradoxical essence of disappearing presence. Paradoxically, the bodhisattva must leave for us to occupy our own nature more completely. An unresolvable koan!

Joanna, a shining being, even in her absence, becomes more present. This was her final gift—to reveal the ambiguity of being/not-being, the forever fragile home of the deepest grief, the greatest love and the most profound compassion. To live in that ambiguity with the same compassion that flowed from the heart of her being becomes our charge to go forth now. Our gratitude and love for the gifts she so generously offered, and now for her presence/absence is as deep as her love for this world.