Joanna Macy — Hope Portal, Episode 5

Our teacher and inspiration for this session is Joanna Macy. What she embodies is a wild love for the world and a fierce hope that rises irrepressible from that. And she carries and lives an important reminder to us that when we love, we will also know pain, and we will know grief that can feel too awful to bear. What is true in our individual lives is true also in our life together, civilizationally. The landscape you and I want to deepen of goodness and muscular hope and generative living is not born of abstract commitments. It's about what we love, our communities, our children, humanity, the natural world. That is a primary passion of Joanna Macy. She's a philosopher of ecology, and she was an environmental activist before that term environmentalism had been coined. We are all also simultaneously, with whatever other challenges we're facing, living with the reality of ecological fragility and disarray and and danger. And I believe that we are, each and every one of us, feeling that at a cellular level. Whatever our belief systems are, whether it's conscious, wherever we live, if in no other way we are having to acknowledge it in the chaos of what we used to call the weather. The weather used to be the stuff of small talk, a comforting mix of predictable and surprising. And when we talk about the muscle of hope being reality based, that means that it does not call us to be brimming with optimism where that is not warranted. Joanna Macy is also a Buddhist teacher and scholar at this point in her life, and she actually says that within Buddhist teaching as she understands it, there is absolutely permission to not be brimming with optimism. What we're called to do is be present. And when you're present, there will be grieving to do, but that this strangely, interestingly, kind of miraculously increases our capacity to love this world, and it unleashes intelligence and ingenuity to sustain that love across a lifetime, as Joanna Macy has. So before the part of my conversation with Joanna that you're going to hear, she named the fact that one of the things we do that gets in the way of grieving as an expression of love is that we beat ourselves up for turning away from our pain at what's happening in the world because it hurts too much. And part of our reorienting to being present to pain is that we get to show compassion towards ourselves. Joanna Macy turns for companionship to the poet, Reiner Maria Rilke. In this, she is a comrade to me. Rilke has been a friend to me across time and space from my years of young adulthood in Berlin to now. Rilke, who also was a citizen of a young century as we are that was full of turmoil and violence and unimaginable possibility. And you're going to hear Joanna turn to Rilke, and read from Rilke a …