Joanna Macy, In Memoriam — Beauty and Wisdom and Courage (and Rilke) to Sustain Us

What It Covers

Krista Tippett speaks with Buddhist teacher Joanna Macy and psychologist Anita Barrows about their translation of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, exploring solitude, love, uncertainty, and ecological crisis through his century-old wisdom.

Key Questions Answered

• •Living Questions: Rilke advises holding unresolved questions like closed rooms rather than seeking immediate answers. Practice sitting with uncertainty in the present moment, nurturing questions over time until you gradually live your way into answers that emerge organically through patient attention.
• •Gender and Relationship: Rilke envisions love as two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other rather than merging. He calls for relationships built from individual wholeness, where partners become distinctively themselves first, creating human-to-human connection beyond conventional masculine-feminine roles and sexual dynamics.
• •Solitude in Nature: True solitude means immersion in the living natural world, not isolation. The pandemic lockdowns created habits of outdoor time that people resist giving up. Solitude becomes communion with the rustle, touch, and murmur of nature, expanding rather than contracting one's sense of connection.
• •Witnessing Transformation: Macy frames our ecological moment as requiring gratitude practice for what may disappear. She advocates saying goodbye to mountains and rivers through thanksgiving, recognizing beauty before it vanishes, and understanding that being present to this unprecedented planetary shift is why we are alive now.