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

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. And as you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What's it like this 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 shall cease to hear you, say to the silent earth, I flow, and to the rushing water speak, I am. For many years, when I have found myself feeling unmoored by life and this world, I have listened to this poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. It's read by Joanna Macy, who also translated it and brought it to life afresh for our century. Joanna has now left this world, but this beloved Buddhist teacher and ecological philosopher and activist has left an immense legacy of beauty and wisdom and courage to sustain us. What follows is the second conversation I had with her together with her friend, the psychologist, and fellow Rilke translator, Anita Barrows, which we recorded amidst pandemic and lockdown in 2021. Rilke sought the shape of meaning in a now vanished Central Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. He was prescient that the world as he'd known it was passing away. Joanna Macy's adventurous life and vision took shape in crucibles of the history that later unfolded from an early career with the CIA in post war, cold war Germany to India with her husband who was leading the nascent peace corps there as the very young Dalai Lama arrived into exile. Now relistening to her perspective on the world and how she channels Rilke, we experience a way of standing before the great unfolding dramas of our time, ecological, political, intimate. We are at a newly existential pivotal moment in history, and Joanna Macy long foresaw this. We are standing before the possibilities of what she called a great unraveling or a great turning towards life generating human society. All of this and so much more comes through in the riches of our 2021 conversation. Joanna, who was born in 1929, was 92 as we spoke. In his, letter that he wrote, he wrote an amazing letter, Rilke did, from Sweden. And he starts out saying, I've been thinking. He's not responding so much to the cadet, but he's speaking about there's something gonna happen. It is enormous. It is huge. We must accept our reality and all its immensity. Everything, even the unheard of, must be possible within it. This is, in the end, the only courage required of us. The courage to meet what is strangest and most awesome. I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. The conversation that follows is infused with friendship as much as ideas. Joanna and Anita have translated Rilke together across decades alongside many other …