Transcript: JOANNA MACY on the World As Lover And Self ⌠ENCORE⌡/207
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Ayana Young Welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with the beloved Joanna Macy, initially released in January of 2015. In this conversation, Joanna gives us a new and transformative lens to approach despair, grief and chronic dissatisfaction. We hope you enjoy this special encore episode.
Ayana Young Hello, my name is Ayana Young, and I welcome you to Unlearn and Rewild, where we explore radical ideas relating to Earth renewal. Today from Berkeley, California, we are joined by Joanna Macy, eco philosopher, activist, scholar of Buddhism and systems theory, who has an international following thanks to 50 years and movements for civil rights, global justice, and ecological sanity. Her 12 books include Coming Back to Life, Widening Circles: A Memoir, World as Lover and World Itself. She travels the world teaching her program for activist empowerment, and healing from the psychological damage of civilization entitled The work that reconnects.
Hello!
Joanna Macy There you are. Hi, Ayana. I am thrilled to be meeting you this way. And in conversation with you.
Ayana Young Oh, it's an honor for me as well, to share your voice in this way. The radio show was created out of a deep despair in my heart and needing to reach out to people like yourself for guidance. And I know there's a lot of other people that are in the same boat as I am.
Joanna Macy You show how significant it is and how productive it is to not be afraid of your despair and grief and outrage over what's happening. Hmm. Instead of thinking of that as doom and gloom, closing your heart to it or thinking that it's some private pathology. You didn't close your eyes, and you let it in. There's no more energy being devoted to protecting yourself from what's happening to the world, you open to it, and look where it's taken you.
Ayana Young I feel so grateful that I've been able to open myself up to the despair, you know,
Joanna Macy That’s the most subversive thing we can do, because the power holders, the whole late capitalism project would have us distrust our feelings and privatize them. That it's some personal craziness and then pave over. And that makes us very obedient and silent. And so it's easier to manage a population that is silent, depressed, isolated and obedient. But you didn't buy into that for some blessed reason. You may not even know yourself. You didn't. You let yourself feel it.
Ayana Young I don't know why it's strange because I didn't grow up in a community that talked about these things, or was maybe even consciously aware of what was happening. And it was just something so loud for me. And even when I didn't know how to talk about the tar sands or nuclear, even when I didn't have that activist vocabulary, I was shouting and I was pushing against this-
Joanna Macy And you were feeling sick at heart?
Ayana Young Yes.
Joanna Macy And you didn't shut up about it?
Ayana Young No, I didn't
Joanna Macy. You may not know even what it was then, you're growing up or your ancestry that gave you that courage.
Ayana Young Before I really stepped into this open heartedness towards what's happening. I was constantly feeling this chronic dissatisfaction. And I was just feeling this heaviness of meaninglessness and emptiness. And it wasn't until I really opened up, you know, broke my heart open, cried, felt the deep darkness of what's going on. And then, you know, starting to be proactive. That's when I felt “Wow, okay, this is enlivening. It's impatient.”
Joanna Macy Yeah. And then you found that you also, you weren't alone, you suddenly found that you had all these wonderful people to link arms with.
Ayana Young We are not alone in this despair. And at the core of it all, the despair comes from this deep love that is undeniable, unexplainable.
Joanna Macy It's our birthright, to feel it, and live out of it, to let it pour through us, for our world. And that's why I'm feeling with a lot of the young people today, they move me so.
Ayana Young I feel like my generation is beginning to emerge from the paralysis of despair. I've always hesitated to use the word hope, since it carries a sense of passivity or resigning your power. So I would distinguish what I'm feeling as a sense of calling, not based on hope, but in the certainty of this path. And the need to rise to this occasion, whether or not we will ever personally see the kind of change we dream about. There's nothing that could stop me from doing this work. And even through times of doubt, and lack of results. I know, I can always take in the beauty of the world every day, and love it fiercely.
Joanna Macy. And that's a great economy too, because it saves you from constantly taking your pulse, either your spiritual pulse, or your strategic activist pulse, “Oh, how am I doing?” And was this successful, that successful, constantly trying to gauge they look at what the outcome is. And you just drop that because you can't tell, there people have done things and said things that have profoundly enriched and altered your life. And they are part of the compost that's nourishing your life. And they don't even know it. You don't go back to tell people sometimes they're not even alive anymore. Sometimes they're people that you've forgotten the name of and that they've gone up, they live in a place you can't reach. So we absolutely are getting free from being dependent on knowing the outcomes of what we're doing. And that is an incredible liberation. And what a privilege it is, isn't it?
Ayana Young Absolutely. I think about that a lot, that so many people don't have the opportunity because they're faced with real issues of survival.
Joanna Macy. That's right. You're so right. And we're so lucky that we have a little psychic space, a little physical space, we're not locked up. We're not cut off in some refugee camp where all we do is stand in line for a crust of bread or a piece of paper to get us out there. We actually have means, you have this radio show. We have this Skype technology. We don't know how long we'll have it. But for the moment we do and for the moment we can let our hearts sing with the sense of purpose we have in our love for life.
Ayana Young That brings to mind the very first interview I recorded, which was with the ecology writer Stephanie Mills and she said something that I haven't ever forgotten, which is cleaving to beauty is of great sustenance. And we can all help a little beauty to continue.
Joanna Macy. I'm grateful to the teachers that tell us that we don't need to pick and choose, but we can be ready for everything. And you may know that I do translations of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote some of the most amazing, short poems, and there's a poem where he says, it's as if he imagines the sacred talking to us, and saying, beauty and terror, keep going, feeling is final. So there'll be terror as well as beauty. We're here, when there's this turning that can happen. There's the great unraveling of living systems. And there's also the great turning toward a life sustaining society. And we don't know how it's going to end. But we're here to face the unraveling, and act for the great turning, and then that will see beauty, but will also experience terror and grief. And we just let it all in. Let it all in. As he said, let's just keep going. Because you're not going to let anything quell the joy of feel, and being of use to life on Earth.
Ayana Young I'd like to read one passage from your book Coming Back to Life. And it's really stuck in my mind. And it makes sense of that paralysis, that moment of stillness as you awaken to the fact that your pain is the pain of the world manifesting in us. “The very stress that when we hide it, seemed to separate us from other people - now uncovers our connective tissue. This realization, whether it comes in a flash of insight, or a gradual dawning is a turning point, we shift to a new way of seeing ourselves in relation to the world, and a new way of understanding our power. Many metaphors come to mind for describing this shift. It is like the turning of the tide, or the pause between breathing in and breathing out. As we allow the world's pain to flow in it rearranges our internal structures, then the outflow releases our gifts of response into the world. Or it is like a fulcrum, letting us shift the weight of our despair, turn it and raise it into new understandings. The Chinese character for crisis is a combination of two forms, one means danger, the other opportunity on this fulcrum danger turns to opportunity.” Wow, that's beautiful. So could you speak about how pain helps transform us and unlocks our healing powers?
Joanna Macy. For one thing, this has been known to us humans, maybe to other life forms as well, for thousands of years, and every spiritual path and every mythological structure. There is this recognition that the way to fulfillment is often through a dark and painful turning, like the hero's journey, for the hero to become a hero and to discover, to engage in the great saving adventure of whatever she or he is about. There's first descent, where you feel almost powerless, you have to confront the monster. And you have to embrace the monster. And that you break free of the restrictions that your culture has imposed on you in daring to love what is unlovable, or what you've been told, is unacceptable. And to run the risks of being considered crazy or lonely or weak or unpatriotic, or too sensitive or too emotional or what have you. And just open your eyes, your mind, your heart to what is, it's a declaration of allegiance to the truth of where you are.
And it's at the same time while, so this has been part of our knowing for a long time and it seems particularly significant and necessary now in our facing our mainstream culture, and the political economy of the industrial growth society, or we could call it late stage capitalism that intensifies this oppressive nature of our culture. And so far, the power holders would not have us not get acquainted with the power of our, the intensity of our outrage, and the depths of our grief, they would like us to feel that everything is just okay the way it is. Put a little smiley face wherever you can keep a stiff upper lip, be obedient, conform, don't step out. And don't raise your head etc. And so when you dare to accept this inner turbulence, which is really life itself, knocking at the door, feel me seeming open up to me, I am your world. You become not only saw personally liberated and find more energy, and more vitality and more joy, and the numbness and the anaesthesia begin to wear off, but you also become subversive, dangerously subversive, you are breaking free of the kind of deep oppression, that our political culture can threaten us we can be threatened with so much with jail with isolation with torture, the power holders in defense of corporate globalization are rolling out just about every scary device they can always genuine harm, to keep us quiet, to keep us obedient. So I like to see I love to see in myself, and then all the many people I've had the good fortune to work with in the work that reconnects how feeling their pain for the world builds a wonderful kind of gleeful courage of being allied with life and begin to act and feel that life is flowing through you.
Ayana Young This system is set up for mandatory participation with, you know, vanishingly few exceptions, the people who have gone money are fossil fuel free. But slave labor and environmental toxification are built into the structure of the economy. And without them as it stands, it wouldn't function. So here we are in this impossible place of never being able to live guilt free. And this guilt is just another form of pain for the world. But how do we deal with this pain? Is there a way to move through it?
Jonna Macy. Yeah, you just said it so beautifully. That you can't be guilt free in this. And so this can make you feel “Oh, there's no clear enemy.” But when we realize that we all belong together, and the living body of earth. And we can see that we're, as living systems, we participate, and not only the biosphere, the ecosphere, but we participate in the political and economic systems that were born into, and living in. So in a way, oh, you can say, damn it, I want to be purely on the side of good and not tainted in any way by my complicity. But it is very difficult, if not totally impossible, today, to live without interdependence with the reigning system.
But the good news of that, is that because you're part of it, you can also be part of its self healing. Because the world actually can't be fixed from the outside, and you can't heal the world. But the world can only heal itself. And we are part of that. So we know that the drag of the habits that we've acquired, we know the sloth and laziness that is, bred by our getting accustomed to the comforts.
And, and so, as we free ourselves, we are showing everybody because everybody's complicit, and that there's no convenient enemy out there, except that there are sort of institutionalized forms of the mistakes we make. By that I mean, well, in Buddhism as which is, you know, is very important, I mean, been very helpful. The sources of suffering are seen to be not some evil principle, but they are simply human greed, and human hatred, and human confusion, delusion. So that's been ever so we make mistakes, when we're motivated by fear, hatred, and delusion. What's happening in our time with these technologies and market forces, is that these great sources of suffering, greed, hatred, and delusion, have taken on institutionalized and technologically assisted systems forms. That's what we need to fight and separate from these institutionalized forms. And therefore that means that when you bump up against people who are working for the system, in corporations, or government or military or police, or Monsanto, or what have you, then you realize they're not the enemy, that they're just in bondage to these organized forms of greed, hatred, and delusion. So you don't waste energy and risk separation, by seeking to hate or defeat them, they're not the enemy. But what you do, then you recognize that you can help them see you can that you focus your energy on how you dismantle these forces that we've allowed to arise. Am I making any sense?
Ayana Young. Oh, absolutely.
Joanna Macy You Know, In The Work That Reconnects, it's not in the books yet, but there's a practice that we do, it's on my website called bowing to the adversary, some of the people you have to oppose the people you have to maybe do civil disobedience to stop what they're doing, that they're not the enemy. And so you make these 10 different bows, you bow to them, knowing that you who are destroying the natural world for your own profit. You have shown me how much I love the natural world. You have shown me how much I love the earth and it's being so I bow to you in gratitude. If it weren't for you, you have shown me how much I value, justice and freedom. And so I bow to you.
Ayana Young You teach not to act from short sighted reactionary impulses, because if we do succeed in knocking down the system we oppose it will spring back up with a new twist or a new slogan or flag, but something equally problematic. And there's this thing called behavioral conditioning. The shift needs to be as deep as our psyche goes to the roots of our cultural identities and our myths, we need to rejoin the river of creative life. So I'm wondering how we can approach simultaneously fixing our inner disconnects. and engaging in effective struggles in the wider context?
Joanna Macy. I think that they actually help each other. That's why I argue with people who seek a spiritual path that is characterized by tranquility and focusing just on your own emotional and spiritual responses, without engaging in the hurly burly of social change work. That shift in consciousness can actually be furthered, and become more real for us, in the course of taking risks, and stepping out and speaking out. And you know why? It's because at the root of this shift that we're required to make now for life to go on. The root of it, I think it comes both from science and spirituality, two revolutions, we're seeing that the Earth is alive, it's a living system. Our political economy is treating the Earth as the supply house and a sewer. And this is wrecking havoc with our own self understanding, and with our own peace of mind, as it breaks our heart in a way, far greater than we imagined, to see our Earth treated this way. But now, just as you and I are alive in this moment, both from science, quantum theory, chaos theory, systems theory, and from spiritual traditions, from the Indigenous people, to the current in every religion there that are recognizing that our world is alive. The Earth is alive. From it derives everything we know and have and are. And therefore, it is sacred to us. Oh, my God, my world is alive, this planet is alive. That's what you were feeling today. I know when you are walking out in the turning leaves, this is a living world, I'll do everything for it. And nothing I can do. Nothing will ever be fall me, that will separate me from the living world is my larger body. They can pour its intelligence and its bliss throw me
Ayana Young When the paradigm of separateness and separate individuals fades away. There is a tremendous weight lifted in a sense, there's a pressure in our culture, to be exceptional, to be original and your ideas and in your expressions. This may partially derived from the notion of human exceptionalism or national exceptionalism in certain cases. So when we begin to see the world as a unified whole, personal success only makes sense if it serves a wider collective success, the thriving of a community or an ecosystem. You've invoked Arne Næss, originator of the term Deep Ecology and his call for cultural therapy to break out of anthropocentrism. You are one of the leading advocates for deep ecology. So can you speak about Arne Næss and how your work has dovetailed with his?
Joanna Macy. Oh yes his coming into my life was, his thought was very important to me. When I started this work, I thought it was just about freeing people from their negative emotions and so they could be more effective, more effective activists. But then I found to my surprise, that in so doing, the people around me and I myself, were feeling a shift in identification. Shift to identifying with the Earth itself, herself, himself. I thought “Oh, that's just like the Buddhist teaching of dependent co-arising of radical inner being”. And then came my acquaintance with Deep Ecology, and I thought, “Oh goody. Now I have a secular term for what I only had spiritual language before”, that we are gaining access to our Deep Ecology that is our structural, the universe is so structured as to involve our mutual belonging, and our capacity to think and act together. So Arne Næss, almost as soon as I discovered that, I was with my buddy, John Seed and Australia, founder of the Rainforest Information Center, and we invented the Council of All Beings, so people could experience, step aside from their human identification, and speak for another life form. And this was not losing their superiority, actually, what almost everybody felt, was taking off a girdle around you. “Ah, oh, I don't have to just constantly be identified with my society defined social overall, I'm part of life. Oh, I can feel what it's like to be a wild goose or slithering snake, or a blade of grass.” And that that is our birthright. Being human is just the last chapter in a journey that has shaped our minds and bodies. We remember that journey in our mother's womb, where we remember being fish, and amphibians growing gills and tails, we do the whole remembering of our origins there and it's wonderful to be liberated from our human like exceptionalism. And then real wisdom and a lot of ingenuity pops up. We must do a Council of All Beings together some day.
Ayana Young My next question challenges me constantly, I experience the primal instinct of survival of self preservation, and the desire for creature comforts. But I've noticed a shift in my motivation lately. The age old biological impulse towards the survival of our species has gone into overshoot, far past what would keep our population steady. And that's the great irony of our time, to increase or even just maintain our standards of living in the Global North. We have to defile and deplete the whole of life. So one big challenge, as I see it, is to override this biological urge and override the habits of overconsumption with the much stronger forces of cultural evolution, which teaches us balance. Do you see this cultural therapy as just awakening this instinct for harmony? Or is it supplanting instinct? What are your thoughts on this?
Joanna Macy. As I was saying just before, what struck me, oh, just a few years after we started, there's a shift in self interest that occurs. A shift to the next systemic level, that as perhaps our earliest ancestors felt and as we get from Indigenous teachings of Natives societies, as well as another religions and spiritual paths, there's a shift from focusing on the separate self, to feeling just part of a larger body a larger being a larger system, you define yourself differently, the realm of your self interest, enlarges and expands. So that what happens to the rainforest of the Amazon Basin, for example, strikes you with the same kind of concern, or at least similar concern as to what's happening to your own lungs. Because you know, these are the lungs of your larger body, the planet Earth, it's very easy to slip back continually into identification with your personal needs for comfort and security and approval. And so you need constant practices. And John Seed used to remind me of this, he said, we got to do these rituals and practices almost daily, and very regularly anyway, to counteract the pool of a hyper individualized society that conditions us and has since birth toward acquisition, and competition.
And so we have, as you may have noticed, in the Work That Reconnects, we follow a spiral of practices, where we begin with gratitude, once you listen to what the Haudenosaunee, the Mohawks, and the Onandaga of Central New York, tell me they, these are the words that come before all else. “We give greetings and thanks to the sun as it rises to the trees that stand in their majesty and teachings, to the waters that strengthen us and the fish that clean the waters,” etc. So just rehearsing, or opening to your gratitude, to be alive, the gratitude that I am now able to meet this extraordinary woman Ayana, and that I will meet her in person someday fills me with such “Oh, what a gift I've just been given”. So gratitude also keeps us that self interest extended wide. The other parts of the spiral are just what we talked about, about not being afraid of the suffering, and then daring to look with new eyes, and deep time and Deep Ecology. linking arms to move forward. There is a huge pole, and fear. That's why fear of scarcity and fear of danger can pull us back to just worrying about ourselves or our family or our clan. It really helps to keep looking through the lens that widens ups, the widening circles of your life.
Ayana Young You wrote “When we reconnect with life by choosing the bare pain for it, our mind retrieves its natural clarity”, in this epic journey from the human centered, exploitative society, to a society that honors the principles of inner being of interconnection, and coevolution. There are enormous feats of logistics and engineering, transitioning to minimally consumptive societies with local and sustainable food and energy production, and a complete reworking of the hierarchical political systems and legal systems and a dissolution of the police state and the military structures, and then shutting down the 400 nuclear reactors worldwide, and dealing with the unimaginable amounts of nuclear waste, just just to name a few of the incredibly complex task ahead. So I'm interested in the open ended question of how to self organize among the huge and growing body of concerned people globally. And how to decide where each of us fits into this project, and be able to shift our strategies as the situation evolves. I know it's a sweeping question. That, of course, there's no simple answer.
Joanna Macy. I could say you're right, it's a huge question. But there are a couple of basic reminders to oneself that really help. One is that of all these issues, yes, there are multiple, but they have one core, what we used to call problematique, there's one core mistake at the source of all of these wreckings of life on our planet. And that is the notion that we are separate, that we can hold relief from the sufferings of others. And that we can, that we can find some private salvation. In a way, it doesn't matter that much, which different issue you work on, whether you work on domestic violence, the slave trade that still exists in our private prison system, we can work to liberate ourselves from the tragedy of imagining that we're separate.
So that means we can move from one to another, that also saves us from thinking that our issue is more important than other people's issues. And that has taken a big toll on activism, and previous decades. They're all important. It's been very helpful to me, by the way, Ayana that we have separated, that as we see these three dimensions of the transition to a life sustaining society, the great turning, and they're holding actions where we slow down the destruction, and they're the changing of the positive actions of changing the very way we do things. And the third, the shift in consciousness, they all support each other. And so we can slip free of being competitive about which of our strategies is most important, and just let life move through us. And through it all, we must steer clear of the great mistake, the great mistake is to think that we can do it alone, even looking at what's happening. We can't even take that in alone.
The name of this game now is link arms and do it together. And that brings us enormous rewards, you found that, look where you found your beloved. Me too. I had 56 years of a marriage where we were looking together at the challenges of our world, and loving each other through the courage and ingenuity we saw in each other, as we made it into one challenge after another. That's why the wedding ring that is still on my hand on my finger has three circles of a different kind of goal. One is me. One is my beloved. And the third circle that links to is our world. We stand together and not gazing riveted into each other's eyes. But we stand side by side looking out at our world, strengthening each other and loving each other through what we discover, as we walk hand in hand into the great turning. That's true love. I know you didn't ask me that question, that just came out.
Ayana Young I love that answer. Thank you so much for sharing that intimate insight. It is so amazing to join with others in the deep passions and convictions for life. And it's so fulfilling.
Joanna Macy. And so it makes us you're doing just what you want. You can imagine being happier and so and you know, you may not see the results of this action for another lifetime or two. So you're, you're free to engage without constantly taking your bolts of how effective you are.
Ayana Young It can almost demean all that heartfelt work put into something that may not have the outward success that we so wished it had. But what else would we be doing during this time? What else could we potentially spend our time on other than deeply loving this planet? That is part of us?
Joanna Macy. You Ayana, you've been prepared for this moment, by four and a half billion years of life on this planet, your mind your heart, your sensitivities, your body, all awarenesses that's, it didn't start with your birth, and your particular line of ancestors, you're there a gift to this time.
Ayana Young I'd like to ask you about deep timme you do an exercise in which a participant expresses an activist issue from several vantage points. For instance, fracking, first, they speak from their own heart, their own point of view. And then they change identity and speak as the opponent would speak. But you insist on it being a sincere attempt, not a caricature of the opponent. But you take it further than and have the person assume the role of non human being that is affected by the issue. Perhaps the fish that were you know, completely wiped out in the creek in Kentucky, where fracking fluids spilled. And then the final voice is of the future human being speaking from the distant future about the cascading effects through time of the actions we're taking now. So how is your study of deep time shaped what you consider to be important in the blink that is this life?
I'm just imagining if every politician and corporate policy maker did this exercise before work in the morning? Oh, oh, what a different world that would be.
Joanna Macy. Oh, I just can't think of anything that would make me happier, that would be more wonderful. Well, what to say? I feel that a lot of the simple practices in the Work That Reconnects, if they could just pause and do them at the cabinet level or in any decision making body in government or corporate structures that have so much power over our lives at this present moment. Yes, this is our birthright to feel these connections, all of them. And what's wonderful, you know, is that this revelation that happens, this particular exercise I call widening circles, as you speak for yourself first, the adversary, the non human and the future one. Let me put it this way. I could decide to go and help people know how important it is to identify with these three other voices. And I could give a lecture about it, I could give a lecture about feeling non violent, identifying with your enemy, a lecture about deep ecology with a more than human, a lecture a part of the lecture on the time. But instead, people don't hear any sermonizing. Not a word of it. All they do is speak from that perspective. And that teaches them.
We don't need to sermonize people, moralize them, let them speak. And then in that speaking, they find how big their heart really is, or their heart-mind, as I say, because in Buddhism, your mind is located in the heart.
I have to tell you something that happened with that Earth Leadership Cohort, we went and had the wonderful weekend together. And in the course of that, you know, we go around the spiral of the Work That Reconnects. And each one is so powerful and subversive in a way, even letting in gratitude for life is subversive to the consumer society, that you are enough the way you are, and don't need to buy everything. In that weekend, we did a very fierce piece of work around truth telling about our pain for the world, called the truth mandala, which you may have done or heard about. And there were some members of the Earth Leadership Cohort, young people that stayed on, well, this truth mandala where people enter the ritual circle, and pick up an object and let it speak. Let the fear speak, that's a stone or let the grief speak, those dead leaves, or let the outrage and anger speak, that's a thick stick, or let the emptiness and overwhelm speak, that's an empty bowl. So this is always been I mean, this has been around for 25 years, and it's gets better and better any rate, this particular truth, mandala was so fierce, and the grief and even hopelessness that was being expressed what people were saying that was just pouring out of all the feelings they'd been sitting on. For years that just erupted. It was like a fierce wind blowing, I could feel it. And there were moments when I wanted to protect some of the younger people there, there was especially one activist, she looked so young and so fragile, even though I knew she was a dynamite activist. I for the first time in my life, as I wanted to go and put my hands over her ears and not be faced with so much total grimness of the outlook of what we've done to ourselves and to the Earth. But of course, I didn't. And she came in to just utterly devastated these terribly grievous things kept pouring out. And when it was over, she said, “Well, I wish I'd done that nine years ago. I feel wonderful.”
Ayana Young Yeah, to release it.
Joanna Macy. Yeah. And we made it clear that each of these dark emotions that so many people fear and flee, have a tantric side or a flip side are a source. And that if the grief the source of the grief is not craziness, but love, you mourn what you love, and that the source of the anger is not hatred at all. It's passion for justice. And the source side of the fear is the courage that is there when you actually speak it. Because we're supposed to be so afraid of our fear, we can't even call attention to it.
I keep discovering the same thing, and that we can trust our deep feelings about what's happening to the world. And that it can bring us strength and they can bring us each other.
Ayana Young Wow, I can see that exercise being really instrumental, especially for people feeling despair and who have grown cold hearted and numb from serial defeats. You know, I've heard some really unsettling justifications for doing nothing. Usually, some variation of, you know, this is all part of Gaia’s process. But if your intuition is awake, it's impossible to ignore the suffering of the earth. And a sense of certainty comes from being an active participant in the journey towards inner being.
Joanna Macy. I love the word certainty, just knowing, ah, this is who I really am or what I really am. This is the source of my life. Oh, it's so much bigger than I thought, Oh, I don't ever need be separated from that. Ah, there's no need to fear. I'm sorry. It's the kind of release not as striving to comprehend, not as striving to scramble up to learn, you know, to reach for the next rung of warning and competence, but rather, a letting go into what has always been there. Always been there but unrecognized, particularly in the industrial growth society.
Ayana Young Thank you so much, Joanna, for bringing this wisdom and serenity to this ongoing conversation. I really hope I get to meet you one day and be a part of the work that reconnects.
Joanna Macy. Well, that is occurring to me too, that I feel you in my heart. And you are so incredibly articulate on your voice is so filled with freedom of Earth's true nature. And there's a lot of life's intelligence that can flow through you.
Ayana Young Wow, thank you so much. I, I am in awe of your words, and this quenching reign of insight and love that flows through you so freely. It's just so beautiful. You know, my partner and I have been feeling really overwhelmed with figuring out our roles and this planetary journey with no blueprint or no antecedents to the challenges we are facing. So I just want to thank you so deeply and truly for your work. And for this conversation. And for being a stepping stone to help us get across this rough river.
Joanna Macy. Well, I bow to you with gladness. I'm literally doing that.
Ayana Young I'm doing that too.
Joanna Macy. Go well dear heart.