What Joanna Macy Taught Me About Facing Eco-Grief

Joanna Macy—the Buddhist visionary who helped thousands of us learn to navigate eco-grief—died on July 19 at her home in Berkeley, California. Given the scale of her influence, the first thing that came to mind for me, after hearing about her passing, was surprisingly small: a brief congratulatory note she sent after I shared a photo of my newborn daughter.

“Oh praise be! Lila is exquisite. Your life is changed forever.”

In just a few words she met me fully in my joy while also expressing the qualities that first drew me to her work: a reverence for life, an attunement to beauty, and the promise of transformation. 

By the time I discovered the Buddhist activist, in my 20s, Macy had already been transforming lives for decades. Starting in the 1970s, Macy began leading workshops to help people confront the fear of nuclear annihilation and environmental collapse. Over time, these evolved into the teachings that Macy is best known for: The Work That Reconnects, a four-step process designed to help people transform despair into meaningful action. Counterintuitively, it begins not with problem-solving but with “coming from gratitude.” 

“As our situation grows more perilous, it becomes ever easier to just shut down,” she once told me. “So to counteract that, we get in touch with our basic gladness to be alive.” Macy found that gratitude could help us become psychologically sturdy enough to “honor our pain for the world.” 

Not only does gratitude prepare us for pain, Macy taught, but the two seemingly opposite feelings are intimately intertwined. You despair because you care; it’s a natural response to a troubled world. At the time, the idea that my eco-grief was rooted in my love of life was revelatory. Not only were my feelings valid, according to Macy, but by facing them, I could tap into the power that we need to heal the planet. 

You despair because you care; it’s a natural response to a troubled world.

In 2012, to investigate this possibility, I attended a short workshop Macy was leading at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was here that I started to see Macy’s framework as the map in my own quest for sanity during what scientists now call the sixth extinction. The workshop offered me a clear sense of direction while remaining nonprescriptive. It felt empowering, because we were encouraged to trust our own intuition and wisdom. Most importantly, it struck me as honest: It didn’t require hope based on optimism. We acknowledged our collective uncertainty about the future and focused on our intention to act anyway. 

In one role-playing exercise that we did in pairs, we imagined what it would feel like to eliminate uncertainty about the future. One person would speak as themselves, someone alive today working on behalf of the world. The other would speak as a person from seven generations in the future, the implication being that we had made it through our current challenges. As a future being, I expected to express gratitude to my partner for their role in creating a livable planet. Instead, I found myself saying things that surprised and energized me. “What an exciting time to be alive!” I blurted to my partner, suddenly feeling not only grateful but also a little jealous. As painful as our current moment might seem, I could now see that it also held the possibility of creativity and purpose. “I wish I could have been there with you,” I said. 

One of Macy’s greatest gifts was integration. In her workshops, Macy would interweave lessons from Buddhism, deep ecology, and systems theory, among other sources. The role-playing exercise, for example, was inspired by the Indigenous traditions of the Haudenosaunee. The German-language poet Rainer Maria Rilke is yet another major influence on her work. If something struck her as true, Macy could fit it into her vision. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that as she incorporated new influences, her vision grew larger.

Fittingly, Macy titled her memoir after Rilke’s poem “Widening Circles.” Here it is in her own translation: 

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

For Macy, not-knowing wasn’t an admission of ignorance but an invitation into possibility. And even if by conventional standards the circles of her life couldn’t go much wider—her teaching and activism took her around the world—Macy never strayed from her mystical and poetic impulses, and she imagined herself going further yet. 

“You can learn to draw the circle of the self so wide that the body of earth becomes your larger body,” she told me after the workshop. “With the rivers as your veins, the rainforests your lungs.”

Macy was right, of course, about my daughter changing my life. My children are now the future beings who say unexpected things. “When you were little, was I the dad?” Lila asked me recently. She’s way ahead of me when it comes to widening the self. And while I’ve always cared deeply about the future of life on earth, now that feeling is a lump in my throat. In addition to anticipatory grief, however, now I also feel relief because I can give my kids a map for navigating this beautiful, uncertain world. For this gift, future beings and I can thank Joanna Macy, who also changed my life forever.

♦

The hero image for this article originally appeared on a interview piece with Macy published on Mindfulness Bell.