Just keep going, no feeling is final
Stories from my at-home vigil for my mentor, Joanna Macy
Listen to me read this post to you here:
As I'm writing this to you, our dear Joanna Macy is still with us, though we are growing ever closer to the end of this precious weeks-long hospice chapter. Her daughter Peggy and beloved friend Anne have been sharing generous, poetic dispatches from her bedside that you can tune into here.
In this last week I've started and stopped writing a dozen different stories that I thought I might share with you, but none seem like they want to complete themselves—it somehow feels very fitting for this liminal chapter where I'm brimming with so much feeling.
Each day, I might swing from wide-eyed psychedelic awe at the amazing gift of life, and of Joanna, to heaving sobs on whatever spot of floor I happened to be standing on when the grief-wave arrives.
Any time I think "surely this is the limit of how much I can feel," something in me makes space for more feeling to exist. I like to imagine that it's Joanna making that room in me, reciting her beloved Rilke’s words:
“You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. […]
Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror.
Just keep going, no feeling is final”
So, here are a few incomplete stories from the gorgeous, achy, labyrinthine lands of grief and praise that I'm building a new intimacy with these days:
Despair and Empowerment in the Nuclear Age
I just learned that today, July 16th, is the 80th anniversary of the first successful atomic bomb test in the New Mexico desert.
As I learn this, I'm transported back to the little movie theater in Joanna's neighborhood, where a few friends and I took her to see the film Oppenheimer.
I can feel her squeezing my hand and leaning into me, eyes wide and full of awe and tears as we watched that incredible scene at the end of the film when it finally happens—the bomb goes off. I remember how that scene felt like it went on forever—all fire and light and deafening booms and eerie prolonged silence. I remember how viscerally she seemed to experience it all, and how amazing it was to watch her let this scene in, realizing that she was 16 on that day, July 16, 1945.
I remember her telling us over the Chinese takeout we brought to her kitchen table after the film, about what that day was like for her: she was on her grandparents' farm in upstate New York when she learned that an atomic bomb had gone off in the desert. She'd never heard of an atomic bomb; it didn't mean much of anything yet, but she said she knew somehow that this news would change the world profoundly.
In the decades to come, Joanna would become deeply impassioned by the spiritual questions of the Nuclear Age. She would pour herself into Nuclear Guardianship work and write a book "Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age", described as "47 exercises for dealing with feelings of despair, isolation, and powerlessness associated with the growing threat of nuclear war, progressive destruction of the environment, and unprecedented human misery". This book would become one of the first offerings of what we now call The Work That Reconnects.
You can hear me and Joanna talk about her Nuclear Guardianship work in episode 7 of our podcast, We Are The Great Turning, "We Are A Part of a River of Time".
Use it all in service of the Great Turning
Last year, when I started getting attention for the We Are The Great Turning podcast that we made, I would get caught in these big waves of imposter syndrome. I'd get love from people about what we created and part of me would recoil, crumble. I didn't know how to let it in. It frightened me.
When I talked to Joanna about it, she said something I'll never forget:
"Honey, your only job is to take all of the power or influence that folks might want to give you and use it in service of the Great Turning."
Joanna occasionally had a "zen stick" way of teaching me—in this moment she was saying just cut it out, Jess. Be big because you are. Don't be more interested in whatever these worries are than you are in offering yourself to our world.
She was helping me remember that it's not about me, and I think this is a great reminder for all of us. How often do we ignore or give away the abundance of love, support and resource available to us because we're afraid of it?
The whole great web of life is conspiring for us to be successful in our work for the Great Turning. This time, when our precious world is in so much need, is no time for us to negate any of the gifts life is giving us… that itch that we feel to do something useful is the web of life speaking through us.
Joanna invites us to say YES to this great glorious ecological conspiracy and use it all.
It makes me think of her instructions from a Work That Reconnects practice called "Callings and Resources":
What resources do you already have to help you make the contribution you long to make? Think in terms of both inner and outer resources. Inner resources might be things like talents and strengths of character, knowledge and skills. External resources might be things like community, specific relationships, institutions, money in the bank and so on… And don't be modest here, we tend to totally underestimate what we have to work with, so be brave and take a fearless inventory of all of the resources that you have access to!
How can we each take "fearless inventory" of the wide web of resource available to us and use it all in service of the Great Turning?
Go Tell the Bees
In many cultures, including Joanna's ancestral British culture, it's a practice to "tell the bees" when someone in the family of the bee-tender is dying. So on Saturday, I walked out to the beehive in my yard to tell them about Joanna when one of them stung me right in the middle of the chest before I could even sit down.
It was clear as day "pay attention!" and I knew immediately that something was wrong. A few days later I confirmed that the bien (colony) of honeybees I've been tending is suffering mightily from something it's not clear I can save them from1.
The potential of this loss is devastating to me… I have been wildly in love with this hive (my first) and I have talked to Joanna for long stretches about them, marveling together at who the honeybees are… it adds so much gravity to this liminal chapter with Joanna to also be sitting in the not-knowing of whether my hive will also die soon.
As I struggle with this uncertainty, I'm also thinking about how bees have long been understood to be "psychopomps"—entities that guide souls between the living world and the afterlife. In folklore from around the world, bees show up to steward our souls through both birth and death.
— So perhaps these bees are leaving me to carry Joanna across to the other side…
— Perhaps I'm meant to hospice my hive while Joanna is being hospiced just up the road.
They are certainly already nudging me along the road of grief… Joanna's absence is made more real to me every time I see the dwindling number of bees buzzing around my yard.
In the days since that sting and startling realization, my mind has traveled back to a moment from episode 8 of We Are The Great Turning, “Eros and Thanatos” when Joanna said to me:
If the end is coming for what we call planet Earth, if I even were to think that the end is coming, I want to know, I want to know as much as I can what it's like to be this planet, or to be an apple tree in an orchard, or a rotten apple on the ground that the pickers missed.
To me, this is Joanna beckoning me to stay with all of it — the painful uncertainty of when her last breath will come and the heartbreaking mystery of whether I'm about to lose my hive — every time I catch myself wanting to reach for a distraction to escape the discomfort of it all, I return to Joanna's invitation:
All of this is so damn precious, how could I miss a second of it?
I'm so glad you're here.
In the week since my last letter, Saying Goodbye to our beloved Joanna Macy, over 400 of you have joined this newsletter, with a dozen of you joining as paid subscribers.
I'm deeply honored that you've chosen to join me here. Thank you.
It's been such a gift to engage with so many of you and to learn about your lives and hear your stories about Joanna and the podcast… please keep them coming. I love hearing from you.
For the now 25+ paid subscribers to We Are The Great Turning, I want to offer my deep gratitude for your generosity and desire to help sustain this writing and this work.
Paid subscribers are invited to a monthly Community Coaching Call, and our July call will be on 7/29. The registration link is below the paywall.
What a wild and stunning gift it is to be in this Great Turning with you,
