Saying goodbye to our beloved Joanna Macy
My dear friend and teacher is in hospice.
I’ve never taken a breath in a world in which Joanna Macy was not also breathing.
Probably neither have you. Soon, we will have to.
Joanna is now being hospiced at her home in Berkeley and so now, we say goodbye (in this physical form at least) to our dear Joanna.
Over a week ago now, my beloved friend and I said our final in-these-bodies goodbye.
She reached up for my shirt and gently pulled my face right next to hers to say “I love you”.
I dripped tears all over her blanket while she said to me “We have to do something about Trump”. She’s right of course, but I hated having his name spoken into such a sacred moment.
She smiled at me, her bright blue eye beaming and she shimmied her shoulders and waved her arms in the air to the Samba music her daughter played.
We kissed each other on the forehead, again and again, forestalling the moment when I would walk out the door. It was hard and it was perfect.
Even now, she continues to teach me. I honestly didn’t know it was possible to die so beautifully.
Since that goodbye I’ve been walking through the world with half my spirit at her bedside. I do not want her to go though she’s been preparing me for this for years.
“It’s like you’re preparing my shroud” she said to me as we made We Are The Great Turning, the podcast that would be her final project. “I'm facing my gone-ness to come. And I like being me, and that being me will disappear under my feet and I will disappear. And what will be left? What will be left is my love. But how can it be given if I'm not here? Well, I will be here in what we're making”.
In these precious days, where I wake up in the morning and still can sense her slowly breathing, in the quiet of her home half a mile up the street I’ve been sitting with the overwhelming privilege that it is to have done this with her. Still, my eyes widen and my jaw drops when I reflect on the gift it was to sit with her, microphones on, all those days, so that we could eventually invite you to the table with us in those episodes.
What will life be like now that I can no longer go to Joanna’s house, put on a kettle for tea and talk about the heartbreaks and beauty of our lives and our world?
Soon she will be our ancestor and all of us can try making a cup of tea, and sitting quietly at the table and inviting her to speak with us. I will have to learn to get better at this kind of quiet and I hope that you will now invite her to your table with you.
How will I let her memory bring me ever deeper into my own life, so that I too live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world… How will I let her brilliance and beauty brighten the ways I live and love our world?
This week it’s meant sobbing into the earth and letting myself call to her “I don’t want you go”.
It’s meant building an altar and french braiding the long grasses in a meditative offering- busy hands always soothe my heart when it hurts.
It’s meant telling my favorite Joanna stories to anyone who will listen, shaking my ass extra hard when a good beat comes on and noticing the thousand-shades-of-green of the forest with more regularity.
This liminal moment where Joanna occupies the space between life and death is so sacred. While the tension of the in-between is full of ache and fear of what life will life be like after her final breath, I’m savoring it. Just as Joanna would.
In that final visit, i said to her “I know you already know this, but I’m going to spend the rest of my life carrying you and your work as far into the world as I am able.”… so I’m also spending time pondering what that might look like. What is the Jess-shaped way of carrying the exquisite gifts Joanna has given us out to the world?
How will you carry what she’s given you?
In the Work That Reconnects, we have a practice called open sentences. I’ll start the sentence, you finish it...
If you leave a comment or DM with your responses, I’ll share them anonymously in the next newsletter. I hope you’ll join me in celebrating her:
When I think of Joanna, what I feel is…
Gifts that Joanna’s life and teachings have given me are…
I long to carry the gifts Joanna has given me out into our aching world by…
A few days a friend texted me a Jewish blessing “Zichrona l'vracha”— may her memory be a revolution — I have no doubt it will be.
I want to bring this work to your community
I can’t think of a better way to celebrate Joanna than sharing her work with you in person. I’ve got visions of traveling to collaborate with groups who are building the great turning together, carrying what she’s taught me, offering my gifts, co-creating some magic together.
In September I’ll be in Europe and I would love to bring my “Jess-shaped flavor” of the Work That Reconnects to your community… let’s make it happen together. Drop me a line and we’ll find a time to explore together soon.
For folks in the US (or elsewhere in the world!), same invitation, but we’d be booking for later in the year.
How do we bravely offer our own gifts in these heartbreaking times?
We’re building the Soulful Climate Leadership Circle around Joanna’s favorite poet, Ranier Maria Rilke’s quote “Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart, and learn to love the questions themselves…live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Join this community that is exploring how we might live with our hearts in tact in these wild times
Let this Darkness be a Belltower
This Rilke poem, which she translated with her dear friend Anita Barrows has been making the rounds this week, for good reason. Listen to her read it here.
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. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such 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 has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am.
Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29
With love, grief and wild celebration of our beloved Joanna’s life,
When I think of Joanna, I feel deep gratitude for her life and all she has shared with us. I am a mere 15 years younger than she is now and will spend the rest of my life learning from her.