13 Joanna Macy Fierce Heart-Mind Warrior
OF ALL THE MANY BUDDHIST MUDRAS OR TEACHING gestures, Joanna Macy cherishes two in particular as po¬tent forces for courage and resilience. In one, the right hand is raised at chest level, palm outward, while the left hand is down. This is the abhaya mudra, encouraging us to have no fear, to rest in the calm presence of the bodhisattva. The other is the bhumisparsha or "calling the Earth to witness" mudra. The Buddha used this powerful mudra, touching the Earth with his hand, when Mara challenged him on his last night under the tree of enlightenment. He would not be swept away by doubt; the Earth itself would support his enlightenment and teaching. For Macy, these two mudras lie at the heart of her life work facing the daunting challenges of our ailing planet.' Standing firm, having no fear, she in¬spires courage and spiritual strength. Sitting firm, touching the Earth, she radiates confidence and perseverance in this demanding work.
I first met Joanna Macy in my opening semester at Starr King School for the Ministry in 1988. Though I was a practicing Buddhist, the Uni¬tarian seminary, with its emphasis on social justice and engaged service, offered a welcoming home for faith-based activism. Macy was teaching a class entitled Systems Theory; I was intrigued. What did systems have to do with religion, or activism, for that matter? The course reader was a thick packet of scientific and philosophical papers, an intellectual chal¬lenge for all of us.' Each week we would discuss the key concepts for the first half of class and then, after the break, we would take up the most inventive and surprisingly relevant learning exercises. As a longtime environmental educator, I had a number of teaching tricks up my own sleeve. But Macy's offerings were captivating, different from anything I had experienced before as either teacher or student. They ranged from complex roleplays to guided meditations, from paired exchanges to art and theater. Some clearly drew on familiar Buddhist principles such as the Four Brahmaviharas or limitless mind states; others revealed systems-theory principles in playful demonstrations.' Week after week, we got to be part of this marvelously creative teaching. I quickly be¬came a fan!
To my delight, Macy invited our class to visit her spacious family home with its large living room for communal gatherings. I was some¬what awed by her large scholarly library; her backroom office was thick with bookshelves—she had her own stacks! Macy's antinuclear activism from the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island years was now focused on the impacts of stored radioactive waste. I had grown up in Portland, Oregon, not far from the Hanford nuclear power plant, so I felt a personal connec¬tion to this horrific unsolved problem.
Macy had convened a study group to consider the idea of "nuclear guardianship," a vision that came to her at Greenham Common peace camp in the UK. "In my mind's eye, I saw surveillance communities forming at today's nuclear facilities," she wrote. "These Guardian Sites would be centers of pilgrimage and reflection, where the cemented cores and waste containments would be reliably monitored and repaired. 114 She imagined volunteers trained to "remember" the story of the radioactive remains as they protected them from terrorism and negligence, draw¬ing on the strength of the world's wisdom traditions. The study group reviewed technical reports, spoke to engineers, visited nuclear sites, and put together a traveling slide show on the Nuclear Guardianship Proj¬ect. When Macy offered a weekend retreat focused on this guardianship concept, I jumped at the chance to do deeper work with her. Through fo¬cused meditation and concentrated role play, we took positions as guards and visitors to a nuclear site far in the future. Drawing on all we knew and all we could imagine, we conjured the massive nuclear facility, the elab-orate radiation precautions, the arduous pilgrimage trail. I was stunned by Macy's ability to communicate her vision and guide the group to pro¬found experiences and insights.
Around this same fertile time, Macy traveled to Australia and met rainforest activist John Seed; together they developed another transformative teaching model—the Council of All Beings.5 Macy's inspiration came from the stories of young King Arthur in The Once and Future King by T. H. White, a book she often read with her children. In the passage where Arthur becomes a wild goose, she described how she felt "the huge sky was calling me, and so were my brothers and sisters as they honked in excitement all around me. . . . I loved the stretch of my neck in the sharp air, the power in my shoulders as they found their rhythm, and the wild, free song we sang together."' In the Council of All Beings, everyone listens quietly to be called by a being and to speak for the being at the council. For years Macy spoke as Wild Goose, filling the room with her wild cries of freedom. One evening, she led our class in a Council of All Beings, and I became Night Mouse, alert for signs of danger and adept at finding my way in the dark. To this day I have a special feeling for the cleverness and surefootedness of field mice, silent in their vigilance.
BRIDGING WORLDS
As I grew to know more of Macy's work, she asked if I would like to read her doctoral dissertation on causality in systems theory and Buddhist phi¬losophy. She had completed her degree in 1978 from Syracuse University and was polishing it up for formal publication.' The root of the work stemmed from an experience she had while meditating at a nun's train¬ing center in Dalhousie, India. A vision came to her of an arching stone bridge and she thought, "if only I could be part of that bridge between the thought-worlds of East and West, connecting the insights of the Buddha Dharma with the modern Western mind."' Once back in the US she took graduate classes at George Washington University and did prelimi¬nary research at the Library of Congress, where she exulted in the public reading room, "a luminous sanctuary of the collective mind, timelessly harboring all its thoughts."9
Macy's time at Syracuse was marked by three powerful nonacademic events. Before she had even started classes, her husband Fran had a serious heart attack. She was distraught and felt she should postpone her studies to take care of him. But Fran insisted she go on, that she needed to do this work, it was time. She knew she had to follow her vision. Two years later,
the nun from Dalhousie came for a visit, and Macy took formal vows of refuge with her. This serious step caused some unexpected upheaval as she struggled to integrate the new Buddhist commitment with her Chris¬tian upbringing. Soon after; His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa came to America, and Macy; who had met him eight years earlier, was received in his private quarters. She asked for his blessing on her studies and, to her surprise, he grasped her head in both hands and chanted vigorously over her precious mind. "It was like having my head in an electric socket." 10 She could hardly sleep for the next three weeks, with "each night a tor¬rent of revelation." That is when her entire thesis took shape.
For me, reading Macy's carefully composed thesis was equally head-spinning. I saw how thoroughly she critiqued the shortcomings of West-ern hierarchical thinking. I saw how methodically she constructed the building blocks of knower and known, body and mind, doer and deed, self and society. I saw how, for her, all of this implied moral concern and political engagement, a logical conclusion from close reading of Buddhist and systems-theory texts. To me, her thesis was elegant, comprehensive, a brilliant and original piece of scholarly work. Here in this thesis lay the complete intellectual and spiritual foundations for her despair and empowerment work and for the deep ecology work to come. As I turned page after page, I glimpsed the depth of her mind and its visionary and analytical clarity. It was wondrous to behold.
DEEP ECOLOGY WORK
Timing is everything, and I had the good fortune to be near at hand when Macy made the link between her systems work and the emerg¬ing philosophy of deep ecology. Promulgated by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess and American sociologist Bill Devall, deep ecology offered a radical holistic approach to environmental ethics. Naess developed his ideas from profound experiences of self-realization based on a widening circle of identification with other beings. Macy could see that Naess's experience was parallel to the Buddhist spiritual shift from self-centered¬ness to relational interdependence. It was Macy who promoted the term "ecological self" and reinforced the call to action required by such broad identification. We began brainstorming together with Fran and a group of colleagues to envision a deep ecology training institute that could offer these principles to support activists in their work. Over the next two years, our "birthing committee" formed the Gateway Project, wrote grants, secured funding, hired staff, and developed faculty and curriculum for the first summer institute in 1993.
These were heady, creative times as we crafted this deep ecology ap¬proach to activist training. As far as we knew, no one else was doing any¬thing quite like this. In these early days, before the dominating presence of the internet and cell phones, people could still take two weeks to be together to network and learn. How radical! I was just beginning my academic teaching career in Vermont, but I lived for those summer re¬treats. Macy was experimenting with and upon us, trying out new forms, inventing new meditations, pushing us into challenging mental and emo¬tional spaces. We did walking meditation in the tall redwoods; we tested exercise prototypes on diversity awareness; we imagined journeying with our ancestors back in time. In one extended roleplay of a bioregional council meeting, I was charged with coaching the nonhuman represen¬tatives to the council—soil, water, air, fire. My "people" fully immersed themselves in their roles: water flowed freely in blue scarves, dirt held still and solid, fire leapt and sparked. Though they could not speak in words, they offered powerful responses to the humans' ideas, changing the discourse in the room. Later these enlivened beings found they were so moved by their experiences that it was hard to return to their limited human perspectives.
Every day Macy and her husband led us in the poignant elm dance, a Latvian song for the healing of the trees, offered with prayers for those who had suffered so much after Chernobyl. They shared the powerful story of traveling to Novozybkov, the town most drenched in radioactiv¬ity after the meltdown, where families were devastated by loss. After so many difficult words and feelings, the elm dance brought people together; strengthening their "cultural immune system." Macy promised them she would tell their story at the World Uranium Hearing and everywhere she led the dance, so they would not be alone in their suffering.11 In the second time through the dance, we call out the names of those in need of healing: treasured salmon, tall redwoods, eroded soil, flooded rivers. The dance "helps us remember why we're doing what we're doing," the Australian rainforest activists say.12 Body, mind, song, heart all expressing the interwoven world and our pain and love for it.
Out of this ferment of creativity at the deep ecology institutes came an expanded guidebook for facilitators, Coming Back to Life, coauthored by Molly Young Brown.13 In the foreword, Matthew Fox, author of Original Blessing, described Macy as a "midwife of grace. . . a rare voice in our time who is a prophet speaking out on behalf of those without a voice. . . . She passes on this prophetic voice to others, she draws it out, she coaxes us not to be afraid and not to be in denial." 14Author David Abram wrote in an endorsement for the book: "Joanna Macy is a woman of uncanny cour¬age and ferocious compassion—a bodhisattva ablaze! For twenty years she has been inviting individuals and groups to acknowledge and honor the shadowed darkness of this era, and to walk through the gates of grief into a new joy at their utter interdependence and solidarity with the rest of the earthly cosmos.""
This teacher's guide contains all the core principles of the work: the goals, the methods, the key concepts underlying the exercises—all that is necessary for effective facilitation of the work. Here were important sys¬tems phenomena such as feedback and positive disintegration—how old forms evolve to adapt, to changing conditions, important guidelines such as, "Do your own emotional work first," and important commitments to listen to the group, to respect the process. One could sense the cherished Buddhist mudras coming to life on the page: have no fear, let the Earth be your witness. All of this added up to a very different way of teaching a practice based on learning as a group, building community,
and leading trusting the expression of strong emotion, and believing in the power of guided reflections to bring forth penetrating insight.
FOUNDATIONS OF THE TEACHING
I am hardly alone in my respect for this powerful teaching. Macy has been a spiritual guide and activist mentor for hundreds, if not thousands, of dedicated practitioners around the world. Her content and style of teach¬ing have been replicated in classrooms, community centers, churches, and living rooms in an ever-expanding web of support. Leaders and facil¬itators have been trained personally by Macy in long retreats, and many trainers have gone on to share the principles and techniques with others in their local circles, faith communities, and activist groups. The guide¬books are clear: the work is to be given away; no one owns it. Macy has
consistently eschewed the role of head teacher or spiritual guru; she always felt the work was meant to travel and evolve. For me, this is one of her greatest teaching gifts—the willingness to offer up the work to so many others and to give them the confidence and skills to go forward in this mutually empowering way.
As a teacher myself, and one of those trained in this work, it has been my good fortune to observe and learn from such a gifted guide. I have spent my whole life contemplating and reflecting on what makes a good teacher. 1-have mentored undergraduates, graduate students, and junior faculty in the arts of teaching. I have taught in the field, in the classroom, and in rural retreat centers. I have taught large lecture classes and inti¬mate seminars and given countless guest lectures. I am keenly aware of the many factors that can make or break a good learning experience. To my mind, Macy's teaching is unparalleled in its creativity, commitment, and wide-reaching influence. What is it that makes her gifts as a teacher so effective?
In reviewing her memoir and other reflections, it is obvious that every¬thing begins with her deep concern for the health and stability of the planet. Her own personal depth of grief and need to care have ultimately led the way in her lifework. She has been willing to let her heart break open over and over again with the unmitigated suffering of the planet and its people and beings. This is strong motivation, but alone it would not be enough to sustain a sixty-year career of intensive teaching and travel. Somehow, in spite of overwhelming grief and despair, Macy con¬tinues to face right into the "poison fire" of nuclear waste, the challenge of climate change, the tragic loss of habitat and species, the unraveling of a safe world for beings of the future. What is it that sustains this pow¬erful teacher?
Behind this work I see three central foundations at the root of Macy's teaching. The first is her depth of intellectual understanding of systems theory and Buddhist philosophy, so fully developed in the academic thesis work. Her training in Eastern and Western philosophy and reli¬gious studies was rigorous and thorough, assuring her confidence that her study was well-founded and her insights defensible. Macy's particular postgraduate gift was to apply these systems principles and to see them at work in every possible circumstance. The analytical tools of systems thinking offer profound implications for environmental work, and now, forty years after her thesis, systems theory is widely used in virtually all global biogeophysical modeling research. Macy engages these principles in all of her teaching, well-grounded in her academic study of formative systems thinkers such as Gregory Bateson and Ludwig von Bertalanffy. Her love of systems theory reflects her love of mind and its great capaci¬ties, and this joy informs her teaching at the core.
At one time, Macy assumed she would take up the academic life as a professor, teaching and writing about world religions in a university setting. That would have been the natural trajectory after completion of a PhD degree. But her life as a student of the Buddha Dharma was also developing alongside her academic life. For her, the dharma of emp¬tiness and the teachings of Indra's net and Vipassana analytics were as compelling as systems theory. This is the second foundation at the root of her teaching. She studied original Pali and Mahayana texts for her thesis and drew on these in her own meditation practice. Though she was ordained in a Tibetan Buddhist lineage and trained in Vipassana medita¬tion practice, it was the Perfection of Wisdom text, the Prajna Paramita emphasized in Zen, that most aligned with her systems understanding. And it was the grand openness in this wisdom text that allowed her to include her own Christian upbringing, as well as her understanding of other great religious traditions, in her emerging work. This com¬bination of intellectual and practice understanding would define Macy as a scholar-practitioner, a practice-informed intellectual leader among modern Buddhist thinkers. "Not that it's been easy," she wrote. "It's not easy to walk a path that hasn't been cleared for you ahead of time.""
These two foundations for Macy's approach as a teacher provide a level of depth and authority that most students never see. Complement¬ing these is a third foundation: a commitment to experiential knowing with a secure depth of trust in her own personal insights and revelations. Strong visions have guided her life toward graduate study, toward nuclear guardianship, toward deep ecology work. Her work has been shaped by a formidable sense of call and response, of listening to what is arising deep in the heart, with sharp clarity in the mind. For her, it is all one embodied experience of heart-mind-cosmos speaking. Macy has cultivated a life¬time of willingness to be open to what is calling to her, and she is able to invite others to trust such calls of the heart. These experiences reinforce a confidence in "emergence," a known property of systems indicating that more will emerge from what is at play, that paying attention to what is emerging is a way to be guided in doing this work. "So we wait; even in our work, we wait," she explains. "Only out of that open expec-tancy can images and visions arise that strike deep enough to summon faith in them."17
Drawing on these foundations—the systems work, the Buddha Dharma, and the power of experiential knowing—Macy and colleagues have fash¬ioned a significant suite of transformative learning exercises. Ritual, guided meditation, paired conversations, community consulting—the elements of this curriculum are packaged in skillful sequences designed to lead to breakthroughs. The guidebooks explain how to encourage max¬imum participation and engagement, how to be with difficult passages in group experience, how to signal process milestones, how to attend to what is arising in whatever unexpected form. As this work developed, Macy was haunted by the possibility that hope was irrelevant: "I had al¬ways assumed that a sanguine confidence in the future was as essential as oxygen. Without it, I had thought, one would collapse into apathy and nihilism."" Yet her own work in systems thinking and Buddhist practice gave her the unassailable answer: that possibilities are endless and con¬stantly emerging. There is no need to depend on hope; the whole uni¬verse is continually offering up new directions for the flow of life.
The culmination of these foundations in her teaching and the foun¬tain of collaborative creativity across Macy's lifetime has now taken the form of what she calls "the Work that Reconnects." She sees this as a regenerating spiral, "a source of strength and fresh insights. It reminds us that we are larger, stronger, deeper, and more creative than we have been brought up to believe." 19 The journey of empowerment travels through four movements: Coming from Gratitude, Honoring Our Pain for the World, Seeing with New Eyes, and Going Forth. Acknowledging grat¬itude grounds the work in appreciation for the wonder of being alive in the world, for loving what is important to us and feeling its true value. This naturally opens a floodgate of pain for the very fragility of all that we love. Through the skillful medicine of the work that reconnects, we perceive with new insight the wealth of resources available in the cosmic web of life, and this spurs us forward to be active agents in the web.
Much has been written about the despair and empowerment work, the deep ecology work, and the work that reconnects. Macy herself has left a treasure of commentary on her teaching methods and principles. In her own words: Even after all these years in doing the work, I am continually sur¬prised by the grandeur of the human heart. Ever again, walking into a room of people to share this work. . . I am awestruck to discover their caring for the world. . . . I am moved, ever again, by their read¬iness to face the bad news. . . . I am humbled by their grief and rage, and by the courage and creativity that is unleashed. The changes they go on to make in their lives, and the actions they go on to take in their communities, teach me. These changes are so real and bold, they challenge me to take seriously the very premises of the work itself.2°
It has been my great honor to know and work with Joanna Macy across the past thirty years and to be challenged to transmit this work to stu¬dents and colleagues. In my mind's eye, I see her in the open meadow at Shenoa Retreat Center, surrounded bytrees, a fierce bodhisattva warrior for the Earth. She stands firm, touching the Earth as witness, her open heart and shining mind fearless in this call to care for the Earth. For me and thousands of others, she is a beacon of courage and compassion in difficult times. Always I see her smiling face radiant with love
