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To honour Joanna Macy, let’s begin to flow with the first phase of the spiral of her work: Gratitude. Take a deep breath, look around, and complete the sentence: “The things I love most about our world are…”
Now we can continue. We are following in the footsteps of an extraordinary woman who lived 96 years on Earth, more than fifty of them as a sacred activist leading a movement inspired by Tibetan Buddhism, Systems Theory and Deep Ecology. Her pioneering and disruptive methodology was named The Work That Reconnects, through which she taught and facilitated workshops for thousands of people. Her work has been replicated by her students and admirers around the world, and it is an invitation to feel gratitude, to honour our pain for the world, to see with new eyes, and to move forward in the present, giving our best.
Joanna’s journey was a deep unfolding of the self in service to the Earth. Her writings, such as Widening Circles and World as Lover, World as Self, are invitations both to awaken to the sacredness that surrounds us, and to recognise the Earth as a lover whose wisdom and beauty have been neglected for far too long.
She reaffirmed over and over the beauty of life, of the Earth that we are, of the challenge we face, and of the miracle that it is for us to be alive here and now, in these urgent and crucial times, where our actions and choices can lead us to the creation of a new world of peace for all – humans and more-than-humans.
She often talked about our pain for the world as a kind of power. “This Earth is waking up now. So you rest in that knowing. And know also that the pain that comes up is just a gateway into which you go into a communion with the living world that is fearless. And that the pain for our world and the love for it are but two sides of the same coin. Don’t let people, therapists or well-meaning friends try to explain it away in terms of your personal biography or that time of the month. It is a measure of your evolution, it is a measure of your humanity, it is a measure of your nobility that you have a heart-mind big enough to see and empathise with the outrage being inflicted on our world and all our relations. Please, feel the ancestors and the future beings. Let them laugh in your ear as well as slap you on the backside and pull you forward because we have great work to do,” she said in one of her talks.
Joanna died peacefully on 19 July 2025 at her home in the United States, surrounded by loved ones. One of the phrases she shared during her last month on Earth was about trees and people on the street that she saw from the hospital window, people she didn’t know. “Here they come, the bodhisattvas*. They don’t know they are bodhisattvas, you know.” She deeply believed in the human heart. She was the kind of person who looked you in the eyes and spoke words that helped you understand your role in the web of life beyond the rational: the energy of her words reached deep into the soul. One afternoon with her, and a person would transform into a lover of our planet. Joanna Amazing.
Rest in peace, beloved.
* A bodhisattva is a being who is on the way to becoming enlightened.
