The One You Feed - Joanna Macy on Work That Reconnects

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

Joanna Macy is an environmental activist, author, a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology. She has written and co-authored many books, including translating much of Rilke���s workEric and Joanna discuss her translations of Rilke along with her important “Work That Reconnects”.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!Joanna Macy and I Discuss her Work That Reconnects and…Her book translation, Letters to a Young Poet by RilkeThe joy she experienced translating the work of Rilke with her coauthor Anita BarrowsHaving patience, curiosity and learning "to live the questions now" Asking ourselves how can we trust and be trustedHer important work called "The Work That Reconnects"Her three visions of living"Business as Usual" refers to the growth economy and capitalism"The Great Unraveling" refers to the world losing its coherence"The Great Turning" is the slowing down the destruction of the world and building new ways of doing thingsHer important activist workKnowing what we can control, but still caring about what we can't controlHow this work is a "celebration of the awareness of the great reciprocity at the heart of the universe"Joanna Macy Links:Joanna’s WebsiteWork That ReconnectsWhen you purchase products and/or services from the sponsors of this episode, you help support The One You Feed. Your support is greatly appreciated, thank you!If you enjoyed this conversation with Joanna Macy you might also enjoy these other episodes:Curiosity and Activism with Sophia BushThe Questioning Mind with Stephen MitchellSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How can we build trust in each other and in ourselves? When we ask ourselves that question, the question itself helps. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. We'll see you next time. wolf. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden. And together our mission on the Really No Really

podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor what's in the museum of failure and does your dog truly love you we have the answer go to really know really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead the really know really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandy B, as we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. That's right. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated

narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, we share our personal journeys navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engage in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that will resonate with your experiences, Decisions Decisions is going to be your go-to source for the open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships

and embrace the freedom of authentic connections. Tune in and join the conversation. Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Joanna Macy, an environmental activist, author, and scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology. She has too many accomplishments for me to even begin to go into, but she is the author of 12 books, and Eric and Joanna cover many topics in this great interview. too many accomplishments for me to even begin to go into, but she is the author of 12 books,

and Eric and Joanna cover many topics in this great interview. Hi, Joanna. Welcome to the show. I'm glad to be here. It is such an honor to have you on. I was joking with you beforehand. You were asking me, you know, about the people who come on the show, and I said, well, the people who come on the show are the sort of people who quote Joanna Macy all the time. In reading for about eight years for this podcast, and I read every guest's book, and so I've read a lot of books, you are in the top five most quoted people, I think, in all these books. You, the Dalai Lama, and Ian McGilchrist, and there's a couple others, but you're way, way up there in both ecological and

spiritual circles. So it's a real honor to have you on. Well, Eric, I'm so happy to meet you. Thank you. It's nice that I can see your face, which our listeners can't, but you look very accessible. The fact that you actually wanted to talk about a real guy and his letters or any other part of this poet who has accompanied me through my life makes my heart open. Yeah. You know, I had wanted to talk to you for years based on the work you've done around systems thinking and Buddhism and deep ecology and all that. And then when I saw that you recently had put out a new translation of perhaps my favorite book of all time, Letters to a Young Poet, I was like,

that does it. I have got to talk to her. So here we are. And before we get into all that, let's start like we always do with a parable. There is a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second and she looks up at her grandmother. She says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Oh, yeah. Well, it's right at the top of my important notions, because what we're facing now

with climate change or climate catastrophe and systems of war, weapons and war making, and the preparations for that that seem to be accelerating, that we have to really look at how has this come about? You know, what have we been doing? So whatever is inside of us that we're trying to satisfy seems to have to do with power over others, possessiveness, greed, having just what we want, and not worrying about its effect on other people, etc. And that's what so many of us are trying to do right now is to give us choice. That's what's great, to give choice to people

and say, you can continue the way you've been rolling along or you can notice what's happening and see what you want to happen and what you need to do to express. And express what? That part of you that loves life. That part of you that is grateful for the gift of life. So let's start by talking about Rilke. When did your interest in Rilke start?

Because you recently, again, a new translation of Letters to a Young Poet, but I believe you've translated or co-translated many before this. Where did that interest start? This was the first book of prose. But in writing it, the Letters to a Young Poet, while it was less fun for us in terms of the task than poetry, because he was writing in a hurry, as we'll talk about it. So it wasn't like each sentence crafted like a necklace of jewels, you know,

which were what it is with poems. And it made it so precious to say how to translate it. Here he was writing at a great clip to a person he didn't know. And he was traveling often, as almost every letter was written from a new place. And to someone he didn't know, a young cadet, even younger than he, he was 27, and the military cadet was 19. But he'd written some poems, and he wondered whether he was in the right occupation.

Maybe he should be a poet instead of an Army officer. And so Wilka did have a book that had just been published, and he'd been reading it, and he was encouraged to write it out of the blue and send him some of his poems and ask for advice, which was a little nervy now that you think about it, but nobody had ever asked it. Wilke himself was only 27, and he hadn't been asked for this, and he was also extremely sympathique and sympathetic to people. And the artist, here's somebody in the army who wants to

be a poet, and he wants me to give him some critical comments about how to succeed. And I can't do it. And starts right out saying that. Don't believe other people who are giving you advice about your writing. And so he said, I cannot advise you about your writing. But what he then proceeded to do, perhaps without meaning to it, was just his art opening, was sharing views about how to live a life. And that's what's caught the attention of people over a century. Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting because it's possible, and you would know this better than I do, and maybe this is just here in the U.S. that this

is the case, but it seems to me that letters to a young poet, at least in the U.S., would have outsold all of Rilke's other works of poetry. Is that accurate? I believe so. Yeah. It's been by far the most popular. And yes, this totally astonishes me. But then, you know, for moments, of an impression it's've done with your life. And I can tell instantly that you're someone with an open heart and a lot of energy and love for life. And so what you take seriously must have been a pretty good medicine you've been drinking. Yeah, well, I've had lots of good medicine to drink for sure. Rilke has been a part of it. Buddhism has been part of it. So many different things. 12-step recovery has been a part of it. Buddhism has been part of it. So many

different things. 12-step recovery has been a part of it. Yeah, I've been fortunate. Yeah. And that's why you're so believable to people. So tell me what made you at this stage in your life decide that we needed a new translation of letters to a young poet? It was because my co-translator and I, Anita Barrows, so loved hanging out with Rilke. It was genuinely, truly, I'm telling you, Eric, translating Rilke was the most fun either of us had. Rilke was the most fun either of us had. It was just totally engrossing. And we come to believe that for translation, it really is a huge asset to do it together, to do it dialogically, and not to just be sitting there listening to the inside of your own head.

So we would start, whether it was a poem or a letter, reading it in the German and then listening to it, and that's particularly important with the poetry, of course, and then working it into English so that it kept some of the feel of it, the personality that comes through, to sort of keep that. Because we're going back and forth and listening rather than sitting with a piece of paper and jotting notes. And with lots of energy and laughter in it because you're doing it with another person that you love to

work with. Now, do you speak German? Yeah. Okay. That's where I found him. I'm not German, nor don't have that ancestry, but I was living in my 20s with my young family in Munich. And right after the birth of my second son, and I was over at the university where I loved to hang out. And I walked into a bookstore on a snowy morning, stomping the snow off my feet, because we were right up against the Alps there. because we're right up against the Alps there. And there on this bookstore was a little table with all just one book on it, several copies. And I walked in and picked it up and opened it and read a little short poem.

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. And that right then and there just went. I had thought my journey, my spiritual journey in life, had been a linear, that it had been toward the golden city or toward the heavenly gates. And it had been such a hodgepodge of trying this and trying that and doing this and doing that, that I had thought that I was hardly on a spiritual path.

And that saddened me a little bit. on a spiritual path, and that saddened me a little bit. And suddenly I thought, oh, wait a minute. I've been doing that. That's the way it's felt. And then the second and last verse that I read was in that same little second poem. I've been circling around God, that primordial tower. I've been circling for thousands of years, and still I don't know.

Am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song? That was enough to grab hold of my heart for the rest of my life. Yeah, those are pretty remarkable verses. I loved these poems so much, and they had come to him, interestingly, by, there's a word for this, almost like divine dictation. When he picked up a pen and it would just pour out, never changed it, never changed a word. Wow. This was for the Book of Hours and for the sonnets to Orpheus toward the end of his life.

Same thing. And never pausing. Well, I might put it another way. Just as if God or some great angelic presence was whispering in his ear, or the mountains and rivers themselves were whispering in his ear. Yeah. So I was reading them in German, and the thing is that they were all rhyming.

And in German, it's very beautiful to do this. Das hat er geschliegen, das hat er befliegen, und das hat er bewohnt. The German with the verbs at the end in the past tense, it makes it very lovely. And I would try to do that in English. And it made them sound sing-song to put things in meter and rhyme. And so I gave up

because I thought, oh, this really sounds tacky. But when I met Anita Barrows about 30 years ago here in California, and she's a poet and a psychotherapist, and she's a published poet. But she said, you know, it's been pointed out, and the great poet Denise Levertov pointed this out, that in a world, in the modern age where there's so much change and anxiety loose, that so much Change and anxiety loose that so much questioning, deep questioning. Don't try to write in rhyme and meter. A rhyme and meter make things sound too sure, you know? Kind of eyed up as if you already know where you're heading.

But we don't know where we're heading. And so then we tried some. And then it came. It just, two things happened. We were talking them into existence, and we were forgetting about the rhyme and meter. You'll be interested in this. The first poem we picked of the book of Hours was one that I asked another translator, Stephen Mitchell. I gone to him and said, there's a poem in the Book of Hours I'm dying to give my American friends who are activists. They need this poem. Anybody who's an activist in the 21st century, needs this poem. And he said, no, I don't do it.

Do it yourself. Okay. So that's what we did first. And then I'll just tell you the first two lines, and then you'll know why I wanted that. I said, Ich bewundere nicht, der Sturm ist wucht. You're not surprised at the force of the storm.

You have seen it coming. The trees flee. Their flight sets the boulevard streaming. And just this sense of things falling apart. Yeah. So Stephen Mitchell told you then that he did not translate poems? No, no. He was a translator.

He's got a book on Rilke. But he hadn't done this poem, and he said he wasn't doing any more. I see. Yeah. It's his translation of letters to a young poet and his translation of Tao Te Ching that I have loved so much over the years. That's wonderful. Does he know that? He does. He does. I was fortunate enough to get to talk to him once for this show,

and he does know that. So do you have any particular parts of Letters to a Young Poet that speak to you most in your life right now? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. One that I have loved is, let me see if I can remember where he was when he wrote that, but he talks about God. He's cheering up the young cadet who apparently you never get the letters that the military cadet wrote back. But it does sound as if he's complaining a lot and that he has a little sorry for himself because

continuously Rilke is kind of booing him up. He's apparently been saying, but I've even, not only have I been a failure, but I've lost God. And so this is a letter where Rilke says, now, wait a minute. How can you lose God? God's not like a little coin or pebble in your pocket that you can lose. And then he goes with a flight of fancy where Rilke says that maybe God is growing along with you and along with all of us, and maybe he's not complete now, but matures and ripens along with the ripening of our life,

of our life and that we're building God by the choices we make, that he is coming into being through our needs and our adventures. Yeah, I love that section of the book also. I think it's a beautiful idea. I think he goes on to sort of say in that section, I think he talks about something like you could only lose him like a little stone. That's right. Yeah. And I think he says the final fruit of a tree whose leaves we are, I think is another description that's used. Yeah. It is.

Yeah. It is. Well, that's also the kind of holy or divine patience and curiosity even that he seems to encourage us to develop. Like that great phrase that one can never tire of, which is to live the questions now. Yeah. which is to live the questions now. Yeah. And that also advises patience, doesn't it? And to hang in there and let something.

And that's another verb, Eric, that he loves. He uses the verb ripen. We can ripen. We can ripen. Questions can ripen. Relationships can ripen. And that from the natural world, which he found to be such an unfailing source of inspiration for himself. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts?

His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all.

Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC.

Amanda Mull, who writes our Business Week buying power column. Very few companies who go viral are like totally prepared for what that means. And Zoe Tillman, senior legal reporter. Courts are not supposed to decide elections. Courts are not really supposed to play a big role in choosing our elected leaders. It's for the voters to decide. Follow the Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Another word that I think runs through that book a lot is trust he's always going on about trusting

trusting in the difficult you know like you said i think to give something time to ripen is to trust it you know you trust it will come along i think that that is practically the stance, the posture, the activity that we most need right now as we're facing so much hardship, fear, inexplicably challenging, falling away of what we used to be able to have faith in. And whether it's our government or our notions of God and his angels. Do you have any German, Eric? I don't. I should, given a lot of my ancestry is German, but I do not speak it. Well, you will love this. Just the trust. Trust is Vertrauen.

Vertrauen. Because trauen is the word that's linked to truth. It's sort of hanging on to a confidence that there's truth. It's truth in being patiently and faithfully with something. This has been very much in my mind. It's interesting that you mention it because I'm thinking of the young people now, looking at a lifetime that's so challenged right now with what's falling apart and with what the climate is doing and what science is saying.

And how can we build trust in each other and in ourselves? And when we ask ourselves that question, the question itself helps. I want to be trustworthy, trust myself. And how hard that must feel when you look at what's happening around us, both with the falling away of the natural world, but also what's happening in our human culture. what's happening in our human culture. We're not acting very trustworthy when we're starting to badmouth other world leaders as if you're trying to build toward hostilities and create incredible.

You know, when you think of that defense budget we just passed, You know, when you think of that defense budget we just passed, over three-quarters of a trillion when people are hungry. And it sounds like, what are we preparing to mount on ourselves now? So I gave a talk just a couple days ago at the Zen Center, and I found myself saying how wonderful it is to be thinking of doing what you can trust. How can you make yourself trustworthy to yourself? How can you begin to trust yourself? And it's sweet because there's an awful lot of counsel that we can find on that, you know, a lot of guidance there. Yeah, well, Zen talks about the three indispensables, you know, great faith or slash great trust, great doubt, great determination.

And all three of those, you know, which I find the great faith slash great trust to be the hardest of those three determination i do all right with doubt yeah i got that one down right yeah that's a beautiful question because again and again while rilke in these letters to the young poet, while he speaks of vertrauen, of trusting, he again and again says, go into the natural world. Get close to nature. Inhale it, be with it, gaze upon it, let it speak to you.

Look at the little things, how the grass grows, I guess, or mushrooms grow, or the trees drink the rain, which they're doing right now here in Berkeley. We're having rain. Good, good. Oh, it is. It's like we're all standing in this look of shock and stunned and yes, and even felt thrown on our faces.

reconnects. And it's really about, you know, how do we reconnect to ourselves and to the world and reconnect to feeling, really feeling the world? Yeah, we didn't know what to call it. We had all different names for the events we would, our intensives or what, but it was when we were doing the last manual on it, which actually was 20 years ago. My co-author and I, we said, well, we need a generic name for this. And my husband was alive then and he loved the work and he spent a lot of his then, and who, he loved the work, and he spent a lot of his life in focus on Russia and the former Soviet Union. And he took it there, too. He said, what are you doing? And I said, well, everything's fine. We're wrapping up the book. That's the book, by the way, that's called Coming Back to Life. A defined term for the work itself, sort of just a definition of it. And he said, well, what does it do? Okay, I said, come on, you know it as well as I do. You know, it connects the mind

with the heart. It connects the reason with hands. It connects the inner with the political. And he went on, he looked and he said, well, I guess it sounds like it's a work that reconnects. And I said, well, yes, but that is such a clunky word. Never. Work that reconnects. And then we thought, well, you know, nobody could ever misrepresent it. So that's what we got. Well, I like the description there.

And there's so much in this that we're not going to have time for. But I wanted to make sure to get to at least the most commonly held stories that we tell about the world. You say story is our vision of reality, the lens through which we see and understand what is happening now in the world. And you talk about three sort of dominant ways we could view what's happening right now. Could you walk us through those three? Yeah. Well, when we wrote that book, these stories were, and particularly that became a little more clearer in a very popular book about the work called Active Hope. And the first is business as usual. And by that, we really mean the growth economy, industrial growth society. And we tended to use that.

It's the same thing as capitalism, but there are very powerful nations and economies that wouldn't want to call themselves capitalists, but they're competing with capitalism and have the same effect on the living body of Earth and other species and us. And it's terrifying because it has an addictive grip on us, that it's entered into our psyche in the way that to sense restlessness, that we have to succeed. We have to keep growing. We have to do more. It has to be more. We have to make more. We have to grow. If we aren't growing

something, then it's no good. And it is this that is turning the species, other species, and the natural world into money, the earth itself. And it's terrifying because we have built such powerful instruments and organizations that enshrine this addiction to grow. So that's business as usual. But what it does to the world now and what we're seeing, the story, we use the phrase we got from David Corton called the great unraveling. I like that phrase because that's what systems do, ecosystems, political systems, human systems, biosystems. They don't fall over dead. They begin to unravel.

They begin to lose their coherence, to lose their memory. And then the third story is the great journey. And that is the coming to our senses, that it starts with the choices we can make in any life, any community, and any institution to begin to slow down the destruction of Earth. There are three steps there. First step is, or not step, it happened at the same time. But what we tend to think of as activism is this slowing down the destruction of our world,

or slowing down the destruction of the forest, the oceans, you know, all that. But it also is, more than that, it's building in new ways of doing things. And when we were developing this, I got so excited to realize how we're doing this at such a clip and with such ingenuity, us as a species, that we are building new ways of growing and cultivating for food. We've been new ways of settling arguments, new ways of making energy, new ways of settling differences. It's like there's more things sprouting right now than we can remember from any other time. There's so much ingenuity.

You know, when people start doing something that matters to them, they get so sharp. The third part of the great turning is just as essential. Because these ways of doing it, these institutions, these forms of activity, the ways that we're building, are all going to turn to dust if we don't have this, if we don't attain the values and the purposes for which we're inventing and caring for the earth. And this means the inner revolution, the moral or spiritual. What is the flame burning in our heart? I love that. That's my definition for me of bodhicitta in the Buddhism, the caring for all beings. This has to work this time,

not just for us, not just for you, but for all of us. Because this is a planet, and we've got a planet to save, and a planet to care for. And a kind of definition for ourselves that we can begin to own, that we're a planet people. We have different ways of showing it, different things to do, but so much to do. It's a wonderful time. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us tonight. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really.

Go to reallyn, really. Yeah. No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called really no really. And you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I love this idea of these three visions. I think we're most often presented with two visions, right? And the two that I most often hear are the business as usual view, as you're saying, which is like, all right, we're just going to carry on. Everything's fine. Nothing to see here. Just, you know, go on. Everything's fine. And the other is we are all screwed. Like, you know, it's all falling apart. There's nothing you can really do. The forces are all screwed. Like, you know, it's all falling apart.

There's nothing you can really do. The forces are too big. Corporations are too powerful. As somebody who never likes only being given binary choice, like this or that, I love this idea of the great turning, which you say it involves the emergence of new and creative human responses

that enable us to make the transition from an industrial growth society to a life-sustaining society. And the central plot is about joining together for how we act. And I love this idea that another way we can see things is that there is a turning happening in the three ways that you talked about. is a turning happening in the three ways that you talked about in actually people starting to slow down the destruction of the earth, the starting to try and save the commons, transformation in the way we're doing things. And then as you say, this sort of fundamental shift in worldview and values. You know, the roots of this go back to the mid 2020th century because we had in science with systems thinking, with the holographic view in science coming forward to see how intricately interwoven this living planet, Gaia theory, our planet is life. And not only that, but it's who you are.

Every molecule in your body is given you by this planet. We have a terrific heritage. And then you can lean back against this living world as something that supports you like at any moment. You can feel it like grace supporting you, acting through you. I got a lot of help with that from Australia when I went there with this work and started working with this fellow John C., rainforest activist, because he'd had an experience

that was his actual experience of, in the action, that it was not he who was saving this remains of an old growth forest from when it was from Gondwana land, you know, the primordial continent. It wasn't his force. It was the rainforest. The rainforest was just acting through him. It was at his back, and he could just stand there with the kind of long-range confidence.

Yeah. I'm just showing up for it. But it's Big Mama who's steering the wheel. Yeah. Well, it's back to that trust idea from Rocha there. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Yep. One of the things that you say is that of all the dangers we face from climate change to nuclear wars, none is so great as the deadening of our response. Say more about that. Well, that question of yours actually leads back to how I got started with this work. Because I felt that deadening among people who even knew what was happening. among people who even knew what was happening. And this was back, oh, a good 50 years ago and more,

when I was in, thanks to one of my sons, in nuclear power concerns, and we started trying to stop the more reactors getting built, and I was involved in a lawsuit. So I learned what was involved. I did the research that showed that people knew what was happening, that when you're close to a reactor, the miscarriages, the birth defects, the stillbirths, all of those grew as well as the cancers, hugely. And so people knew, but it was very hard for them to talk about it, or not just because it involved female bodies, but that if it was distressing,

it's hard in America, which is a country built on manifest destiny and being cheerful and smiling a lot. I mean, that's how you sell everything from cars to politicians. It struck me as this numbing. I felt it myself, and I sensed it in other people, and I saw that there were very admirable psychiatrists that we felt that it was somehow un-American, and it was unpopular if you were to talk about how worried you were, or how depressed you were, or how sad you were or how depressed you were or how sad you were or how shocked you were by what you saw happening around you. I think that's even more so truer for men than women.

And that couldn't allow you to respond as a human being. And so I thought, how can we come alive? And so I thought, how can we come alive? How can we come alive to what we're actually doing? You know, we seem to accept that there are things that we can't change, and we might as well not talk about it. There's going to be a famine in Afghanistan, and we still have war sanctions against that country, so we can't get any money in there.

But it's hard to talk about things that are really, really stressing you or that's stressing the world. And so that's what I started with and invented ways in a group that we could actually come clean or spontaneous. We had invented ways of talking like open sentences or practices like the truth mandala where it was almost ritual powerful to see what happened when they felt free and to speak their hearts, people from all walks of life, ages, backgrounds. And then what came was this, when they could do it together, What came was this, when they could do it together, this explosion of energy and high spirits, even to hilarity. Suddenly, you know, you just feel, oh, I can face anything. I'm up for anything. you know if you can just say it as it is and not nervously look over your shoulder and chew on your lip or you know gnaw your thumbnail or and this is not for me to talk about and to realize that you

don't want it you don't want people treated this way or you don't want this people made sick in this way and with that comes such energy and as i said sometimes even hilarity laughter and so that was the discovery and then soon as we worked as the years went by it and this work it developed into a spiral that has become identified with the work that reconnects. Four stages. Maybe you read about that too. I definitely did. I want to ask you a sense of hilarity and energy when people are suddenly talking about things that up till now you just never talked about.

And all of a sudden, once that comes out, like you said, I think that was a great way of describing it, sort of hilarity and energy. And I relate with that. Absolutely. It's the same. Yeah. Now we don't start with, you know, ask people to start with admitting a higher power. But I think, and there's a feeling of also, it's close to hitting bottom in that when you can face some of the worst fancies you have about what could happen. I had some military people, the commander of a nuclear submarine, you know, and to actually talk about what some of the nightmares were, to share some of them, was let free, set free. You know, I think the other piece of it is, you talked about how we

have sort of this American sense of optimism and, you know, it's fine and, you know, smile and move on. But the other thing that runs through this, I think, and I know this certainly plays to me perhaps more even than being American, is that a lot of our, at least the way we have perhaps co-opted our spiritual traditions to make them more American, has brought this in also, which says that, you know, we've got the serenity prayer, which exposes some real wisdom, right? Yes. You know, the serenity to know what we can change and what we can't. But you say in the book also that if we only allow ourselves to care about what we can

actually control, that diminishes us as people. And when you said that, I went, wow, that really kind of hit me because I'm a definite like focus on what you can control aspect, but it caused me to look at that differently. Well pointed out. I love that you're saying that because there's a lot now that we can't control and that we have to learn to live with and still see where we have choice. It's made a big difference for me, Eric, that not at the beginning, but pretty soon we found that we needed, if we're going to really look at some of the dysfunctions and suffering in our cultures, planet-wide,

that we're going to need something to ground us to look at that. And you couldn't start right off coming together and facing it, talking about it. You needed to feel somehow held. And so it actually was happening. It was happening naturally that we would be talking about what was working in our lives and what we were grateful for. It's amazing that because that didn't come in by a decision, but it was then by the time in the year 98 or 99, at the end of the 20th century, we wrote another book about it. We had a book in 83 and then a book at the end of the 90s. And then that's when the gratitude came in. And that has had an incredible effect on, well, I guess, but on me.

It's changed me, changed my life. I always had a lot of love, but that's why I was able to handle the pain. But this pattern of doing the work in that first station where, you know, you take a stop with somebody and say, can we take 10 minutes and just run the spiral? And then you do it together. But it's automatically what's going for me right now. Just say something that you are so incredibly thankful for.

You just mentioned as we talk about the spiral, you described the work that reconnects as a spiral mapping through four stages. You talked about coming from gratitude. We've talked a little bit about honoring our pain for the world. We're running out of time, but let's talk about the third stage of the spiral, which is seeing with new eyes. Yeah. Well, one of the things that happens, I think of the whole thing, the critical point is honoring the pain. It's not diagnosing it, and it's not pathologizing it, which is what the power holders in the current world system, it's very convenient for them to pathologize people's suffering,

because then it's not a judgment on them. energize people's suffering, because then it's not a judgment on them. It doesn't lead you to want to change a system if it's just somebody's crankiness and paranoia. And what happens in honoring the pain is that you begin to see that it's not from craziness that you're feeling this grief, but it's from caring. And this caring is your love for life. It's like two hands pressed together or your pain for the world, moral pain, physical pain, dread, all the emotions and your love for the world are inseparable. They're two sides of the same coin. It helps to remind people, but it becomes evident in doing the work. And so then when you realize your oneness with the world, then your capacity is everything is seen looks afresh then. Your identity with the world, your caring for the world,

your anguish for the world is the most natural thing in the world because that's your true identity. Yeah. And then that is such good news. But it opens things. It opens your relationships with every other part of the planetary body and this being that's in terms of space, but also in terms of time. And what we have found, the changes that it makes in our relations with our past,

past civilizations, past ancestors, become intimately related to us. And it's been so beautiful in some of the rituals, like harvesting the gifts of the ancestors. It's incredibly beautiful and empowering. Or in relation with future beings, intimate sense of connection with those who aren't born yet, but they are in us because they are in our bodies. Our bodies carry in our DNA the future ones, and they can be poisoned by what we breathe in or take in,

even though they may not be born for another thousand years. That is an amazing idea to really reflect on that, that the future versions of us exist in us today. It is such an interesting idea. And they can help us so that it's a two-way street. So the entire work is a celebration, I would say, and cannot be understood from a linear standpoint, but rather from the awareness of the great reciprocity at the heart of the universe.

We're doing it with the ancestors and the future ones and the other beings, like the ritual of the council of all beings. When you let another critter talk through you in your voice, you step aside from your human identity. It's this broadening of what it's like to be a conscious, choice-making being on a planet like Earth. Sky's the limit. That's such a beautiful sentiment. and i love the fact that in the middle of that sentiment you used the word critter which just makes me just makes me happy it's such a great word so we're out of time but i'm going to bring us back to where we started and i'm going to read just a short bit of rilke from your latest book and then I'll allow you to sort of add anything you'd like to to the end of it.

This is just a couple lines where it says, Furthermore, let life happen to you. Believe me, you can count on life in any case. And as to feelings, all feelings are pure that hold you together and lift you up. Impure is the feeling that arises from only one aspect of your being and thus tears you apart. thank you. Yeah, we're on the way to coming together in this time, if we choose that to be. It is true it may not be coming together enough for what we'd like to see happen, but we are. We're facing and making choices

to trust each other and trust ourselves. And it's wonderful to have beings like Rilke to remind us, and like Eric Zimmer to remind us as well. It's been such a joy listening to you and talking with you. Thank you. Well, thank you so much. And you may have just made my life by putting me in a sentence with Rilke. So thank you so much, Joanna. It is such a pleasure and such an honor to have you on. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community.

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