Upstream - The Work That Reconnects with Joanna Macy

Episode Date: February 8, 2016

In this interview, we hear from Joanna Macy PhD, a highly revered local eco-justice philosopher, activist, and leader. Joanna is a scholar, teacher, and a practitioner of Buddhism, Systems Theory, Gaia Theory, and the Deep Ecology Movement. At 86, she moves through the world with profound wisdom, passion, and the rare gift to inspire us to move from despair into empowered action for the earth and all living beings. To learn more about Joanna and the work that she does please visit http://www.joannamacy.net This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Hello and welcome. You are listening to an Upstream interview, which is part of the Economics for Transition project. My name is Della Duncan, and I'm very happy to welcome Joanna Macy to this program. Welcome, Joanna. Hello, Della. So glad to be with you. What Joanna Macy does through her books, film projects, courses, and workshops is invite us to experience active hope for the world and humanity by reconnecting us to the natural we see ourselves, how we see who we are, to include not just ourself, but also to include earth and all living beings, and as well to expand our perspective of time so that we don't just focus on the present and what's happening this year and during this century, but also to include the history of Earth and all of the future history of Earth. And so in doing so, we're able to have our actions and our ways of being draw on the wisdom of four

billion years of life on Earth, and also to contribute to a thriving planet, a life-sustaining planet, instead of a life-destructive planet and a dying one. And her work is grounded in a theoretical framework that includes general systems theory, Buddhism, Gaia theory, and the deep ecology movement. But her teachings are not just theoretical. They are also deeply personal. People in workshops and through books and the website are invited to experience the lessons in their own bodies, embodied wisdom. It is an experiential learning process and one that is inclusive of all that arises throughout. Joanna, is there anything else that you'd like to add by way of introduction? there anything else that you'd like to add by way of introduction? Yes, thank you. Well, speaking about the work that we do, the experiential, interactive work, you're right. It's to feel it in our lives, but also to find ourselves listening to the most important voice, the one we most need to hear, and that is the inner voice in us where the currents of life flow through and motivate us to speak the truth,

speak the truth of what we know and feel and see is happening to our world. is happening to our world. And then I would add, Adela, in introducing myself, that, yes, I draw heavily from Buddhism and my love affair with Buddhism and systems theory. And also that I've been an activist all my life, that I've been an activist all my life, from the Civil Rights Movement on for the last 50 more years of my life. So I've learned as much from that as from any books I ever read, any course I ever took.

And then there's another part of my life that is like a fountain that brings me gladness and soul food, and that's poetry. I love poetry. I try to weave it into so much that I do, and it's been greatly enhanced by my good fortune in translating the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. He's a great German lyric poet of the 20th century who sensed the full range of what we're experiencing. So that's been part of me and my family.

Do you have a Rilke poem you'd like to share? You spoke of how I like to invite people to experience wider dimensions of their existence beyond the shrunken sense of self that a hyper-individualistic culture, such as ours in the Industrial Growth Society, that competition, that striving to serve number one and get ahead at all costs, that shrinks our perceptions of life. So the first poem of Rilke that I opened the book to back, wow, 60-some years ago when I was in Germany with my young family. I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.

that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one, but I give myself to it. I circle 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? So thank you for asking for that, Della.

And I guess you could say then that the work I love best is to help people wonder who they've been all these thousands of years and that they've've been maybe Falkenstorm and certainly a great song. Wonderful. Thank you. And as you start the book, Act of Hope, which is co-authored with Chris Johnstone and also many of your workshops with Gratitude, I want to ask why Gratitude? Why is that so important to you?

Yeah, and why to start with it? For a lot of reasons. For one thing is that this is a really rough time now. Everybody knows that. Whether it's climate change or whether it's acidification of the ocean, whether it's spasms of extinction, the sixth mass extinction, whether it's the growing inequality of economic, whether it's the people sinking below the poverty line, there's so much bad news. And it's so important that we

not be afraid of it. So the very first thing that I find is important is to realize that you have a right to be glad to be alive. And gratitude brings that forward. Gratitude, you know, it's the first step in every spiritual path, every religion, say the anthropologists, begins with that kind of primal, wow, get a load of this. Wow, sun rising, stars at night, the moon, the leaves. You know, it's an amazing universe,

and we have senses to experience it and voices to sing it. And so it's our birthright to feel glad to be alive because we're given this gift. And we use that gift of life best when we take it with a sense of wonder and awe. And that carries through to even being alive in such a hard time as this, even to the point where you can say,

wow, if this is facing humanity, if we've come to this, boy, I'm glad that I didn't check out or not somewhere else, This gratitude stirs the body, mind, fuels the heart. And it's also, I must say, politically subversive because corporate capitalism thrives on making us feel needy and insufficient, you know, so that we can keep buying more. And we're told continuously from the billion-dollar advertising industries that we don't look right or smell right or dress right. industries that we don't look right or smell right or dress right. And this neediness serves the consumer society, doesn't it?

Yes. So gratitude, just stop and think. You know, here I am in Berkeley. I'm sitting across from you. You're doing this beautiful program. These women that you're, and all genders, I guess, that you're talking to in this program are graduating, and you're helping them feel glad to be alive.

So we've got this technology. So there's a lot to be grateful for. Yeah. It reminds me of the quote, the most revolutionary thing we can do is know that we are enough. And even I think this emphasis on gratitude and starting with gratitude goes even further. It's not just knowing that we are enough, it's celebrating all that we have, even in the face of business as usual and all the sadness and despair. That's right. And so how do your identities as a woman, as a mother and a grandmother, how do those identities, particularly we just had Mother's Day, how do they influence how you move through the world and the work that you do?

influence how you move through the world and the work that you do? There is a sense of relatedness and interrelatedness, even interdependence, comes more easily for women through their biology and their socialization to notice needs and to step forward in caring. The male of the species in the industrial growth society has had to harden himself to against what so-called weak emotions and disregard the plight of others or the needs of others in

a socialized effort to for dominance and so that there's and the armor that they're socialized to wear still from the centuries, millennia of patriarchy. So as women, we are readier to see what is most needed for us to perceive

at this point, at this millennial point of our human journey, and that is our interbeing, our inter-existence, the fabric almost, the interweaving of the web of life. So there's that aspect of being a woman that has actually fostered and abetted a lot of my scholarship around interrelatedness. And I would say also that I'm a white woman, so I know and have accepted how easy it is to assume the privileged status of a white person. But I do know something about oppression, having been born when I was born 86 years ago, and the culture then and how it was modeled for me

through my mother and other women to be a people pleaser and to concede the reins to the man and be passed over and to have doors closed. So that position of being subordinated gives you an understanding of some of the workings of society that when you're on top, you don't get. Now, a woman of color would have even more understanding than I do as a white woman of the workings of an oppressive society. But I think oppression and subordination wises you up a lot, so I have to give thanks for that.

Thank you. What are some of the current events and processes happening in the world right now that are causing great pain and grief for you right now? The dying of the oceans is so, grieves me. It's the womb of life, the rapid acidification, acidification, which is killing life forms, and also the contamination of it through radioactive pollution, just pumping out tons and tons of it from Japan and the dumping of it in other seas as well. Other sources of contamination.

The great islands of continent-size plastic garbage patches. and these great, majestic life forms with their huge sensitivities and brains of the marine mammals, their days being numbered. And also, since I'm on about the oceans, the contamination and loss of the plankton. Plankton is over 40% gone, and that provides a huge amount of our oxygen, which is also being diminished by loss of forests. Well, that's just one of them.

I could get going. Ask me about anything. Ask me about incarceration. Ask me about the prison system or whatever, the spying of the government, spying, anything. But I think that everyone today who is alert enough to listen to your program will have their own list. Yeah, there's no shortage of suffering to be found.

And so what is your attitude and approach to people who seemingly, through words and actions, either don't care about the types of things we're talking about, the social and environmental suffering, or who maybe even work to create harm. What is your attitude, your approach to working with those individuals? I would love to be able to say, Della, that I feel serenely compassionate for their brains, but I just get mad as anything. I get infuriated and judgmental.

But in the work that we do, in the work that we connect, what I put forward, the teaching is that the real enemies today are not the individuals who are in political or military power or corporate power or running the media so much as the systems that they're part of. In Buddhist terms, we could call those organized forms of greed, hatred, and delusion. And I really like that about the Buddhist view of life, that there's not an evil principle that is causing our suffering and causing us to create suffering for ourselves and others,

but so much as errors, mistakes we fall into, which are seen as the three poisons, greed, hatred, delusion. And I've learned from my teachers and thought leaders over my life that in our time, you can see that there are organized forms, institutionalized forms of greed, hatred, and delusion that you see in the consumer society, in the military-industrial complex, in the media. And so that they're perfectly nice people who go to work for them.

And they can stay nice people, and you're making them, but they're hostage to these organized forms. And they'll have to bow to them or leave. And so we do practices where we help think about how we can free people from this rather than blame them. So what are a few of the inspiring current events and processes, the things that are just really nourishing you right now, that are really inspiring you right now in our world? Oh, my goodness. So many.

I love it that I've just been coming back from the East Coast where I was meeting with high school students throughout greater New York City as part of a project to understand what happened 70 years ago. Now, these are kids, 15, 16, 17, 18 years old. 15, 16, 17, 18 years old. And when we bring to them on this 70th year since the nuclear bombing, our first and only use so far

of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we brought these Hibakusha survivors. Well, I just was so moved to see how these young people sitting there in their public schools, crowded and aware of the inequities of our lives and how totally wrapped they were They were to hear the stories of these aging Japanese men and women who came to say, they mustn't let their story get lost. We still have these bombs, and only they're thousands of times more powerful. They can actually cause a nuclear winter now if we use them. They could wipe out life.

And so here are these, oh it's so sweet, here are these old wrinkle-faced like me, wrinkle-faced old Japanese people talking and these gorgeous young people, often young people of color, leaning forward, their eyes just riveted on hearing it, that this is something they know that they need to take in, and that we're a military power that's a danger to life on earth, and that no greater wish could there be than to disarm and let the resources flow to the health and care of living beings. So that's just one thing, but there's so much happening that's beautiful. The organic farms that work against genetic modification, the people working their heads off to stop hydraulic fracturing to save the water from contamination,

art, the songs and poetry now, the rituals, the dances, over and over again what I hear and see is a recognition that the earth is alive and that we belong to the earth. And then if we get that, if we really open to that, it's like we've come home. So I sense around the world we call this the great turning, and you're going to talk about that.

Well, let's talk about it now. So the great turning, what is it, and where are we at in the process? Yeah. Well, we call it the great turning, but you could call it anything. It's the transition from a business as usual, treat the earth, extract anything you want from it, turn it into a sewer and sacrifice zone, to grab what you can, to sell what you can. It's a fever of madness.

And more and more people and the artists, the singers, and this has been true for decades now, of course, are calling us to recognize our true nature that way. And that thrills me, what people are inventing to get off, what they're ready to do. You know, as I go east and meet in schools, often it's not the students are occupying the president's office for fossil fuel divestment. so I have a wonderful what, hope I guess in seeing what the young people are doing seeing what you're doing for example

Thank you, and I want to mention that there's a website called Songs of the Great Turning of singers and songs of the time of the Great Turning. And they're very inspiring. And also, if you're interested in learning more about Joanna Macy's work with nuclear weapons and the movement on the website, JoannaMacy.net, there's a lot of great writings and resources on that page. And so if you're just joining us, we are Women Hold a Path to the Sky on KALX 90.7 FM. I'm the host today, Della Duncan, and we're speaking with Joanna Macy, an eco philosopher and activist of five decades.

And you can find out more about Joanna and her work at www.joannamacy.net. And that's J-O-A-N-N-A-M-A-C-Y. You know, Adele, in case I sound inanely optimistic, we must say that when we talk about the Great Turning, we have to recognize as well that there is a very powerful phenomenon gripping the world, which we call the great unraveling. And that is what the industrial growth society or corporate capitalism is doing to life itself and the natural world which we need for every breath we draw. And this is wiping us out fast. I like the term great unraveling, which we borrow from economist David Corton because it's what natural systems do.

They don't just fall over dead. They begin to unravel. They begin to lose their complexity, their coherence, their inner intelligence. And that's what's happening both to natural systems, biological systems, and cultural ones as well, cultures and languages winking out. So what we're called to is to see, as a friend of mine put it, things are getting better and better and worse and worse, faster and faster. There's the great unraveling and the great turning.

the great unraveling and the great turning. And we have to keep our eyes and hearts open to both and to realize that hope is not something you have like a property that things will be sure to work out, but it's something you do. Hope is a choice. When you see you have a choice, and then you act for it. Praise be. Hallelujah. There is something you can get behind. You can get behind the great turning. You can put your life for that. And there are plenty of other people there.

But always there will be uncertainty. And we mustn't be afraid of it. Isn't that right, Della? Absolutely, to be open to uncertainty. Yeah. Because if you were to believe, oh, it's going to be okay, I really believe it's going to work out, or if you thought it's too late, I give up. Both of those. Leave your life flat and boring and don't bring out your creativity and your courage. So walking that razor edge of uncertainty is what brings you alive. I spoke with a painter in San Francisco telling me about rising rent prices and how that was affecting studio space. And I was I thought that

she would have a really dire and negative experience. But she said, it's so exciting, because it means I get to be really creative about where where I make art and where I show my art, you know, and to be in with that uncertainty and not knowing and just that approach to it. Beautiful. and just that approach to it. Beautiful. Yeah, absolutely. And so you mentioned systems, and our current economic system is definitely one that is causing great suffering and definitely part of the great unraveling. And if we look at history, this is not the only economic system we've ever had. We've had a system based on slavery, we've had the feudal system, and both of those systems have unraveled.

And we are seeing many signs of the unraveling of capitalism and the growth industrial complex right now. Which is a cause for celebration. It's a cause for great celebration. Because in a moment where things are in that chaos point of change, then strong action with even small groups can have a wider effect than one would have thought. And people are looking for alternatives.

People are open to what else is emerging out there that could potentially work better. And the alternatives are happening. Absolutely. And they tend to be happening at the grassroots level, sort of under the radar, don't you think? Yes. the country, whether it's here in Northern California, where there's always been so much, you know, I think of the first county to outlaw genetic, you know, GMOs up in Mendocino. And return to growing grains and return to efforts to correct for monocropping,

for the CSAs, the farmer's markets, so many experiments, when they're sort of rooted in the citizens taking control at the local level, they find that there is, working at the municipal and county level, there's more room for exciting change. Do you see that too? Absolutely. I'm thinking of the transition town movement of really moving off the dependence on fossil fuels, local communities, and the localization of economies. Absolutely. There's definitely emergence of lots of things coming up. And there's the corporate sponsorship of politics is growing ever bigger and bigger and the income inequality in the United States ever bigger and bigger. So again, that dynamic of on one side, things are getting better and better, and on the other, So it seems to me that it's in the fostering and nourishing

of collaborative mutual belonging at the local level. So it's not just creating a more distributive energy network, but also a more distributive energy network, but also a more distributive spiritual network where we can meet together to share our stories, to honor the earth, to have festivals and rituals, to know that we can turn to each other, to begin to experiment with a gift economy so that we're not measuring everything in terms of the money we can earn or spend. Yeah, and also the growth industrial complex, as you said, hyper-individualization,

what that leads to is loneliness. Incredible loneliness. We had more people last year in the world die of suicide than in all the wars, casualty of last year. No. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So we need connection to ourselves and to each other in our natural world. And so let's talk a little bit about what Buddhism and economics, how that intersection can maybe offer us something. I'm thinking of the concept of right livelihood. I'm thinking of the book that you wrote, Dharma and Development, about Sri Lanka. What about that connection between Buddhism and economics that can offer us hope? Well, I think that the teachings for economics that come out of

not only the Lord Buddha's teachings, but the movement in the early centuries can teach us a lot. You know, Gautama Siddhartha came from a tribal republic. There were six of them in southern Nepal. And at the time he began to teach in 6th century India, there were two great monarchies arising in the Ganges plain. They were centers of a centralization of power

and of cities urbanization rapidly and people being drawn out of their, from their traditional life patterns to which they belong into anonymity of the cities and competition. And what the Buddha did was to establish, encourage the establishment of communities of practice. And he called them sanghas, which was the name for the deliberative councils in the tribal republics. So these were sort of islands of democratic talking things out.

And they didn't have power. There was no hierarchy. If they had a disagreement, there was a way that they could just separate, but one wouldn't rule over the other. And that they practiced freedom from greed and institutionalized greed by gift economy, no private property, and also by radical social inclusion, everybody was welcome, wherever they came from, whatever color they were, if they were runaway slaves

or AWOL soldiers or what. And even though that made him a laughingstock among some, the Buddha never closed the door on anybody. So this kind of community of practice, where we can practice speaking truth, sharing our goods, making our choices, spiritual practices and rituals that honor life, I feel that's what's called for.

And I think it's beginning to take form. When you see people gathering for a project, often nowadays they'll pause to light a candle, say a word of gratitude for life, feed their spirit, even if they're going to, you know, especially, I guess, if they're going to do civil disobedience. But this combination of the spiritual and the social protest is powerful, I think, and beautiful, I think. It speaks to our passion for life.

many communities, many workshops, teachings. I know you yourself have offered workshops based on Donna. And what that is is that the teacher gives the gift of their teachings freely, and then the participants can give whatever gift they feel called to give. And what I've seen is that the practice of generosity creates so much connection and also wealth on both sides of learning and knowledge and everything. It also, I'm inspired by Sarvodaya and the respect they give to children from the littlies on up and to women. so that now in a Sarvodaya village, when it gains a certain kind of autonomy, they have, and they're registered, they have to have

at least three children, at least three women, three farmers, along with whoever else is there, so that this deep respect for anyone who is graced with the gift of life is expected to have then the responsibility to defend and protect life. As we approach our upcoming 2016 presidential election, I'm wondering what your thoughts, what your questions are, what are you feeling right now as we think about politics at home and abroad? Well, pretty discouraged, a certain nausea. But there's some bright ones, you know. I'm just so grateful that Bernie Sanders of Vermont has declared his readiness to run.

And he knows he doesn't have a chance, but he's willing to go to all that trouble and all that effort at this age in order to raise certain questions, to inject a little bit of honesty, a little bit of readiness to look at the actuality. So I mean, if Bernie Sanders can do that, then I can certainly roll up my sleeves and do my best to speak the truth. So I, I thank him for that. Great. And so you talked about communities and communities as a space for rituals and practices.

And one of my favorite definitions of magic is intention plus action. And I really, I think about that when I've done a lot of rituals and practices that you offer in your books, on your website, joannamacy.net, and also in your courses, in the work that reconnects. And so I'm wondering what are some of the regular rituals and practices that you have well some of them are um well ritual by itself I I uh like your uh bringing that up because it asked me to think, why is ritual so important?

And it's because it's so easy in the speed and distractedness of our life in the industrial growth society, scrambling and shortness of means of all kinds, be it money or time or love, to let your life become just one full thing after another and distracted to distraction. So rituals give you pause to actually touch in to intention and pay attention. And when you pay attention to whatever it is you're paying attention to,

whether it's giving thanks for a glass of water or peeling and eating an orange as Thich Nhat Hanh does, or putting a candle before thinking of an ancestor, that attention grows into deep recognition and from that into love. And you touch the wellsprings of life in your own soul. A ritual of sorts that I am grateful for, I learned from the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka. Oh, I'd known about it before.

It's in the Buddhist teachings. It's called the Four Immeasurables or the Four Brahma Viharas. But with Sarvodaya, when I was there on the ground, living in a village, watching it work, I saw how they use this practice, which is a meditative practice. It's fourfold. It's a practice that calls to mind loving kindness, compassion, joy in the joy of others and equanimity

and those four abodes are incredibly captivating and powerful and I realized in my year every meeting that they hold, whatever it's for, even how to write a grant to get material for building a school or whatever, they do this. So this blend of the ritual of where you bring your mind together, they bring a collective mind to this practice of loving kindness. And then together, bringing their mind to practice a karuna, maha karuna, great compassion or grief with the grief of others.

Then mudita, joy in the joy of others. When you do these, I find there just is no room in the mind for fear. I mean, in the moment that you are practicing that, there's no fear. And you are in your power. And you're in your connectedness with life. And, you know, that can, you know, if you go off and do something else, the fear and loneliness can come in. But you have that tool where that charge of really opening to another person and letting life flow through you in whatever you're doing is so beautiful.

So I bring that in very. Then there are rituals of truth-telling, as you've experienced. their rituals of choosing to role play conversations between people now and those living seven generations from now. That's one of the most powerful, don't you think? Absolutely. And then you realize that what is just an idea, an abstraction, oh, future beings,

some of you're speaking for them, or you're listening to them in this role play. And as soon it ceases being a role play, but you feel something so genuine inside you. Yeah, I remember hearing from a seventh generation future being, they were in front of me and they said, thank you for all the work that you did for the world to, for the great turning to happen. And it really strengthened my everyday choice to do things that are in line with the great turning because of that one person's voice to me. Yeah. We need that.

Absolutely. And it sounds like rituals and practices for you are a really great way of accessing our inner peace, wisdom, and joy at any moment. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the other wonderful rituals and practices is an activity called the Council of All Beings, which I know that you talk about in the book Thinking Like a Mountain. And I know that you created it in the 1980s with John Seed, who is an Australian environmentalist. And this one is another one that had profound impact on

myself. And I'm wondering if you would talk a little bit about the purpose of that activity and what you've seen it do for workshop participants. Who's come to the space when you've done that activity? Yeah. Well, John Seed, founder of the Rainforest Information Service, challenged me when I was down there. when I was down there, to, he said, our culture, one of the great problems of our human culture right now is that we're so anthropocentric and that we are caught still, even when we work for social justice and the environment, even the word environment shows a human-centeredness.

And he said, we're not gonna uh get anywhere really there will be not that the transformation that's required will not happen unless we break open to our radical belonging to life with all other beings and uh and uh awaken from our amnesia that we were far older than our species and that we have currents of interconnectedness and knowing that with every living being. And we're just the most recent species to come along and we're so arrogant and ignorant about our connections. And so as a corrective to that, we allowed the counsel of all beings to arise where each person can let their human identity be shrugged off for a little while

and let themselves be chosen by another life form. It could be an animal or a plant form or a feature of the natural world, like a mountain, a river, or a swamp. world like a mountain or river or swamp or uh and let that more than human life form far more ancient than humans speak through us it's like stepping out of shoes that are too tight and or a coat that's too tight and letting the self expand as it's taken over and speaks for another life form and people find that it's very easy to do and that it feels good that and that there is a knowing that gets articulated and a wisdom that arises that they would not have expected. And often their lives are altered.

One example of that is my own husband, who at a council of all beings, found himself speaking for a body of water. And this was a lake in Siberia. It's a fascinating lake. It holds 20% of the world's fresh water. He knew that, and he began speaking for it in the Council of All Beings. And it had extraordinary things to say about how the paper mills were polluting it and how the species were being threatened, etc. etc. And as a result of that, he organized a bilateral between Russia and the United States of key environmental leaders and scientists and photographers to go. He went with David Brower, the arch druid, and they created Baikal Watch.

And as a result from that, there have been councils on ecotourism, and there have been strong regulatory measures to preserve the species and the purity of the lake and to encourage the stories and cultures that it had fostered through history. That's just one. I happen to be closely related to that example, but there are many such. Yeah, and I think that moment when in that activity that we close our eyes and ask for a being to come to us and ask to be able to speak for it, what arises is just, it's other than ourselves. And for him to have that body of water arise to speak through him, you know, it's just really powerful. So thank you for that. And so if you're joining us, this is Women Hold a Path to the Sky on KALX 90.7 FM. I'm the host, Della Duncan, and we're here with Joanna Macy, a leader, teacher, and scholar of Gaia theory, Buddhism, general systems theory,

and deep ecology, and an activist as well. So if you want to know more about Joanna, you can visit www.joannamacy.net. Joanna, in just a few weeks, you will begin a women's retreat at Spirit Rock titled Reclaiming the Mother of All Buddhas. And this retreat is particularly special for me. It is two years ago when I was first introduced to you and your work. And so I'm wondering if you'd talk a little bit about who is Prajnaparamita, the mother of all Buddhists. She is an archetype, thought form, that arose about at the first century of the Common Era, about five

centuries after the Buddha taught, at the dawn of the Mahayana form of Buddhism. And it was at that point that scriptures were coming to the fore that reclaimed the essential nature of the Buddha's original teachings, of which were the radical interdependence, interrelatedness of all phenomena, that life was not organized in any hierarchical manner, but that it consisted of currents of relationship, a relational view of what the universe is, of how the universe is created by flows of matter, energy, and information, and information, and that guided by experience,

and then as minds arise, guided by intention. So this is very close to the systems view of life, and one that I found as a woman very resonant to my own experience in a female body with female sensitivities. My experience as a girl, as a mother, and now, of course, as a grandmother. My experience as a thinker, as a writer, as an activist, and my experience of being part of the living system of our planet. That this kind of relational view of life helps us to experience that we can literally see ourselves as living parts of a living whole. And it's kind of hard to talk about this briefly, but there are a lot of practices that can help us and that can give us...

You know, what it opens us to can more easily be expressed in terms of the deep ecology movement, where we move beyond the anthropocentrism that guides much of environmental activism to a recognition of a shift to a belonging to Earth that transforms our sense of who we are, literally, so that we don't identify ourselves with that small, striving ego as much. Yeah, absolutely. Because then if we think of ourselves as just an individual then all that

we do is altruistic and we just think of ourselves as and that anything to help anyone else would be selfish you know and so what we what we do is instead if we can expand what we see as ourselves. And myself acting for a body of water or a tree or another living being is part of acting for myself, then I'm no longer selfish. Yeah. It's all part of it. So thank you for that. And what are some other retreats and projects that you're working on right now and contributing to that maybe you want to share with the listeners? Well, I continue to offer the work that reconnects. And I am, I continue to, will in the fall again, have my regular Thursday nights, second Thursday every month of drop-in sangha. Then I also have the nuclear guardianship project.

Well, I do know one of the other ones is the EcoSatva training, which is online, a webinar, online sessions. Starting in the fall now. Starting in the fall, September 13th through 16th. So in closing, do you have any last words, well wishes, or poetry to share with our listeners and graduates today? Here's a poem. It is also from Rilke from the Book of Hours. It was written over 100 years ago, and the poet was like 23 when he wrote this. And this short poem is the one that he wrote that's been the most, and that we've translated, that's been the most set to music.

And it starts out referring to God, but I want to tell you, the poet's God is not a big daddy God on a throne. This God is one with the fabric of life and speaks to us. So, all right, here's the poem. God speaks to each of us as he makes us and walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear. You, cast out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don't let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.

Thank you. Thank you, Joanna, for the poem and for everything today, and also from all of our listeners listening. Thank you. Thank you, Joanna, for the poem and for everything today, and also from all of our listeners listening. Thank you.