Joanna

Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine. In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there. And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am. Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29

Beloved Teacher Joanna Macy is Dancing Through Liminal Space As She Leaves This World To Become A Part of Everything...

 "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.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.

I've been circling for thousands of years and I still don't know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?"

Rilke translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

....

I have longed to study this work for years and only in the last two years thanks to The School for The Great Turning have found classes I could incorporate into my schedule. The timing couldn't have been better as within and without I and many of us find ourselves caught, overwhelmed, and in some cases. shutting down and self destructing somewhere between the Industrial Growth Society's End Stage Capitalism's Great Unraveling which is killing life on planet Earth and The Great Turning the movement toward a life sustaining culture.

It was my great fortune to begin this journey with Lydia Violet Harutonian whose devotion to and depth of field around this work have made her the right person to carry this flame on.

Thank you Joanna. Thank you Lydia Violet. Thank you School For The Great Turning. Thank you to each and every one of my classmates and to all of you doing what you can to ground in gratitude, feel your pain for the world, see with ancient and new eyes and go forth in whatever ways you can to respect our ancestors and protect all living beings, the humans and the more than humans including those not yet born.

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https://youtu.be/Uc42aNYo8vw?si=Kil9_LbShDRs21uR

...

  You, darkness, of whom I am born—

I love you more than the flame

that limits the world

to the circle it illumines

and excludes all the rest.

But the dark embraces everything:

shapes and shadows, creatures and me,

people, nations—just as they are.

It lets me imagine

a great presence stirring beside me.

I believe in the night.

(from The Book of Hours, trans. Joanna Macy & Anita Barrows)

 

Joanna as you might know by now is at a threshold in the liminal place where her last breaths are near…

There is not a week without a reference and gratitude  to Joanna’s work and how it is tattooed on my bones . 

It could be the council of all beings - the work that reconnects vast and deep mycelium - Rilke- etc…

All are now imbedded in my work as a soul  activist, mentor, grief tender. Artist and creative visionary. All of my life carries threads spun by Joanna 

The teacher I dreamt of…she came and scattered millions of seeds of beauty and freedom 

 

We hold again a Global Vigil for Life 

12:30pm ( California time)