UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium, transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows, including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at soundstruefoundation.org. And in advance, thank you for your support.
Hi friends, it’s Tami. In honor of this being the week of Earth Day—although in my heart, I wish we collectively honored the Earth every day and every week—we’re bringing you a special episode. It is, in fact, not an episode of Insights at the Edge, but instead the first episode of a new podcast supported by the Sounds True Foundation. It’s called We Are the Great Turning, featuring the legendary deep ecologist and systems thinker Joanna Macy, now 95 years old, in conversation with her young, dear friend, environmental activist Jess Serrante. We Are the Great Turning is a special ten-part series exploring the spiritual roots of the climate crisis and how to turn towards our heartbreak, honor it, and be informed by it, and in the process, transform our grief and anger into agency and action.
We Are the Great Turning is available wherever you stream podcasts, or join us at WeAreTheGreatTurning.com where you can find all ten episodes, bonus exercises, and a tool kit to bring the insights from this podcast deeper into your life. Again, that’s WeAreTheGreatTurning.com. We are the great turning. That’s the choice we have the opportunity to make. Take a listen.
Jess Serrante: All right. Our recorders are on for the first time.
Joanna Macy: Yes, this is what we’re called to do right now. I guess, talk about situations of extreme alarm and ignorance. We’re in a situation that humanity’s never been in before. There’ve been wars, plagues, huge migrations, but this concerns everyone on earth. And this is not something we know how to even begin to think about.
JS: You’re listening to We Are The Great Turning. This podcast is a series of conversations between me, Jess Serrante, and my ninety-five-year-old friend Joanna Macy about this moment in history we’re living through, or as Joanna says…
JM: Standing afresh with what’s it like to live on earth at this moment.
JS: And I want to be upfront about something. This podcast is about loving a world engulfed in crisis and separation. It’s about reclaiming a sense of possibility and our interconnection with one another and the earth.
But this is not a podcast about hope. Not exactly. In these episodes, I want to invite you into a deep sense of your belonging and love for our world, into connection with the great possibilities that still exist for us even in these precarious times, and into action. This is what Joanna has done for me.
As you listen to this series, I hope that you’ll slow down and imagine yourself sitting at Joanna’s dining room table with us, drinking tea and talking, because as we had these conversations, we were imagining you there with us.
JM: Because you’re here too. You’re facing just what we’re facing. So even though I can’t see your face, I’m very moved to think of how much we have in common. I may never hear your name or see your face, but you suddenly become real because you’re on the planet with me at this time.
JS: So I’m glad you’re here, and I hope you’ll stick around. In this series, we’ll be talking about many of the hardest feelings that emerge for us as we look into the face of the climate crisis. We’ll also be sharing ideas and practices that can help make these times more bearable.
It’s important to note though, that there are times when seeking professional help is essential, even life-saving. So if you’re dealing with emotional pain that’s too much, whether it’s solely climate-related or not, I hope you’ll seek out mental health support. You can go to our show’s website, Wearethegreatturning.com, for some resources that may help.
In this first episode, love and loss, and what someone living in the last chapter of their life can teach us about facing the climate crisis.
JM: I want to reach and take hold of that live wire of reality. I want to be here. I want to be. If I can’t avoid climate change, then I want to be here with all my attention, with all my trust in life.
JS: That’s Joanna. She’s a scholar of Buddhism and systems thinking, and she’s known around the world as a beloved voice in peace, justice, and ecology movements. The Dalai Lama is a big fan of hers, and so was Thich Nhat Hanh. Her ideas and teachings have been adopted by scholars and organizers and movements around the world, from the global climate movement to the youth-led resistance in Myanmar to the Iranian Women’s movement. Anywhere that people are seeking a kind of spiritual strength as they struggle together for justice, it’s possible that you’ll find Joanna’s work.
And me, I’m Jess. Back in the spring of 2014, I was 25 years old and having a kind of existential crisis. At that point, I’d been all-in as a climate and environmental organizer for seven years. I was heartbroken at how bad the state of the climate crisis had grown and frustrated at how little difference my actions seemed to make. At the time, I was working on a campaign targeting snack food companies about the palm oil in their supply chains, and I remember saying to a friend at a bar one night, “Can my life really be about a better PepsiCo?” So I took a leave of absence from my organizing job, and around that time, I met Joanna and my life changed forever.
We met when I chased her down in the hallway at a conference in Berkeley. That conversation led to me attending a retreat that she was leading that summer in the Redwoods in northern California, and that retreat was a deep dive into a practice that Joanna is the root teacher, the originator of. It’s called “The Work that Reconnects”. Joanna now lives in Berkeley, California, and she’s lived a really extraordinary life. She grew up in New York City in the thirties, began studying Tibetan Buddhism while living in India in the sixties with her husband Fran, who worked for the Peace Corps, and in the seventies, she became an anti-nuclear activist when she was a married mom of three. In her early fifties, she went back to school to get a PhD studying Buddhism and systems theory, and it was then that she faced an existential crisis, kind of like mine.
JM: Almost 50 years ago, a moment that was for me, almost cataclysmic, occurred at a daylong symposium of the Cousteau Society.
JS: That’s Jacques Cousteau, of course, the scientist and adventurer best known for exploring and protecting the oceans.
JM: It held a full day on three floors of a great coliseum in Boston, on the environmental problems assailing us: not just the oceans as Cousteau is connected with, but it was the oil spills, the acid rain, the poisoning the lakes. There was factory farming. It was just a whole jamboree of all these issues. All of it seemed to be growing, and a kind of assault on the human body. On all other species too. This was back then, it was in ’77, yeah, 50 years ago.
JS: So 1977 was 11 years before the UN would officially acknowledge the existence of anthropogenic climate change, and 15 years before the first UN Climate Conference in Rio. But Joanna suddenly and clearly understood that something was very wrong in humanity’s relationship to earth.
JM: There was no aspect of the natural world that seemed free of being undercut and losing its capacity, even, for vitality. We were destroying our world. We are destroying our world with every aspect of the power that we’ve accrued in corporate capitalism. And it brought a tremendous internal avalanche of grief. It was so arresting to me. It was so huge, the realization, that I couldn’t speak.
JS: At first, she bottled up these feelings and kept them to herself.
JM: And it silenced me. It silenced me for 15 months. I couldn’t speak of it to my friends, my family, my husband, my fellow academics in the department. I couldn’t bear being cheered up, because it was the assault on my psyche was that we were destroying our world.
JS: I asked Joanna why being cheered up was so unbearable to her.
JM: If they understood me even a tiny bit, they’d know that this was not cheer-up-able. It’s sort of like talking to somebody whose father will face the firing line the next morning, and you say, “Well, got to look on the bright side.” What’s the bright side? If you try to cheer me up, that means you didn’t get it. It only makes it worse. It only makes you feel more isolated.
JS: This was a big deal for me to hear her say this. Over my years of climate activism, I have at times felt desperate to be cheered up. I’ve also tried to pull my loved ones out of their pain from time to time. But what I’m coming to understand now is that cheering each other up is just another way of feeding denial, and denial only makes our circumstances worse.
JM: Because you know that if you really sense what’s happening, and you can’t hear it from anybody else except yourself, it makes you crazy. And there’s the loneliness of the unheard witness of what’s befalling our planet. You’ve been holding it back because you don’t want others to know how bad it is. You don’t want others to know how great is the grief. I didn’t want my family to know how much pain I was in. I didn’t want them to know my own suffering because it was enough to drive you mad to think that we were heading over the brink as a species, to bring this sense of anguish and isolation to my beloveds.
JS: But underneath, Joanna knew that hiding her pain away did her no good. She knew that she and other people who were feeling the same way needed a way to be with the full truth of what’s happening to the planet together, so that we could be listened to and understood, as opposed to carrying it silently and alone.
JM: Having people understand it was the greatest joy in the world. That means that it brings a mutual gratitude and respect. To find a home… It’s like you’ve been homeless for years and years, and suddenly you find a home, a roof over your head.
JS: She drew on her study of Buddhism, and began offering writing and group workshops that allowed her and her participants to share how they were feeling. And it snowballed from there, from the Cold War to the Chernobyl disaster to the emerging climate crisis. The urgency of the world intersected with Joanna’s passion through her academic work, global activism and collaborations with her friends and husband Fran.
And the result? Despair and Empowerment Work, or what is now known as The Work that Reconnects. The Work that Reconnects is one of the most powerful practices that I know of. It’s also incredibly hard to describe, partly because it’s so experiential. We’ll get into all of this more in future episodes, and you can practice The Work that Reconnects yourself by listening with friends and checking out our online toolkit. I’ll tell you more about these resources at the end of the episode.
For me, when I first experienced this work at that retreat in 2014, I came alive. Like Dorothy in Oz, it all went from black and white to technicolor. It’s all there now. Grief and fear, yes, but also beauty and awe and purpose. When Joanna first started talking about this, there wasn’t much of a public climate conversation, but now, almost a half a century later, climate disasters are regular front-page news and climate anxiety is an epidemic.
My relationship with Joanna has given me an understanding of how to go on, even amid change and loss, and this is what I hope these conversations will give to you.
You think you’ll come back as a crow?
JM: Oh, I’d love to. I would love to. Oh.
JS: This is from one of the last conversations that we had in this series, and it’s pretty emotional, because Joanna and I are confronting the fact that we don’t know how much time we have left to spend together.
I like thinking with you, and I know that it’s not over, but it’s like in order for us to move the project towards completion, I have to go do some thinking on my own and go through the material and then come back.
JM: Because you are creating material that will be… A lot of the people to whom it’s introduced, I’ll be gone.
JS: Yeah. I think that’s a part of what scares me, too, if I’m being totally honest.
JM: Well, that’s what I’m just sensing. Looking at this, I’m facing my gone-ness to come. And I’m used to being me. I like being me, and that being me will disappear under my feet and I will disappear. And what will be left? The words, I don’t want to say them, but what will be left is my love. That’s what my love for the world feels like. It’s something that I have to give, but how can it be given if I’m not here? Well, I will be here in what we’re making, and what you have with incredible courage stepped in to say, “I’ll have this to be there when you’re gone.”
JS: Thanks for saying it, because I didn’t have the guts to say it.
JM: Yeah, it’s a work of incredible caring. I just so love your spunk, your strength to look right into my mortality, our mortality, the mortality of this moment and say, “All right, I’m up for this. It makes sense to do this.”
JS: The work here, the next phase, is that in some ways it feels like moving… In a weird way, it feels like moving closer to losing you.
JM: Yes. That’s what I was just about to say. That you have the nerve and devotion to life and do our work to prepare this. It’s like preparing my shroud. You’re preparing for something that will be my gift when I’m gone, and your gift.
But you know what? When the emptiness comes and you look to where I sit on this couch and I’m not here, you’ll know you’ve been with me, gone already. You’ve been with me with gone. And so it’s an act of love for me and for those whom I’ve loved and who love me. You’re doing that. And if you didn’t cry, it wouldn’t be worth… It wouldn’t be any good for doing this job.
JS: As Joanna talked about what it means for us to be making this podcast in this late stage of her life, it reminded me of what she’s been teaching me for years about the daunting task of addressing the climate crisis.
JM: And so it’s an act of love, and if you didn’t cry, it wouldn’t be worth… It wouldn’t be any good for doing this job.
JS: To love our world well, in this time of great need, we need our pain. Joanna often says that love and pain are two sides of the same coin. We can’t have one without the other. We feel so much pain as we look at what’s happening to our world because of how much we love it. So when we allow our hearts to break, when we allow ourselves to really feel our outrage, fear, grief, rather than rushing to be cheered up or distracted, we can love our world with more generosity, because touching our heartbreak and touching our love are the same.
JM: So this conversation is surrounded by loss: loss of each other, and loss of the way we’ve lived on this planet. And there’s so much that you’re going to have to face that I won’t, I suppose.
JS: Yeah. And I feel only joy at you avoiding any suffering that might come across all of us in the years to come.
JM: Well, now I do feel sadder. That’s the grief for me.
JS: What is?
JM: That I won’t be there with you would help when it’s really awful. I breathe no sigh of relief that I’ll be gone. What comes up for me so strong now, as you’re aware, is that what’s true for me is this heartbreaking, open with love for what we’re doing. And there are many of us who are preparing themselves and the rest of us to carry forward as humans on this planet, when it becomes so unfriendly to our life form, to our fragility, there’ll be colder winters and hotter summers, then this kind of body I can’t handle well. And it just occurs to me that we are feeling so guilty toward the future ones. We must also realize that what we’re doing, so much that we’re doing out of compassion, that we are putting ourselves in the heart, minds, and bodies of those who are living toward the end of this very century, what things will be like 80 years from now or what things would be like in eight years from now.
JS: In our hyper-individualist society, it can be easy to experience what I’ve heard Joanna refer to as a “cultural amnesia”. We forget how incredibly interconnected we are: with each other, with our planet, with the long line of ancestors, who we come from and with the future ones. And that’s why Joanna calls for compassion. She uses the Sanskrit word “Karuna”.
JM: Let’s hear it for “Karuna”. Let’s hear it for the moral imagination, to link ourselves to those who come after us when we won’t be here.
JS: Remembering our interconnection is a mental muscle. We can practice and learn to get better at shaking ourselves free from that amnesia. It’s all there in the name of Joanna’s work, The Work that Reconnects. It’s hard to think of anything more important or more gratifying for us to be doing right now while our planet is in such grave danger, than reconnecting to each other and our world. To courageously face the crises around us, we need each other.
JM: You must speak. You can speak. You’re listening to me. I’m so grateful you can hear me. And that was what I needed from the get-go. And it’s what you need to. Who can you talk to and can you listen to?
JS: So this is what I want to leave you with this episode, an invitation to speak, listen, and share this podcast with people close to you, an invitation into a climate conversation that welcomes all of you, your fears, your uncertainty, your heartbreaks, your love, your dreams of a better future, and all the rest. I hope you’ll continue to join us at Joanna’s table as we dive in future episodes into more vulnerable and intimate conversations about living with our hearts intact amid this unfolding climate crisis. We want to make it easy for you to bring the insights from each of our 10 episodes deeper into your life, so we made a toolkit to help you form a podcast club where you gather with others to discuss the episodes. It has conversation prompts, instructions for practicing The Work that Reconnects together, related resources, and more. You can find it at WeAreTheGreatTurning.com and at the link in our show notes. Next time we’ll talk about what we call the Three Stories of Our Time.
JM: There are three stories that we can choose from because they are actually happening now in our world. The big drama that we’re in consists of these three stories and how we respond to them, how we choose to recognize them. So listen up.
JS: I’m listening.
JM: These are the three stories.
JS: Thanks for listening to We Are The Great Turning. This show is free for everyone made possible by our generous donors. If you’d like to, you can make a donation at WeAreTheGreatTurning.com. There, you can also find our toolkit with discussion prompts, guided exercises, and more to bring the insights from this podcast deeper into your life.
We build The Great Turning by talking and acting together. So please consider sharing these episodes with someone you love or forming a podcast club and going through the exercises in the toolkit together. This episode, we have a bonus for you. It’s a guided exercise designed to help you practice The Work that Reconnects with the people in your life. You can find the link to that bonus episode in your podcast app.
We love your feedback, so send us a note or a voice message at GreatTurning@SoundsTrue.com. You can find me on Instagram at Jess_Serrante, S-E-R-R-A-N-T-E, and at JessSerrante.com.
This show is brought to you by the Sounds True Foundation. Thank you to our team at Sounds True, especially Tami Simon and Fernie Tiflis. Our producer is Anya Kamenetz. Our audio producer and engineer is Luce Fleming. Our editorial consultant is Anna Sale. Thank you to Rising Appalachia for the use of their songs Resilient, Catalyst, and Novels of Acquaintance. Thank you to all of our generous donors who made this podcast possible. Christopher Hormel, the Best Family Foundation, the Calliopeia Foundation, Barbara Ford. Polly Howells, Linnea Lombard, Kathleen Sullivan, Blaise Dupuy, Miju Han, Gideon Wald, and everyone who contributed to our GoFundMe. Special thanks to Ann Simons-Bucher, Peggy Macy, Stephanie Caza, Jeremy Blanchard, Lucy Boucher, Jesse Marshall, Leilani Navar, and Jim Colgan.
I want to offer my deepest gratitude to Joanna Macy for her profound friendship and extraordinary generosity and wisdom. It has been the honor of my life to make this podcast with you. Something tells me I might wind up with a crow tattoo now, so that I can carry you with me forever.
JM: Yeah, that’s right. Right in the middle of your forehead.
TS: If you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations, and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
