Joanna Macy Quotes

"In the first movement, our infancy as a species, we felt no separation from the natural world around us. Trees, rocks, and plants surrounded us with a living presence as intimate and pulsing as our own bodies. In that primal intimacy, which anthropologists call "participation mystique," we were as one with our world as a child in the mother's womb.

Then self-consciousness arose and gave us distance on our world. We needed that distance in order to make decisions and strategies, in order to measure, judge and to monitor our judgments. With the emergence of free-will, the fall out of the Garden of Eden, the second movement began — the lonely and heroic journey of the ego. Nowadays, yearning to reclaim a sense of wholeness, some of us tend to disparage that movement of separation from nature, but it brought us great gains for which we can be grateful. The distanced and observing eye brought us tools of science, and a priceless view of the vast, orderly intricacy of our world. The recognition of our individuality brought us trial by jury and the Bill of Rights.

Now, harvesting these gains, we are ready to return. The third movement begins. Having gained distance and sophistication of perception, we can turn and recognize who we have been all along. Now it can dawn on us: we are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again — and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way than before, in our infancy."

In choosing our story, we not only cast our vote of influence over the kind of world future generations inherit, but we also affect our own lives in the here and now. When we find a good story and fully give ourselves to it, that story can act through us, breathing new life into everything we do. When we move in a direction that touches our heart, we add to the momentum of deeper purpose that makes us feel more alive. A great story and a satisfying life share a vital element: a compelling plot that moves toward meaningful goals, where what is at stake is far larger than our personal gains and losses. The Great Turning is such a story.

In the past, changing the self and changing the world were often regarded as separate endeavors and viewed in either-or terms. But in the story of the Great Turning, they are recognized as mutually reinforcing and essential to one another.

The obvious choice, then, is to extend our notions of self-interest. For example, it would not occur to me to plead with you, “Don’t saw off your leg. That would be an act of violence.” It wouldn’t occur to me (or to you) because your leg is part of your body. Well, so are the trees in the Amazon rain basin. They are our external lungs. We are beginning to realize that the world is our body.

By refreshing our sense of belonging in the world, we widen the web of relationships that nourishes us and protects us from burnout.

Most Americans get their news from corporate-controlled media. At the same time, right-wing interests and ideologues are buying up the major newspapers, radio and television stations across the country which people have looked to over the years for balanced reporting. Now too often, they find misinformation, outright deception and the fomenting of false fears in once-trusted media. Such manipulation of the news keeps people ignorant and confused about what’s really going on.

How dare I be discouraged in the work By anything so trivial As the fear of personal failure? — Paul Williams

Be generous with your strengths and skills. They are not your private property, and they grow from being shared.

Yet, even focusing on this present life, disciples often queried the Buddha as to who is responsible for the habits, sufferings, and pleasures we experience. In reply, he refused to say that they are caused by a past actor with whom we have no more connection. One cannot categorically separate the “I” who experiences the result from the “I” who set it in motion; for they are not discontinuous. Yet neither are they the same. One cannot say that “one and the same person both acts and experiences the result,” for the person is different, altered. There is a continuity, but it is not the continuity of an agent as a distinct and enduring being. The continuity resides in the acts themselves that condition consciousness and feelings in dependent co-arising. It inheres in the reflexive dynamics of action, shaping that which brought it forth.

The biggest gift you can give is to be absolutely present, and when you're worrying about whether you're hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you're showing up, that you're here and that you're finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that. That was what is going to unleash our intelligence and our ingenuity and our solidarity for the healing of our world.

While we touch on both of these, our focus is on how we can strengthen our commitment and capacity to act, so that we can best play our part, whatever that may be, in the healing of our world.

It is the delusion that the self is so separate and fragile that we must delineate and defend its boundaries; that it is so small and so needy that we must endlessly acquire and endlessly consume; and that as individuals, corporations, nation-states, or a species, we can be immune to what we do to other beings.

Grace happens when we act with others on behalf of our world.

In the face of impermanence and death, it takes courage to love the things of this world and to believe that praising them is our noblest calling.

The heart tht breaks open can contain the whole universe.