Meditations in an Emergency

07/21/2025

The woman that was Joanna Macy is gone. And still here as books, teachings, in students, friends, and through broad influence even beyond those who know her and her work. She’s a tree that’s fallen; she’s a tree that trees have grown out of; she’s now part of the past, but also she fed and nourished and loved and guided a possible future, a hopeful and demanding future, demanding in that we would have to change ourselves and our society to make it.

It’s almost strange to think about her integrity, her compassion, her generosity at a time when the news is full of stories about cruel and corrupt men and the wreckage they’ve strewn all around them, but she’s a reminder that their opposite is also present in the world and even in the nation; the same society produced them both. Joanna Macy is gone. Joanna Macy is with us in a thousand ways and even if she fades from the conversation about who we are and what we can do about our relationship with the planet, she will be underneath the effort of countless others, feeding and anchoring their work.

There’s a Jewish response when hearing of a death: “May their memory be a blessing.” With Macy there is no need to wish it be so; we know her life was a long blessing as out of love for the earth and tenderness toward what impairs our care for it, she toiled, studied, created, translated from other languages into English but also translated from inchoate emotions like fear and grief to clarity and action, translated the riches of Tibetan Buddhism into what she believed might be useful to us in the Western world, and what might make us useful to the survival of the natural world.

Berries of many kinds are ripening in this forest on the shores of an inland sea; I eat blackberries, both Himalayan and native, red huckleberries of a kind new to me, a couple of salmonberries whose drupelets look like golden-red fish eggs, see again and again the trunks of cedars curving before rising, like the prow of ships sailing through the deep time of these forests, see the roots that reach for darkness, the trunks and branches that reach for light, see this place in the gentle weather of summer, see the great trunks of trees that washed ashore in the storms of winter, see ravens, an owl, robins, eagles, buzzards, seagulls. I see love in the signs of how people have cared for and protected and walked these woods. I see deep time in the old trees and the cycle of life.

Macy said to Tippet in that 2010 interview, “But actually, we’re made for that. There’s a song that wants to sing itself through us, and we’ve just got to be available. Maybe the song that is to be sung through us is the most beautiful requiem for an irreplaceable planet or maybe it’s a song of joyous rebirth as we create a new culture that doesn’t destroy its world.” She invited us to sing both songs or maybe to know they’re the same song, to sing the requiem for a dying world that could welcome what remains possible.

She is present, she is gone beyond, she has become a falcon, a storm, a great song.