This beautiful interview and the wisdom found here is a gift to us all.
May we all open to the other face of our pain for the world.
May we be that brave and love that deeply.
Warmest blessings ~ Molly
An Interview by Krista Tippett of Joanna Macy
Krista Tippett: Something that's very present for me as I'm reading about you, and the passion you've had as an environmentalist for a long time, is that you also were always very aware that there is a sense of grief i how we take in news. And you really work with people to hold on to that, to take their grief seriously.
Joanna Macy: Or not hold on to it so much as to not be afraid of it. Because that grief, if you are afraid of it and pave it over, clamp it down, it shuts you down. And the kind of apathy and closed-down denial, our difficulty in looking at what we're doing to our world, stems not from callous indifference or ignorance so much as it stems from fear of pain. That was a big lesson for me as I was organizing around nuclear power and around the time of the Three Mile Island catastrophe and around Chernobyl.
That became actually perhaps the most pivotal point in, I don't know, the landscape of my life - that dance with despair, to see how we are called to not run from the discomfort and not run from the grief or the feelings of outrage or even fear. If we can be fearless, and be with our pain, it turns. It doesn't stay static. It only doesn't change if we refuse to look at it. When we look at it, when we take it in our hands, when we can just be with it and keep breathing, then it turns. It turns to reveal its other face. And the other face of our pain for the world is our love for the world, our absolutely inseparable connectedness with all life.
KT: In even thinking that way, a poetic mind-set is more useful than the kind of fact-based or argument-based way we tend to approach problems culturally, even precisely the same ecological problem.
JM: Oh, yeah. That keeps people from even mentioning how distressed they are, because they think that they need to have all the facts and figures and statistics to show that they intellectually can master the problem.
KT: But we get overwhelmed by the facts and the figures and the pictures. They are debilitating, they're paralyzing. As you're saying it's in part because we don't really know how to dwell with grief and turn it into something else. But I think about this a lot as a journalist, as somebody who works in media.
JM: Its a double-edged sword, isn't it? You're taking care of your mother and she's dying of cancer and you can't - you won't - say, I can't go in her house or in her room because I don't want to look at her. If you love her, you want to be with her. If we love our world, we're able to see the scum of oil spreading across the Gulf. We're able to see what it's doing to the wetlands and the marshes, what it's doing to the dolphins and the gulls. When you love something, your love doesn't say, "Well, too bad my kid has leukemia, so I won't go near her." It's just the opposite.
KT: I just want to underline the connection that you repeatedly make, which might be counter-intuitive. You talk about spirituality and you are also always equally talking about - these are some phrases from your writing that echo things you said -- your "wild love for the world" or even "an erotic connection with the world." Those two things go together for you.
JM: That's right. World as lover, world as self. And it's OK for our hearts to be broken over the world. What else is a heart for? There's a great intelligence there. We've been treating the earth as if it were a supply house and a sewer. We've been grabbing, extracting resources from it for our cars and our hair dryers and our bombs, and we're been pouring the waste into it until it's overflowing, but our earth is not a supply house and a sewer. It is our larger body. We breathe it. We taste it. We are it, and it is time now that we venerate that incredible flowering of life that takes every aspect of our physicality.
So I'm looking a my hand right now as we talk. It's got lot of wrinkles because I'm 81 years old, but it's linked to hands like this back through the ages. This hand is directly linked to hands that learned to reach and grasp and climb and push up on dry land and weave reeds into baskets. it has a fantastic history. Every particle and every atom in this hand goes back to the beginning of space-time. Were' part of that story.
You're always asked to sort of stretch a little bit more. And actually we're made for that. But in any case, there's absolutely no excuse for making our passionate love for our world dependent on what we think of its degree of health, whether we think it's going to go on forever. This moment, you're alive.
- Excerpted from Krista Tippett's new book Becoming Wise:
An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
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| Joanna Macy |
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