July 27, 2025
“If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear.”
“It’s walking the razor’s edge of the sacred moment where you don’t know, you can’t count on, and comfort yourself with any sure hope. All you can know is your allegiance to life and your intention to serve it in this moment that we are given. In that sense, this radical uncertainty liberates your creativity and courage.”
“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.”
– Joanna R. Macy, 1929 – 2025
Dear Friends,
How is your summer unfolding? Lately, I’ve been sitting with what it means to write during these times. I’m coming to peace with being a householder practitioner—someone rooted in a midlife filled with responsibilities. This season of life doesn’t offer much time to absorb, reflect deeply, research history, read books, and come up with profound wisdom. And I am so grateful for those who are engaging actively, distilling flood of information into thoughtful analysis and discussion, offering clarity and wisdom on how to engage at this time.
At the moment, I’m simply juggling my life, among a full-time job, raising a teenage son, taking care of my aging body, maintaining a spiritual life, and carving out time to organize and teach meditation offerings when I can. I feel a dissonance about taking in what is happening in our world and the mundaneness of my ordinary life. Yet, this is what I can do at this moment, balancing many priorities. One phrase from my meditation practice keeps returning: “Small moments, many times.” I am still taking in what’s happening, and reflecting on it when I can, and I know it is still making a difference at some level, in the actions I take, with the people I interact.
On July 19th, the world lost a luminous elder: A scholar, Buddhist, an ecologist, and an activist, Joanna Macy, passed away at the age of 96. Even at 95, Joanna remained insightful and clear. Just last year, she and Jessica Serrante made this 10-episode “We Are the Great Turning Podcast” that captured how she was holding the world at her age.
I had never met Joanna Macy and attended her workshops, but her work has deeply influenced all the work I do. In every class or ecodharma retreat where I offer work around climate resilience, they are rooted in Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects. If I am looking for a practice or a group exercise, I always return to her books, “Coming Back to Life” and “Active Hope.” Joanna Macy’s exercises, such as the Mirror Walk or the Truth Mandala, are often the ones that touch people most deeply and are the most transformative in my classes. I am so thankful that, as we are doing the work around climate resilience today, Joanna Macy had been a fearless pioneer and a deep thinker in creating and guiding this work. She created frameworks, articulated the complexities, and came up with countless creative exercises to help us process fear, anger, despair in the face of the climate crisis. Inspiring, fierce, yet loving, she urged us again and again to love this world, love our life, and opened our hearts to courage and creativity.
It was her circle work Truth Mandala that awakened me to the reality of the climate crisis eight years ago. I was in Mark Coleman’s nature meditation teacher training, and during one module, we explored climate grief through this practice. The topic was not new to me, but I hadn’t explored it emotionally. It remained an intellectual exercise. As I witnessed my peers process their raw grief, anger, and despair through this circle, I was deeply moved and stunned into silence.
A week later, reading a Native American story to my six-year-old son about a wolf guiding two children home, he asked me, “How many wolves are in the U.S.?” I looked it up later that night. The answer was almost none, except for a few that were allowed to live in the Yellowstone National Park. This animal that was once rampant in North America, the apex of the food chain and an integral part of this native ecosystem, was hunted to extinction. The next morning, after dropping my son at school, I sat in the church courtyard nearby, meditated, and sobbed. That moment broke something open in me—it was the beginning of my journey toward understanding the climate crisis from the heart and becoming engaged in the work of resilience. In the years since, I have conducted the Truth Mandala in classes and retreats, and each time, it is transformative to the participants as it was for me.
No matter how daunting the crisis is, Joanna Macy urged us not to numb out, not to be trapped in our challenging emotions, but to work through them, so we can tap into our lifeforce and be enlivened again. She often quoted Thich Nhat Hanh, whom was asked, “What do we most need to do to save our world?” His answer was this: “What we most need to do is to hear within us the sounds of the Earth crying.” She was struck that Thich Nhat Hahn did not point to a strategic plan or action, but listening was the first answer. Over the years, this story resonates with me more and more deeply. Before we make any strategic plans and take actions, we first need to allow our hearts to be touched. To feel the deep connection with all beings. It is from this softening, this connection, this love that we move into actions. Wise action and mind follow the heart.
When Joanna Macy talked about the grief, anger and despair about the environmental devastation, she also talked about the love and joy of this world at the same time. They always co-exist. Dancing, singing, and playfulness infused her work.
And what was most inspiring to me was that she first did this work in the 1980s and 90s, when the world was barely aware of climate change, when no one was listening or payting attention. Yet she was courageous and persistent, offering prolific and impactful work for half a century. She was not afraid to stand alone. What remarkable faith and a life of engagement and service.
And for those of us in midlife: Joanna started this work in her late 40s. She remained active until 95. Some of her most important contributions came during the second half of her life. It showed me that when our lifeforce is aligned with purpose, we can grow into elderhood and spend the second half of our life offering our best work yet. I love what Rebecca Solnit wrote about what a legacy means in honoring Joanna Macy,
“When I was younger, I was taught what an artist or writer was supposed to aspire to was immortality, the kind that Dante and Li Po and Shakespeare have, so that in centuries to come memory of your name and attention to your creations continue. Later in life, I realized that there was an entirely different thing to aspire to, an entirely different kind of creative success: to be so much part of your own time, of the present that is making the future, that rather than remaining what people think about, you become in some way how people think, how they value, what they prioritize. You stop being what’s in front of their eyes and become part of what is behind their eyes, how they see the world, how they live, act, what they aspire to, what they hold close, what they resist.”
I like to imagine that her soul is now off on some cosmic adventure—and that her spirit will continue to guide and bless the work of healing our beautiful, broken world. A fun inquiry might be, if Joanna Macy reincarnates, who would she choose to be in her next life at this planetary moment?
May we recognize that we are in the Great Turning that Joanna talked about. May we be the ones we are waiting for. May each of us find our own way to do our part, in whatever form it manifests. May we listen with our heart.
Blessings and love,
Lin
Photo: A friend running freely at sunset, Point Reyes National Park, California, June 2025.
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