From Joanna Macy’s ‘World as Lover, World as Self’

With the change of administration in Washington DC, it feels like as good a time as any to look back at Joanna Macy’s book World as Lover, World as Self. It was originally written in 1991. Yet, I read it in 2021 and found myself saying “YES!” “YES!” over and over again – feeling as though it was written for this time, and well maybe it was.

adrienne maree brown gives this revew “Joanna Macy unveils an ancient set of roots for our work to transform the future. Macy weaves the spirit work of Buddhism into our community and activism work, helping us grasp where we are in the Great Turning.”

Joanna Macy PhD’s bio reads: “scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology. A respected voice in movements for peace, justice, and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with learnings from six decades of activism and a ground-breaking framework for personal and social change.”

Here are a few passages from World as Lover, World as Self to entice you to read the whole book.

“Nature is alive and seamlessly whole, often symbolized by a circle: the sacred hoop of life.”

“So gratitude is liberating. It builds a sense of sufficiency that is quite subversive to the consumer economy.”

“The refusal to feel takes a heavy toll. It not only impoverishes our emotional and sensory life – flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstatic – but psychic numbing also impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in resisting despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies. Fear of despair erects an invisible screen, filtering out anxiety-provoking data. In a world where organisms require feedback in order to adapts and survive, this is suicidal.”

“It can help to realize that falling apart is not such a bad thing. Indeed, it is essential to evolutionary and psychological transformations as the cracking of outgrown shells.”

“We don’t need to protect ourselves from change, for our very nature is change.”

“We build the road and the road builds us.” - Sarvodaya Movement in Sri Lanka

“Some experiences seem to change the shape of who we are and leave us reconfigured – with gateways where there had been walls, and closet doors leading to wild woodlands and the sea. Whether suddenly complete or slowly unfolding, these experiences are always a gift – whole, sufficient, and free of doubt.”

“Bellah pointed out that the individualism embodied in and inflamed by the industrial growth society is accelerating. It not only causes alienation and fragmentation in our society but is also endangering our survival. Bellah calls for a moral ecology. ‘We have to treat others as part of who we are,’ he says, ‘rather than as a them  with whom we are in constant competition.’”

“As your heart breaks open, there will be room for the world to heal.”

“We discover ourselves through what we awaken in others.”

“Speed and haste, as many a wise on has pointed out, are inherently violent. The violence they inflict on our environment is not only because of our appetite for time-saving devices and materials to make them but also because they put us out of sync with the ecosystem. The natural systems that sustain us move at slower rhythms than we do. The feedback loops are longer and take more time than our interactions with machines. In the rush of minutes and seconds, we don’t notice the slow increments of sea level rise or the changing length of seasons. Our own accelerating speed distances us ever more from the rhythms of the natural world and blinds us to our impact upon it.”

“‘Is it more important to work on yourself? Or is it more important to be out there on the barricades?’ Those are such useless arguments, because actually we have to do it all.”

“First, let us ground ourselves in gratitude. To effect any real change, gladness to be here is essential.”