Honoring Joanna Macy

Founder of the Work that Reconnects, Buddhist philosopher, deep ecology and systems thinking scholar, nuclear activist, translator of Rilke’s poetry, adventurer, and our beloved mentor and friend

Watch or Listen

Add Your Words

A Love Letter, from Lydia to all who grieve:

I feel you all so close, wave after wave of love for Joanna Macy and her work.

And as you love her, look up to her…take up your place in this world.

It is no accident that she transitions now in the darkest of times.

As Rilke writes, “You are the bow that shoots the arrow, and you are the target.”

I hear a call, soaring through this love we share, ripening us into this moment.

Become the Shambhala warriors you have read about. You will see darkness and desecration, and you will stay steady. You will grieve and love with eyes wide open.

You will see the interbeing of all things and take solace there. And take solace in the great love guiding the millions of people working now to repair our world.

Your very being is a frontline. You are humanity, ever-blooming, and will protect that flame in yourselves and others.

You will reach for each other, guide each other, and savor every breath of time we have with our precious planet.

For that is what we are.

We are The Great Turning

Joanna Macy was a scholar, teacher, author, activist, and most of all, an inspired woman with a wild love for the world. She lived an adventurous life alongside her beloved Fran Macy and their three children. From anti-nuclear activism, to Tibetan refugee communities in India, to Sarvodaya self-reliant communities in Sri Lanka, and communal living in Syracuse, NY, Joanna and her family lived their lives outside the box, following their passion for service and zest for life wherever it took them.

In addition to working with communities across the world, Joanna travelled the intellectual landscapes of general systems theory and Buddhist scholarship. She wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the relationships between these two bodies of thought, exploring how they enrich each other, and our work toward our common welfare. Joanna fell in love with the poetry of German poet Rainer Marie Rilke in the 1950s, and went on to translate four volumes of his poetry with her co-translator, Anita Barrows. In the hundreds of workshops Joanna facilitated later in her life, she would often read aloud Rilke’s poems.

General reflection on Joanna:

In the 1970s and 80s, led by her love for life and growing despair over the environmental and nuclear crises, Joanna developed a series of interactive practices, originally called ‘Despair and Empowerment Work’ and then renamed ‘The Work that Reconnects.’ These group practices help people ground in gratitude, become unafraid of their pain for the world, and shift their consciousness to know themselves as interconnected with each other, everyone part of the living body of Earth. Joanna’s work is experiential, multi-dimensional, and calls upon the “moral imagination”.

She invites people to dream into the past and the future, helping them actualize their unique roles to play in the ‘Great Turning’ to a life sustaining society — without needing to know what the outcome will be. Her work teaches that our grief and our rage are healthy responses to a world in crisis, and that these difficult emotions represent our true love for the world. When we feel and honor the intelligence that is these feelings, we can free up our energy to continue the great work of our time. Her writings and teachings consist of theories on change, activism, and transformative worldviews through which to view reality, all deeply inspired by Buddhist teachings, deep ecology, and systems theory.

Joanna’s body was transitioned from this life on July 19, 2025, surrounded by loving family, at the ripe age of 96. Yet Joanna will live on through her students and her teachings for decades — may it be centuries — to come. We consider Joanna to have been the living example of what she taught about: a ‘bodhisattva’, which is a Buddhist term for a soul who chooses to return to human form again and again to continue to help relieve the suffering of our world. Joanna was a friend, a mentor, a sage, a cheerleader and a spiritual grandmother of sorts, to many of us here at School for the Great Turning. We intend to carry her legacy into the future in the best way we know how. Knowing her in this life has been one of our greatest blessings. Thank you for what you have bestowed upon us. In your memory, we say, “that’s how it goes in the Great Turning.”