Foreword for Joanna Macy: A Wild Love for the World
Purple Hills Ghost Ranch No II, Georgia O'Keeffe
In the early 1980s I was driving along a poorly paved road in the outer suburbs of New York City, my right hand fiddling with the radio dial in hopes of finding some decent songs to listen to. As the sound skidded from station to station – between the white fuzz of static and intermittent snatches of innocuous, overproduced music – I abruptly heard a clear and curious voice, not exactly singing, but definitely singsong, lilting up and down. I stopped turning the dial and just listened. At a brief station break, the woman being interviewed was identified as Joanna Macy, a Buddhist scholar and activist. And then there was that unusual voice again, breathy, with a slightly nasal twang, saying something astonishingly simple…
"You know, the oxygen we need to breathe is precisely what all the green plants around us are breathing out. So what the plants breathe out, all of us are breathing in. And then what we breathe out is just what all those plants need to breathe in…"
Wait a minute. I pulled the car over to the side of the road in order to think about this… Was this true? Like many young people in the states, I had studied the process of photosynthesis in high school, and then in more depth in my college biology courses. I knew well that the oxygen in the atmosphere was generated by plants. I also knew plenty well that we and other animals breathe out carbon dioxide as a by-product of our own respiratory metabolism. But I had been taught these as two entirely separate mechanical processes. Somehow, I had never noticed how mutually entangled these two activities were.
And I had surely never thought of plants as breathing. I stepped out of the car to gaze at the leafing trees near the road. Plants just "give off" oxygen automatically, don't they? Yet the more I thought about it, the more I saw the perfectly analogous nature of these two processes, one zoological and one botanical. If we call our own uptake of oxygen from the air around us "breathing in," and the giving off of carbon dioxide from our lungs is called "breathing out," then surely we could say that all these green and rooted beings inhale carbon dioxide, and that they exhale the oxygen we animals need to live. I mean, of course they were breathing! I looked around me, my nostrils flaring. The broad-leafed maples lining the road, and another tree scarred with someone's initials (the gray bark swollen with welts around the letters), and even the clumped grasses underfoot – I remember how these all seemed weirdly different, their edges shimmering in the summer heat. They felt more present, somehow, more intensely alive. Or rather I was more present to them, my animal senses now more open to these others as sensate beings in their own right, sensitive and sentient organisms vibrantly engaged in the same world as I.
Joanna's simple articulation in that radio broadcast has never left me. It was so dumbfoundingly obvious – something most all of us already knew, although the detached jargon of the academy had blocked us from noticing the utter wonder of the thing: What the plants are breathing out, all of us animals are breathing in. And what we creatures are breathing out, all of the plants are breathing in. The exquisite reciprocity, here, remains astonishing to me even today – a magic pulse of interspecies generosity quietly unfurling itself in the depths of the present moment, hidden at the heart of all our experience.
Of course, many meditative practices central to the great spiritual traditions work to gently bring our skittish attention back to the simple to-and-fro of our breathing. The very word "spirit" is cognate with "respiration" – both derived from the Latin spiritus, which originally meant a breath or a gust of wind. Yet spiritual practice, in the West, is commonly framed as a path to personal fulfillment – as a way to find oneself, or to transcend one's suffering, or simply as a way to open and deepen one's inner life. In the course of my own work as an ecologist and activist, I have often found myself teaching in tandem with Buddhist masters who skillfully draw practitioners to an awareness of the breath sliding in and out of their nostrils…yet somehow they never connect that breath to the birds swooping past, to the herbs and trees drinking sunlight all around us, to the whoosh of the wind along the walls of the zendo. Even when teaching out of doors, the most ostensibly awake spiritual teachers commonly fail to notice – much less make explicit for their students – the seamless continuity between their breath and the encompassing atmosphere, roiling with birdsong and clouds of pollen from the trees.
Yet clearly, that is where Joanna Macy begins. Her understanding of spiritual wisdom carries us not inside ourselves but out into the depths of the earthly sensuous. In the second of the ten life-changing epiphanies that she describes in this book, Joanna writes that she "turned inside out" – such that her expanded body seemed to contain all the beings and events that she saw. For Joanna Macy the real "inner world" is the world that we are in – the world in which we're bodily immersed, along with all these other bodies: black bears, earthworms, sea turtles tangled in plastic, owl-haunted forests and rapidly eroding slopes strewn with clearcut debris.
And so it is here – in the collective depths of this world where we grapple and struggle and gather to dance, where we grieve the harrowing losses and then stand, shoulder to shoulder, to protect children and battered refugees, and to safeguard the wild-flourishing beauty that remains – it is here, in the improvisational thick of the Real, that we must practice our spiritual work.
*
At the lustrous heart of Joanna's lifework and practice lies the Buddha's jewel-like insight into the truth ofpratītyasamutpāda, or dependent co-arising – a principle that Joanna translates as "mutual causality" in her splendid doctoral dissertation on The Dharma of Natural Systems. And so you will encounter many references to this principle in the pages that follow, under a wide array of names – emergent co-arising, reciprocal causality, dependent co-origination, or even the deceptively simple notion that "everything leans" (that is, each apparently autonomous thing actually leans upon everything else).
Several decades ago, Joanna's spiritual brother, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh offered an eloquent translation of pratītyasamutpāda by coining the word "interbeing." It's a luminous and indispensable term. Sometimes, when I'm unable to sleep – hounded by worries for my children, or for the whirling Earth at this teetering moment in its unfolding – I throw off the covers and slip naked out the back door to gaze up into the fathomless deep. Often the moon floats there, a slender crescent like a billowing sail, or a full-round and radiant disk gliding in and out of the clouds. The moon's visage compels my gaze, and reciprocates it; I cannot help but sense the moon gazing back at me, locating me just here, where I stand, gazing up. In Thich Nhat Hanh's sense, the moon and I inter-are.
As taught by many other Buddhist scholars and masters, however, the insight of emergent co-arising can seem a highly abstract concept, exceedingly difficult to grasp or perceive directly. Joanna's way, though, is always to make such insights palpable, grounding them in our directly felt, bodily experience. What could be more visceral, more sensorially immediate, then breathing? Here is her pellucid translation (with Anita Barrows) of a stanza from one of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus:
Breath, you invisible poem!
Pure, continuous exchange
with all that is, flow and counterflow
where rhythmically I come to be.
The altered awareness of breathing as uttermost reciprocity – as a "pure, continuous exchange" between us furred or smooth-skinned animals and the numberless plants that surround us, each making possible the other – has become for me the most tangible, sensuous example of pratītyasamutpāda, the magic of emergent co-arising. Interbeing as interbreathing.
*
Today, in late spring, I walk in the foothills near my home, allowing my footfalls to slow to the pace of my breath. All around me, mountains are conjuring clouds out of the fathomless blue. My ears drink cricket rhythms and frog trills, while my nostrils inhale the scents of juniper and sagebrush. The fluted song of a hermit thrush quavers in the air. Drawn by a sweetness it can't resist, my nose nestles into the furrowed bark of one Ponderosa pine tree after another, guzzling the scents of vanilla and butterscotch from the rising sap. This holy Earth is far too wondrous to be fathomed or figured out by us. The erotic richness of the more-than-human world invites us always deeper into vital intimacy and participation with the rest of the real, drawing forth our tears at the compounding wounds while engendering an astonished and shadowed joy at finding ourselves immersed and participant in so much mystery, willing to risk everything for its continued flourishing…
*
A few years after hearing her voice on the radio I met Joanna face to face, and since then I've had the gift to learn from her, to break bread with her, and to teach alongside Joanna under the tall redwoods of California or on islands dense with red cedars and Sitka spruces in the Salish Sea. Yet the last time we saw one another, there were hardly any trees around: in the winter of 2017, we met in the high desert of northern New Mexico, and went walking for an afternoon in the multihued canyons there, surrounded by stratified layers of ocher and beige, of yellow-gold and rust-red rock. Our voices gliding in and out of the desert silence, each of us relaxed into the consummate pleasure of simply being oneself with a trusted other, sharing an almost drunken joy in the extravagant and shadowed beauty of the land. We soon found ourselves reciting poetry to one another, divergent verses echoing off the cliffs: Rilke, of course, and Tomas Transtromer, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. But there was an inward trembling as well. For we knew that on the following day, a woefully ignorant and mean-spirited member of our species was to be inaugurated as the president of our country. And so, clasping hands and gazing into one another's eyes, we offered spoken spells of protection for the well-being of our round and bleeding world.
Which brings me to say a few words regarding why I think that Joanna's work, and the many evolving practices she's fostered, will become ever more crucial in the decades to come. I am writing in the late spring of 2019, almost two and a half years after our wander in those canyons. The damage wrought – not just within our country but around the earth – by the demagogue who was installed the following day is already immense. Yet many citizens feel sure that the current American administration is only an aberration; they are confident that within a couple years our battered country will return to normal. I am less sanguine. The multiple atrocities of the twentieth century provide abundant evidence of the human propensity – when economies falter for too long, when crops fail or famine spreads – for polarization and scapegoating, for ethnic cleansing and genocide. No matter how "advanced" or "refined" the culture, whenever times get tough the most facile human response seems to be to locate some group to blame for all the troubles, and then try to eradicate them – or, failing that, to inflict upon them as much pain as possible.
And it is now evident that things will be getting hard for a very long while. Due to our long forgetting of our human embedment within a much more-than-human biosphere, it now seems probable that melting glaciers, scorching wildfires turning the midday-sun blood red, surging floodwaters overtopping levees, never-before-seen winds and soil-cracking heatwaves will be making things more and more difficult well beyond the foreseeable future, as our wombish world shivers into a bone-wrenching fever. In such a situation, should we not expect that the unconscious allurement toward demagoguery and scapegoating will swell and intensify? In such stressed-out times, those who wish to garner crowds and concentrate power have only to declare, with great certainty, whom the enemy is – have only to amp up fear, and then escalate hatred – in order to rapidly amass countless followers. Such is the collective psychology of this moment in the world's unraveling, when the ecological strains on our civilization are poised to intensify by the year, by the month, and soon enough by the day. The current occupant of the White House, and the crowd-inflaming rage he cannot resist sowing with evident glee, may not at all be an aberration, but simply an early glimpse of what is rolling toward us – not inevitably, no, yet an early symptom, or sign, of what may soon show itself more fully as our most ready mass response to rapidly rising panic.
How can we short circuit this reflexive recourse to scapegoating whenever adversity rolls like a great wave across numberless lives, and fear rises like a tide within the populace? Surely this is one of the greatest riddles of our broken era, a koan that demands our deepest and most attentive contemplation! If there exists anywhere a satisfactory reply to this conundrum, it likely resides in such earth-centered community practices as Joanna Macy's work has engendered. It likely resides in the dawning recognition of our thorough entanglement in this breathing biosphere, in the slow discovery that our lives are hopelessly dependent upon one another, but also upon the flourishing of earthworms, and humpback whales, and the clouds that gather like a clamorous crowd above the rainforest. If we and the melting glaciers inter-are with one another, if the life-giving atmosphere of this planet is born of the interbreathing of us animals with the grasses and the forests, then it behooves us to recognize that our two-legged forms are just our smaller bodies, and that the animate Earth is our larger Flesh – a vast, spherical metabolism in which our individual physiologies are all entwined. Earth is the wider and much wilder Life in which our separate lives all participate, of which each unique entity (a spinning spider, an aspen grove, a person) is but an internal expression.
How fleeting is anyone's experience relative to the broad lifespan of the planet! And yet we each partake of that whole. Indeed, there are those who give themselves so deeply to this world, who open their soul so fully to each chance encounter – who so thoroughly resolve not to shrink from any of the uncanny textures or flavors or feels that this life offers – that from these many encounters their heart distills a mysterious wine, an invisible elixir that streams out through their eyes to refresh all that they look upon, waking a secret and long-slumbering sentience in things, quickening a pulse deep within the ground wherever they wander.
Such a magical creature is Joanna Macy. When reading through the various chapters that follow, you may find yourself wondering how it is possible that a single human life can have touched and transformed so many others, in so many different places! Yet this is hardly a mystery. By offering herself so unconditionally to each locale and situation wherein she finds herself, Joanna's life radiates out to touch and enliven every cell within our larger, spherical Body. By giving herself with such abandon to the very presence of the present moment, Joanna's tears and her joy – like those of any genuine Bodhisattva – reverberate backward and forward to nourish each moment within the broad Life of the breathing Earth.