Weekend tip: Krista Tippett interviewing Joanna Macy

Joanna Macy

​"...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."

​In previous posts I have mentioned my admiration for Krista Tippett and her radio programme/podcast On Being. I am reading her latest book "Becoming Wise" (non affiliate link) and savouring every word. It is beautiful, inspiring and deep nourishment on all levels.

The podcast is brilliant, you can download it on your phone and listen in the car/when you are cleaning/ironing or (please do!) lounging on a Sunday afternoon :)

Her interview with Joanna Macy "philosopher of ecology...translator of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke" particularly touched me and I listened to it a number of times yesterday in the car. In this interview she is in her eighties and sums up everything that I believe in a way that I hope I will be able to do when I am that age.

She talks about a "pivotal time in the landscape of her life" when she realised that "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 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 and that, if we can be fearless, to be with our pain, it turns. It doesn't stay static. It only doesn't change if we refuse to look at it. But 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."

"So that is what keeps me going, Krista. The Great Turning is a revolution that is underway, the transition to a life-sustaining society, that this is sprouting up in countless ways, new ways of holding the land, new ways of generating energy, new ways of producing food, some of them very old ways that we are going back to, wisdom of the ancestors and of the indigenous people, often, new ways of measuring prosperity and wealth, new ways of handling differences through nonviolent communication, through restorative circles instead of outside the dominant punitive penal system now. There’s a tremendous energy."

I leave you with this truly inspiring woman and her beautifully translated Rilke poetry.

Happy Sunday.

Link to On Being with Krista Tippett interviewing Joanna Macy

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