Joanna Macy, our beloved root teacher of the Work That Reconnects, passed away on July 19, 2025 at age 96. The Deep Times editorial team plans to include a community-wide tribute to Joanna in our March 2026 issue, which will have the theme of connecting to ancestors. However, we want to include a small tribute in this issue, so each of us on the editorial team shares our own memories of and gratitude for Joanna.
We begin and end with poems from our resident poets, with short prose pieces in between.
by Karina Lutz:
Slow death
When death comes…I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over…
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
~Mary Oliver
When life comes,
let’s not be full of argument either,
or wracked with uncertainty,
let’s welcome it like the ten thousand sorrows
we’ve learned to befriend
like Rumi, like Milarepa, like Rilke.
Let us love like Joanna,
this great, voluptuous-horrific world
of lovers and demons,
even as the line between the two runs
through each of us.
May us and them not be so full of argument
or uncertainty. We know one thing for certain:
that this is it.
We may say death comes
sometimes ‘too fast’,
like war, like nukes,
and sometimes ‘too slow’,
like climate chaos, like nukewaste.
And now we say
the end is near.
Yet all is near in deep time.
Still uncertainty can be excruciating.
Joanna showed us:
be with that,
closed her eyes, and showed us,
if we left eyes open,
how to breathe
till whenever.
She showed: life is relational,
flows in and out of systems.
Don’t fall, she said, don’t fall
for the illusion of the separate self
even when looking at a body,
even when watching a body leave us,
even when what we love changes
—O Earth!—
“Look at those redwoods,
loving us,” she said at the end.
Surrounding us with love:
no us,
no them.
by Molly Brown
Joanna has been a major presence in my life for the last 35 years, more than half of my adult life. My professional work has been shaped by her teaching, writing, and thinking–and friendship– since 1990, when I attended her workshop on Nuclear Guardianship and joined the “Fire Group” that she and her husband Fran hosted. In the following years, we taught together, co-facilitated workshops, and wrote two editions of Coming Back to Life, while getting together as often as was possible to talk, scheme, and simply enjoy each other’s company. Joanna’s teachings (well described in A Wild Love for the World) are central to my thinking and worldview, so much so that it is difficult for me to discern what I learned from Joanna and what came from other sources (and she introduced me to many).
We never lived in the same town; for 12 years I was an hour’s drive away, for four years, 1000 miles away, and for the last 21 years, a five hour drive away. So I had to find my own parallel path and ways of teaching. Moreover, the interplay of my strong background in psychosynthesis and Joanna’s teachings makes it impossible to sort what came from who or where. We swam in the same philosophical soup, along with so many other people–so beautiful.
Thank you dear Joanna for being in my life, for offering me so many opportunities to work creatively and collaboratively with you, for introducing me to so many wonderful colleagues and friends, and for loving and affirming me in so many ways. I love you, in body and now in spirit.
by Carolyn Treadway:
Simply put, Joanna taught me how to live and (recently) taught me how to die. Over the many years she has been my teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend. I would not be the person I became without the influence and example of Joanna (and Fran) Macy.
I first learned of Joanna in 1983 via her pamphlet Despairwork. Little did I know this pamphlet would change my life! Soon I read her new book Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age. It spoke deeply to my angst about nuclear war and nuclear waste.
I realized the power of Despair Work the very first time I experienced an open sentence exercise: my partner, a stranger, now knew more about my nuclear angst than my own family!
I was hooked (to do this work)!
Early in 1984, I accompanied Joanna to several Midwestern workshops I had organized for her. Those days were formative in my becoming a lifelong anti-nuclear activist. Years later, because of Joanna (and Fran) I was one of a handful of people who prevented the construction of a second nuclear power reactor in Clinton, Illinois. I consider that to be part of Joanna’s legacy.
Every training I attended with Joanna was so amazing, empowering, and sacred. Seeds II, 30 days on the Oregon coast in 2007, was especially so for me. Joanna invited us to live in the Fourth Time while we were creating our community of 60. Good practice for the Great Turning!
Joanna showed me how to live using my deepest emotions to put my values into action, cherishing all life, and acting on its behalf. In her recent dying process, Joanna and her helpers taught us so much about planful dying held in local and worldwide interactive circles of care and love. To me, it is an example for the Great Turning.
By Martha O’Hehir
I see Joanna in my mind’s eye, leading a two-week intensive at the Rowe Center. Joanna in her ethnic tunics and dangly earrings, telling stories. Joanna leading the elm dance, Joanna in the forest, discovering “aha’s.” Joanna with her bright and hopeful eyes and mouth, always looking into us as if we will suddenly blossom with insight into the radical interdependence of all phenomena. Joanna speaking our vows and awaiting our antiphonal response of commitment. These vows which guide and connect me to her work and to her.
Quickly following, and daily now, I find myself walking a spiral of Joanna consciousness and open sentences. I am grateful for… Joanna’s courage, for speaking the truth about nuclear proliferation, climate change, and what is an active manifestation of hope. I feel the loss… of her body-presence on this planet as a “mother of my eco-birth” and how she embraced the pain and fear in my soul, and blessed it into action. I see her now… as an ancestor, as a living and guiding spirit, as a source of cosmic energy that she infuses in my being to carry on this work. Going forth,…I ask her, “what’s next?” and “where do we go from here?”
Today, I find her walking the spiral as spirit. She is grateful beyond imagination, she honors with even greater compassion all that is sad in the world, she sees with everwidening eyes all of her children and life to the edges of the cosmos, and her spirit is going forth with me, with us.
By Rebecca Selove
An intriguing book title, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, led me to Joanna in the late 1980’s. The book expanded my framework for living, loving Earth, and orienting myself in the face of multiple layers of planetary-scale collapse and disintegration.
I am grateful for having been in three workshops with her. Those precious times have lingering aftereffects, amplified by reading her words and sharing time with others in the vast network of The Work That Reconnects. I am grateful especially for her articulation of three ways of participating in The Great Turning. I comfort myself, and sometimes others, with the thought that there are many ways to contribute as part of the international community of activists, artists, caregivers, writers, and others united by commitment to active hope. One of my favorite and most sustaining of Joanna’s comments, printed on the back of a Thank You card I designed, is “Gratitude is a revolutionary act.”
The tearfulness I feel when thinking about Joanna comes from grief that she is gone and joy that she was here. I give thanks for her generous spirit and to the community that continues to expand and support change.
By Kevin Lay
In Arizona I saw Joanna Macy’s face on a poster for a meditation retreat which among other things described her as a deep ecologist. That was enough for me. The retreat was in 1994 at Manzanita Village in the hills outside San Diego.
I went on to read Joanna’s book “Mutual Causality and General Systems Theory” and loved discussing paticcia sammupadda, with her. That’s a Pali phrase that means dependent co-arising. Paticcia sammupadda is a generalization of cause and effect that is like an ancient expression of quantum entanglement. It felt satisfying to learn how all things are connected and this turned out to be my introduction to practicing Buddhism. Since then, I attended many of Joanna’s retreats, including the Seeds II 30-day retreat on the coast of Oregon. She continues to be a beacon of loving clarity to me.
For Joanna
When I heard the news of your passing
my eyes filled with tears.
The bright sky blossomed
three high eagles.
Good bye lovely teacher.
I turned away to write this down
and then turned back. The eagles were gone.
This is how you ripple outward.
By Erin Holtz Braeckman:
Beloved Mother
as Tree of Life
you are the
house of belonging
charting in widening rings
the weight of our stars
each transit and return
of holy lament and ordinary awe
a weathering pith that fruits
in lanterns of gold
filled with some distant sun
made known from seed
so that by your
arboreal skies
we might move in measure with the light
