As many of you will already be aware, on 20 July 2025, on a Sunday morning, Australian time, the beloved Joanna Macy died. We want to take some time to honour her in this newsletter, as her work, her vision and her dreaming are foundational to the work that Psychology for a Safe Climate offers.
I first met Joanna in 2012 when I was travelling in California, and almost by chance, found myself on one of her intensives. After years of working in the environment space as a grassroots activist and then as a fledgling community organiser I was feeling a little lost. I knew I wanted to contribute and show up, and that climate change was the issue of our generation, but I felt disillusioned and disconnected from myself and the world around me. Meeting Joanna, and experiencing the Work that Reconnects brought me back into the deeper truth of who I was and what it meant to ‘show up’ at this time. There are few moments in life where you know they are turning points as they are happening. This first encounter with Joanna and her work was one such turning point for me, and I could feel it in the moment, changing my whole world and future before me. A few years later I returned to live in California and had the privilege of learning directly from Joanna for the two years that I was there.
I would not be doing the work I do today without the pivotal role Joanna has played in my life as a teacher and guide. Joanna opened me to the fundamental and life-giving connection between grief and love that remains the hub of my life and work. Before I encountered Joanna and the Work that Reconnects, I felt compelled to justify and explain my advocacy for nature using the scientific and political framing of the culture I had grown up in (modern, Western, scientific, rational). Love was a sentimental, romantic, flimsy notion not to be touched upon publicly. But Joanna modelled a courageous reclamation and declaration of the love that is at the heart of all our activism and actions to protect nature. She moved beyond even that notion of separation and taught that our deep feelings are expressions of the earth, moving through us as earth.
Joanna taught this by inviting people into experiences of this truth, rather than simply talking or lecturing about it. She offered practices that opened the body, heart and mind to new ways of feeling, listening and knowing that were rooted in connection and interdependence so that this knowledge lived on in our bones, not just our minds.
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Here I am with Bronwyn Gresham facilitating the Mirror Walk (one such experiential practice from the Work that Reconnects) with the Learning Team from the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. It is always a joy to get outside and invite people to wander with one another, taking in the world as a mirror that reflects back who they really are. This practice softens and opens people to beauty, mystery and connection. When I first experienced it myself it completely altered my sense of self - which is to say, it undid me completely! In the months after I first did the Mirror Walk, every time I looked at a tree, or a river, or even a pile of rubbish by the side of the road, my whole sense of who I was dissolved, and I literally felt I was that tree, that river, that empty can rolling down the gutter. Slowly my old sense of self (or even what it meant to be a self) ebbed away and transformed into something far larger, more complex, more beautiful and freeing than what I had identified with before.
The day after she died I gathered with friends and others who had known Joanna in Australia at a friend’s property by the Birrarung river. As the sun went down we lit a fire and shared stories of Joanna. At the end we got talking about the Elm dance, and some people there had never done it, so myself and my dear friend Claire Dunn led the group through the steps together. As we moved the steps and listened to the song, we spoke the people and places we were grieving. I could feel every other time I had moved in a circle like this with others to this song, I could hear Joanna’s voice in my head, and the faces of the many others I have been in circle with in this way. I could feel all the generations who had moved in circles like this one, singing and honouring the places and beings that mattered to them. Suddenly Joanna’s death was more real to me because I was moving in my body with other people, I was speaking to what had been lost. The tears came, and with them, the relief of really feeling my grief. That was the beginning of assimilating the reality of Joanna’s death.
The practices of the Work that Reconnects return us again and again in this way to the ground of what is real. From there we have a place to take that next meaningful step, and this is what Joanna taught: how to alchemise and dance with the pain so that we can open to, and love our world, just as it is.
One of my own great joys as a facilitator, is witnessing others rediscover and reclaim their own love for our living earth. I’ll never forget a workshop some years ago when an older gentleman, who had been working in the environmental field his whole life shared in the closing circle with some softness and real astonishment that he had just realised that all of his work had really been motivated by love. In recognising and naming this I could see the fresh rootedness, confidence and strength in his body.
Recognising and naming our feelings can do this - to speak and experience our love resituates us in a lived and embodied truth that is energising and real. It awakens us also to the tangible responsibilities that accompany this connection and care. We act though, from love, rather than from obligation or even some sense of ‘doing the right thing’. In the current age of social media moralising, and obsession with appearances, this is no small thing.
Joanna's body of work as a scholar, as a facilitator and as a translator of Rilke is formidable, but in the end it was her presence, her courage to show up in her own pain and joy, moment to moment, that moved and changed me on a deep cellular level. One day I was sitting with her talking about her memoir Widening Circles and she said to me, "Beth, may you live a beautiful life!". This was no random platitude, it was like she tapped into the deepest possibility I was yearning for and gave me permission to live it.
Joanna was like that - her words and stories were transmissions of insight and love that extended you beyond what you thought was possible. And now more than ever, we need permission to dream into a world that is beyond what we think is possible.
My gratitude to have known this being is immense, and I vow to share what I have learned from her for the rest of my life.
