Joanna Macy on ‘Waking Up Together’
Excerpted from an interview by Dahr Jamail, in Truthout
Learning to See in the Dark Amid Catastrophe: An Interview With Deep Ecologist Joanna Macy
Jamail | What is called of us now, from the planet? What are we being called to do at this time?
Macy | To wake up together. That is actually the name of the movement in Sri Lanka that I went over to do field work with. Sarvodaya. Taking the Gandhian term, but using it in a slightly different way, but the same Sanskrit, which is “everybody wakes up together.”
It’s hard to wake up alone now. It’s scary to see even what is going on. But there is almost no limit, I’ve come to believe, to what we can do with the love and support of each other. There is almost no limit to what we can do for the sake of each other. This taps into the Bodhisattva heart. That’s that hero figure of Mahayana Buddhism, “the one with the boundless heart.” The one who realizes there is no private salvation.
If you are going to wake up, you have to wake up together. Never has that been more true than now, at this stage of late stage corporate capitalism.
There is a huge force, through the media, through the banking system, through these people and corporations that are locked in runaway system that is very hard for them to stop now. Because once you create something, an economic system or being or contraption that has to keep making more money, it is forced to do that. It is forced into these extractive industries, and the mining. Even the nicest people are caught up in this. These are super-human forces and principalities, and so many are trapped in it. Those who appear to be our enemies, they are just flesh and blood who are also trapped by this economic system. And it’s good for that system to keep making nuclear bombs. It had President Barack Obama over a barrel. He was caught in that system before he walked into the White House as president. And his first act had to do with more permission being given to Wall Street.
So that can give us compassion for each other. And we don’t have to waste time being scared of each other. We can see each other as captives of a force that’s got us all by the throat. But we can stop it. We have to help each other wake up to how we are destroying everything we love, before we are turned into robotic instruments of these inhuman systems. Just by their own logic, it is pretty simple to see.
It’s going to be beautiful to see what we dare to do. Facing our fears, and letting go of and getting over our knee-jerk reactions to what we think we don’t like, or are afraid of. To see our capacity to walk into the fire. To discover how much we really love being alive. To give ourselves a taste of what that passion is. To let us fall really in love with our planet, and its beauty, and to see that in ourselves, as well as in each other.
The inhuman economic machine does not love us back. It makes us into robots. It sucks us into the destruction of all that is. And even if we can’t turn it around now, at least we can wake up, so that in the time that is left we can discover who we are, just looking into each other’s eyes. Just looking into the face of the moon at night, or the trees, or the faces of our children and free ourselves. I think we want that.
We can do that, we are capable of that, and that is what I see happening. I know that is possible, because I see it. Because it’s happened to me, and countless of my brothers and sisters. They don’t have to do the Work That Reconnects, they just have to fall in love with life, and there are many ways that people are doing that.
And as you do, you find that you are not alone here. We not only have each other, but we have the ancestors. And we have the future ones. And that is the truth. The ancestors are with us because their blood flows in our veins. They made us. We wouldn’t be here without them. Every single one of them, back through time, carried us like a seed. They are here. And they are worried sick about us.
And the future ones — we carry the future in us. And the future ones and the ancestors, I feel they surround us at times, as witnesses. And if we open our heart-minds to them, they can give us guidance and strength and strength in our hearts. Because it helps us realize how big we are. We are bigger than the balance sheets of the mega-corporations. But the mega-corporations are not real. We are real!
Jamail | People are starting to take radical actions — the resistance at Standing Rock, people chaining themselves to railroad tracks to block coal trains, etc. — valiant acts of resistance — yet much of mainstream society still has not joined with these movements. Talk about that disparity, and that phenomenon.
Macy | There again is the betrayal from the media. Fox News and all the others are made to do what they do, skewering the truth as they do.
These people who take these valiant actions to help the Earth, they call to me at the center of my soul. They are the cutting edge of human evolution. They have broken free from being captives of the hyper-individualism of our culture. They are no longer held captive by their lonely ego winning out over other people. They are no longer held captive by a shrunken ego.
And to me, there is nothing more beautiful. I see beauty in them. Such great moral beauty. They are aflame with meaning. They are like beacons. They are saying, “Don’t let it get the best of you. This is just hardware! This is just cement and steel! Don’t let this cow you. See, watch! I’m not afraid. I’m going to do it. I’m going to lock myself down…. But see! See how it is to be free!”
That’s what I hear them saying to the psyche. I think there is nothing more beautiful. They are showing us what we can be. That we can spring free, and walk out of the prison cell of the separate ego and find our true nature in our inter-woven-ness in the web of life.
Oh, that just blows my mind it is so beautiful! It makes me so glad to be alive!
About the Authors:
Eco-philosopher Joanna Macy, Ph.D., is a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory and deep ecology. A respected voice in the movements for peace, justice and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with five decades of activism. As the root teacher of the Work That Reconnects, she has created a ground-breaking theoretical framework for personal and social change, as well as a powerful workshop methodology for its application.
It’s Time to Weave our Souls and weave Waves of Deep, Powerful CHANGE.
❤️Lina Cuartas