Honouring Joanna Macy: A tribute in the time of compost and collapse
- Helen Ireland
- Jul 27
- 3 min read
In a world unravelling through ecological collapse, social fragmentation, and the spiritual exhaustion of late capitalism, some voices don’t just guide they tend. Joanna Macy was such a voice, as we reflect on her meaningful and impactful life, we are invited not merely to remember her but to respond.
More than a scholar of Buddhism, systems theory, and deep ecology, Macy was a weaver of fields, holding space for truths too heavy to carry alone and too sacred to carry without trembling. For over five decades, she helped humans stay with the trouble of this planetary moment. not by fixing it, but by learning to feel it, metabolise it, and be transformed.
And in 2025, amid climate tipping points, rising authoritarianism, and spiritual fatigue, her teachings ripple with fierce new urgency.
Active Hope: Composting certainty
At the root of Macy’s offering is a practice she called Active Hope, not hope as optimism, not hope as certainty, but hope as relational fidelity. She taught that we act not because we know we will succeed, but because we are in love with life.
This is not a productivity hack or an escape from grief. It is an orientation toward life’s trembling. Active Hope invites us into emotional sobriety, a capacity to feel the weight of despair, climate grief, and rage, without numbing, fleeing, or collapsing.
To feel grief is not pathology. It is participation.
The spiral of The work that reconnects
Perhaps Macy’s most enduring framework is The Work That Reconnects, a living spiral that invites us to metabolise the dissonance of modernity through a fourfold rhythm:
Coming from gratitude - Rooting in reverence for life’s web.
Honouring Our Pain for the World - Making space for sorrow, rage, and love.
Seeing with New Eyes - Re-storying reality through systems thinking, ancient wisdoms, and deep ecology.
Going Forth - Responding with humility, courage, and intergenerational responsibility.
This is not a linear sequence but a recursive compost heap, each layer breaking down, feeding the next, allowing unexpected growth. The spiral teaches us to relate not through control or resolution, but through surrender, curiosity, and co-stewardship.
The Great Turning: Holding the tension of three stories
Macy named three interwoven stories coexisting in our time:
Business as usual, the dominant story of extraction and progress.
The great unraveling, the story of breakdown and collapse.
The great turning, the emergent story of awakening, reweaving, and regeneration.
She did not ask us to pick a favourite. She asked us to see that all three are true. And that the act of turning is not one of escaping but of composting.This framing helps us remember: collapse is not failure. Collapse is metabolism. It is not the opposite of hope, but its invitation.
Why Her Work Matters Now (and always)
Today, Macy’s wisdom is more than relevant, it is metabolically necessary.
We live in “VUCA times” volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. People are exhausted, disoriented, and afraid. The logic of separability of humans as apart from the rest of nature is breaking down, but its hauntings remain.
Macy reminds us:
That despair is not the enemy. Disconnection is.
That we don’t need to be perfect to act. We need to be in relationship.
That we are nature defending itself. Not separate from life, but agents of its continuity.
Her work doesn’t offer answers. It invites us into a deeper question: How might we live, now that we remember we belong to everything?
Honouring Joanna
Joanna Macy’s body has returned to Earth. Her breath, now wind. Her voice, now water. Her wisdom is not a legacy to preserve but a compost pile to tend. Let us not rush to replace her. Let us resist making her into a saint or symbol. Instead, may we sit in the ruptures she held open and ask:
“What does this grief make possible? What does her death demand of our living?”
To honour her is to live the spiral she offered - to feel deeply, act humbly, and stay in love with life without guarantees. As she becomes ancestor, we ask: What does her death demand of our living?
To quote her once more:
“The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.”(Joanna Macy, The Work That Reconnects, 2007)
May her broken-open heart ripple through us, not as certainty, but as commitment.
Sources:
Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in with Unexpected Resilience & Power (New World Library, 2012)
Joanna Macy, Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects (New Society Publishers, 2014)
Joanna Macy, The Work That Reconnects (original framework, various published and workshop formats)
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