Joanna Macy

And then around the time that COVID hit, I was feeling this like pull to listen deeply to the earth.

during this time when things got so wonky i was like what is going on and like what does the earth want us to know right now um and so i was talking to various people and like i want to do some kind of practice where we're like listening to the earth and so that same friend who introduced us was like you should talk to lauren about this because um she's been doing some of that um joanna macy work the work that reconnects and really having these councils with the council of all beings where you're listening to all of the different beings and and being able to to bring some answers through and so we started a little group called children of gaia and we met on her property um probably for a couple of years we would meet seasonally and sit around the fire and bring our questions together.

And then we would go out and do a sit on the land and listen for the answers and then come back in sort of a council style and share what answers we received from the earth and from the plants about whatever was up for us in those moments.

So it was a beautiful way to, yeah, just really drop into what the nature and what the earth might want us to know in those crazy times.

And at the same time, a lot is crumbling in our system.

There is this great turning in the words of Joanna Macy, dearly departed Joanna Macy, there is this unraveling, there is this great simplification, there is this collapse underway in a system that was built never for regeneration, but fully out of extraction, exploitation of the earth, of humanity, of women, of children to grow grow grow grow grow with literally never any forethought about what would happen at the end of that curve at the end of that line what do we have left to never think about the life cycle of an economy literally just so frustrating to think about but the opportunity that this wealth transfer is giving my generation millennial generation and subsequent generations, Gen X, Gen Y, is an opportunity to be seed investors and midwives of a new culture, a new world.

And here I come to buying the farm.

Because if I look at the systems that are just big, big, big, and I was presented during those Obama years, during those 2010s, right? We were presented with these opportunities for the powers that be.

I am now about the age, I'm a little younger than I was when I met him.

and um he was an amazing teacher he was my teacher i also um you know i referred him as my spiritual father um there was also a woman who was my my cousin i called him my ex we were very close named joanna macy who was also a teacher a spiritual buddhist teacher um and she lived out on the west coast in berkeley california a lot of people know her she wrote quite a few books and gave talks and lectures and seminars all over the world.

And she passed away last year in her age of 96, I think.

So I'm right at a point where I'm starting to, you know, I've published these books.

Mm-hmm

... um, Lauren has done some of Joanna Macy's work, and the work that reconnects.

And so our mutual friends again were like, "Hey, call up Lauren." [laughs] And so we talked, and we're like, "Let's start a little group, you know, to listen deeply right now and ask-"

Hmm

um so there is something about a real personal choice as to whether you put your energy towards the third horizon the third attractor or working on the transition of what exists um then there is the what is the reality um can those existing institutions and organizations actually change into something that enables human civilization to continue in some kind of way through a continuing systemic breakdown? Which is what I was trying to explore in the articles I called the Paideia Inquiry earlier this year.

And the thing I often realise within myself is when I think about it, am I clinging on to vain hope or is it real hope? Is it active hope that Joanna Macy would use to describe that that can happen? And the honest answer is I don't have a sure answer about the question.

Is everything going to come tumbling down around our ears in some kind of mad anarchy? I don't know.

I think change happens rapidly and it is happening rapidly, but we don't necessarily always perceive it as individuals unless we're working on that arc of time.

That's what we're here for.

A wonderful woman called Pamela Mang, who is very foundational in Regenesis, always said that is this regenerative development movement is built on the belief that not that humans are a cancer or a cockroach on the planet, but that we've just missed our role in life, which is to be regenerative.

the catalysts of ongoing evolution here on earth and if we can just recapture that um and and i think she was again another very wise woman in the foundational time of this this work um you know she's not very high profile as carol was or joanna macy was but again does um has done amazing foundational work that you know it's it's that whole, a lot of the work that is being done now, many of us won't live to see, you know, it's the tree and you won't sit under the shade kind of thing.

Yeah.

Like, who are you really? Moment by moment, actually, because things are changing.

So one of my favorite teachers and writers, Joanna Macy, she talks about, I think she was married for 65 years, long, long time to her husband.

And she says the secret to their success was always seeing him as a mystery.

Like she never actually quite knew who he was even after 65 years or however long they're married.

I want to like, be listening deeply to the earth and what does she have to say about this time and how do we navigate it.

And, and so my mutual friend said, Hey, you should get in touch with Lauren because she's done a lot of this Joanna Macy work of the work that reconnects and maybe you could do something around that.

So we started a little circle out on Lauren's land called children of Gaia.

And it was really this opportunity to come together as a circle and just ask each other these questions that might be coming up for us as we were working our way through this really strange period in history.

Yeah.

Well, about 25 years ago, I was getting to know Joanna Macy's work.

I don't know, do you know Joanna Macy? And I was introduced through a book called Coming Back to Life.

And one of the things that really hit me in that book was her assertion that the grief that we feel about what's happening to our earth is actually preventing us from really doing the work that we long for to heal the world.

And over the course of that decade, those 10 years, I got to do a couple of workshops coming back to life, the work that reconnects.

And so that includes these profound losses of family and people we love, but it also includes things like the loss of relationship, the loss of connection, the loss of a job.

And yeah, loss is just so profound in how pervasive it is.

And so one of the things that I have learned going back to that story about Joanna Macy, I started noticing over time all the different ways that loss was impacting me.