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Join author and founder of the Center for Wild Spirituality, Victoria Loorz, as she explores the possibilities of restoring beloved community and sacred conversation with All That Is: human and more-than-human.
Stephen: You are listening to a podcast from the Center for Wild Spirituality.
Victoria: Hey there, and welcome to the Holy Wild. I'm Victoria Loorz and this is a conversation with human beings who are restoring sacred conversation with all beings. It's a podcast for the edge walkers, those who walk along the edges between an old story of dominance and separation, and an emerging new and yet ancient story grounded in kindred relationship with Earth. All it takes really is humility, deep listening, and allowing yourself to fall in love again with our holy and wild earth.
If you are listening to this podcast, you probably already know that Joanna Macy died last week, and I've talked to many people who were feeling that grief of her loss. We all knew that she was in her late nineties or mid nineties at least, and yet if you knew Joanna Macy at all, you're likely to have felt that collective grief, that knowing that she's gone.
That shared recognition that something essential has shifted in the world. I don't think it's an overstatement or an exaggeration to say that Joanna is responsible for a movement that has fundamentally altered the way we understand activism, the way we understand the way we can stand up for earth and for people.
How she talks about it is understanding the relationship between heartbreak and healing and between despair and action. And she didn't just pave the way for those formally involved in the Work That Reconnects Network, the work that she spent majority of her life building, but she certainly did that.
She paved the way through her organizations, through her gatherings. She also opened something much larger, a recognition that our activism to protect earth and all of her beloved ones, human and more than human, cannot be sustained by our outrage alone. It can't be nourished by righteousness like we are right, and it can't be kept alive through fear.
It must be rooted in love. And not the soft, easy kind of love that turns away from difficulty. But Joanna was about that fierce, uncompromising love that looks directly in the face of what we're losing and chooses not to look away, and it's through that, that we choose to act and to love anyway. She created pathways and rituals and stories that guide the journey of reconnection with earth and with each other and even with our own wild selves, through a process of grief, through a deepening of love, through the modalities of playfulness and imagination and ritual, and we use many of work that reconnects rituals that she created or co-created with people in her world. We use them throughout so many of the wild because they're so powerful.
I am deeply grateful for her presence and her work. So this podcast today is really a recording of a wild luminary webinar that she did with Seminary of the Wild five years ago. It was an absolute honor to be in the same virtual room with her. It was during the pandemic, so I hope that you can feel the power of her presence in this recording.
May the heart and passion and wisdom of Joanna Macy and the work that reconnects continue to empower the work that all of us are called to do and to ignite and be the sacred fire of the love soaked lives that we are each called to live.
Joanna: What a treat to be here with you all. Thanks to the Seminary of the Wild, and what a canopy to be gathered under of a seminary of the wild because that of the wisdom and openness that suggests to the beautiful body of our planet, ever wild in its dance and unpredictability of its events, yet tied in a beautiful karma of our mutual belonging and our interdependence.
And what a treat for me to be thinking with you about what's in store for us. That's what I would like to, because I'm sure that everyone here has been thinking of this taking stock of, but it's every day you look and it's changing. The political scene is changing almost minute by minute and the economic scene pretty fast as well. And the choices that we are facing in relation to how we respond to the coronavirus, the pandemic, and then how we find our balance as heirs of this time.
I myself am incredibly grateful that I get a chance to be alive at this time with so much unfolding so fast now. I have been expecting for the last couple of years making my peace with the fact that given the history unfolding right now, that our politically economy was not gonna hold together.
That means a cultural, economic civilizational kind of collapse. It's a big deal. It's corporate capitalism of a global nature. And that, I thought that was a lot to contend with already, and then didn't even think that just around the corner, around the dawning of the 2020s that we already thought was gonna be a remarkable decade, wham! The Coronavirus, the pandemic, and the choices that it offers our leaders, our political choice makers and us. So we are both seeing remarkable, radical, dramatic changes in our culture and our political culture and in our own lives where suddenly, thanks to the virus, there is a sudden release of the rush and we're asked to be quiet and we're asked to make do with this.
Well, when in my life have I encountered the changes that we're asked to support for our health and the health of our culture? We're asked to support this stoppage. And that makes me think of course of the true meaning of apocalypse, which you know, I'm sure as well as I means an unveiling a revelation.
And what this pandemic is revealing is the fragility of our culture and of our economy. That for those of us whose home country is the United States, it is prided itself on ever repeating mantra of we're the most powerful nation in the world, suddenly revealing our fragility of being able to take care of each other, of having the material, the health, hospital rooms, the beds, the masks, all that for taking care of people.
And then, revealing their essential fragility or weakness. Also revealing a kind of rottenness of the sordid reality of our tragic inequality in our country, as we see how people of color, and especially African Americans, but that's true of indigenous people. When you look at what's happening on the reservations and with the Navajo nation that the unfair, unequal treatment of them is putting them in such a desperate situation.
And that's a revelation. Whereas to look in a mirror, a mirror is being held up to the shoddy nature of our democracy. And at the same time, what's revealed is that we can, that there's air that can be cleaned and made safe to breathe, and that the waters can, the rivers and waters and canals can begin to cleanse themselves as the sky begins to cleanse. As the factories slow down and the airports go still, we're alive for that.
And so I'd like to reflect with you on what are some of the tools that we have right now at hand? What are some of the ways that we can think about, how to rebuild? Because I'm quite sure that you agree with me that we do not wanna go back to normal.
We wanna use this time to grow strong, pay better attention to what the needs are, what the hopes are, where the strengths lie, what we want most to address, and what we can find in ourselves. How can we use this time to grow our wisdom and our capacity to choose? And so in thinking about some of the thought tools that we have, I have loved and found it very useful to look at what our world view is.
In Germany, they call their weltbild, their image of the world or rather their image, our image of our relationship to our world. And that seeing that can help us, it's a lot of fun and it's also kind of clears the mind to imagine and to help us see our experience. And, in a way that clarifies the choices.
So I see in both spiritual traditions, especially spiritual traditions, that there have been throughout the eons different worldviews. And it seems to me that there have been four worldviews of our relationship to the world that have actually surfaced each these four. And I'll tell you right now how I see them.
One is world as battlefield. Second is world as trap, world as lover and world as self. And I have been, I actually have been able to see these before, which I love to unpack with you a present in almost every spiritual tradition.
So let's start with world is battlefield. Oh, that is a good one to be adopting in a time of uncertainty. When you are not sure of what you can expect and where the care advantages lie and what is the right way to go, then world is battlefield where it draws one. Because it can release great energies and this view goes back quite as way back, you know, couple of millennia to, I think they said Zoroastrian, the mannequin, where the drama of life is presented as the battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil. Between the legions of light and those of darkness and they are contending with each other and it can feel quite good in a time of uncertainty, because you wanna be sure that you're on the force that's gonna side, that's gonna win. And in this battle, good is gonna win. And it allows you to use any means, just about any means that are there for you.
For the triumph, it helps you feel quite sure and self-righteous because you are generally seeing yourself on the side of the winner, on the side of God, and it's persuasive too because it releases these energies of self-righteousness and often anger and blame and certitude and it doesn't bother you that these are polarizing in your culture.
It makes it easier to see who's wrong and who's right, and that can be a comfort as well. And that this world as battlefield, I actually was schooled in a somewhat myself by my grandfather, and I come from a christian tradition of great gentleness, the congregational, and certainly in the hands of my pastor grandfather.
But there, the world was seen as more like a school, a gymnasium in which I would grow my forces, my strengths, my wisdom and tools, my virtue. So, but both in that and in the more mannequin view, the world is more like a stage set for the exercise and acquisition of virtue than for a value in itself.
And we've seen, we've been treated to quite a bit of this view, certainly in the last years of the current administration and in its campaign, not that it hasn't been there a hell of a lot in this country itself. So there's this, we can choose there. But then let's look at the next one.
The world is a trap because that is very winsome for many of us, because the goal is not to engage in a struggle and vanquish the foe, but to disentangle ourselves and escape from this messy world. So because the spiritual path tends to condemn material, what's material, because we tend to see this world, and particularly this culture as quite materialistic.
There's a temptation to think, well, what we would like to choose to rise above that and see ourselves on the side of the transcendent, what transcends the crass materiality of our culture. And this, I find there's a quite prevalent, or we, you can, you can notice it in new age thinking and in some, as you know, I see myself now and I'm very grateful for engaging in learning from Buddhist teachings and practices.
Many of my fellow Western Buddhists also give great prize to, it's easy to take the serenity that you feel in meditation and see that that is a calling somehow to rise above the stress and strain and often the sorrow and grief and heartbreak of seeing, attending to what is happening to our world.
To our brothers and sisters here and to really pay attention to that. Sometimes it's not, serenity is not the first thing you feel. You feel heart break. And so it can feel that, oh, wouldn't it be nice to just rise above this all? Into a realm of detachment. And so I have seen a lot of my, well, I don't wanna make sweeping statements though I do, but there are a lot of my friends that get tempted into seeing that it's that the Buddha, it's as if the Buddha was asking us to detach from the world when actually he only asked us to detach from the ego. So that this world as trap can also be a trap where we engage in what was been so aptly described as spiritual bypassing where we can seek comfort by staying in a more comfortable psychics place rather than tending to the real mess sometimes that we feel in our world and mirrored in our own lives.
And so that's still an option for us, but it's not an option that I think is going to be a guiding one as for the culture on this incredible moment that we're in when we have the time to think together in this pandemic of where we want to, with whom we want to and how we want to engage to build a life supporting civilization.
So we've talked about the great, where we places we're tempted to go, as I said, with world as battlefield and world as trap. But the two that draw me. That often I dance together. Dance between them or combine them is world is lover and world as self, that we can look at our world not as a stage set for our moral battles and not as a prison to escape from, but as a living realm.
This is extraordinary. And even before we had this system science that showed that our planet, our world of trees and oceans and mountains and rock and rivers flowing and countless beings, that the natural world is actually a living system. That it is as alive as we are, from the systems thinking perspective, that it is like our larger body that we belong to it like a cell in a larger body that that is, there's been nature mysticism throughout all the eons of time, but that it should come through science as well now. In this moment has always just been causing me to gasp with kind of wonder and astonishment that I could be alive at a time when this is coming upon, that we can feel the world around us as the earliest people did what the, the anthropologists call the sense of mystical participation in it.
And that our indigenous brothers and sisters there who are being listened to more now than ever are reminding us of this and that we can feel like we're coming home. You really find that the most for me in my ears in India, in the Hindu tradition, but also it's there in the ancient goddess and sufism and the Kabbalah, even in Christianity and bridal mysticism. The lover out of boundless love takes the form of the beloved. Both are made of the same nectar and share the same food. The entire universe. It is a display that contains them, and yet they, the entire universe is too small, but yet they live happily in the tiniest article.
This dance. The erotic dance, and that's in the ancient vedas. The world creates itself out of that primal erotic impulse.
My favorite evoker of the world is lover is actually not in a spiritual tradition, but that of a storyteller from Italy. Italo Calvino in his book Cosmicomics, and in this book it's a lot of different stories and the stories are all told by this one character who was there throughout from the beginning of time.
A little bit like Mel Brooks' 3000 year old man, if you've ever seen that. And so this one who's been there always, his name is ____ because the people in the, there's no vowels in their name. And so he remembers that and the whole story, and each of the chapters in it begins with a citation from the physical scientist astronomer, which is through the calculations begun by Edwin P Hubble on the galaxy's velocity of recession.
We can establish the moment when all the universes matter was concentrated in a single point before it began to expand in space and now, this Mel Brooks character was there throughout, tells the story.
We were there. We were all there. Where else would we have been? We were all there in that one point.
And boy was it crowded, contrary to what you might think, it wasn't the sort of place that encourages sociability because we were, you know, in order to feel neighborly, you have to be able to back up just a little bit to say hi. We couldn't because we were all crowded together. Everything, all of us were there.
And if you have a good memory, you might be able to remember it too. Sure. Because along with all of us, we were back there that there was the Vge Mountains and there was the Andromedan Nebula, and there was Disneyland and the Pentagon and the whole, everything had to be crowded into that one point. What made it worse, of course, was a zoo family because they had these, their camping equipment all over everything, so it wasn't the place that would encourage a lot of fellow feeling and peace of mind either if it were not.
Now in the story, her name is an equation, so I have given her a pronounceable name, but this is Calvino's heroin story. Oh, he says, her bosom, her thighs, her orange dressing gown. The sheer memory of her fills me with a blissful, generous emotion. The fact that she was going to bed with Mr ____ didn't make any difference to us.
You see? Because in a point, if you're going to bed, well, the bed fills up the whole point. And so we were there with her. Yes, we were. And so she was all in bed with all of us and, and you know, if she'd been another person, he says, we was no telling the things one would've said about her, but we just wanted to go on forever and it could have, except for one day.
And I, that's when days began. She said to us, well, darlings. If I only had some space, what pasta I could make for you. And at that moment when in that tiny, enclosed, crowded space someone had, she had, this generous emotion. Darling's what pasta I could make, that actually the space she wished for began to happen.
And then here is, and I'm gonna read it, my favorite, just part of my favorite, longest sentence in I've ever read.
And in that moment that we all thought of the space that her round arms would occupy moving backward and forward over the great mound of flour and eggs while her arms kneeded and kneeded, white and shiny with oil up to the elbows, and we thought of the space the flour would occupy, and the wheat for the flower and the fields to raise the wheat and the mountains from which the water would flow to irrigate the fields, the space it would take for the sun to arrive with its rays to ripen the wheat of the space for the sun to condense from the clouds of stellar gases and burn.
The quantities of stars and galaxies and lactic masses and flight through space that would be needed to hold suspended. Every galaxy, every nebula, every sun, every planet you see, it would be all required. You know, you realize that all necessity for that pasta Yes. That's the interdependence of all things.
And at the same time we thought of it, this space was inevitably being formed. At the same time that was uttering the words what pasta darling, the point that contained her in all of us was expanding in a halo of distance. In light years, in centuries and billions of light millennia, and we were being hurled to the four corners of the universe, and she, she, who in the midst of our tiny, closed petty world, had been capable of a generous impulse with true general necessity of general love, initiated at the same time the concept of universal gravitation and the gravitating universe making possible billions and billions of suns and planets and the continents of the planets kneeding with floury, generous arms. And she lost at that moment, and we mourning her loss. Well, now that's in the story, but of course.
Our papa wasn't lost at all. She sent each one of us and then you turn and look at each other. I see the, I see. And your smile. Yeah. You this. You can't kid me. She's part of you. That generosity is there because you are holding. World is lover. You recognize that you've come out of that beautiful, creative reciprocity and erotic reciprocity at the center of our universe.
But then you see, even when lovers meet, they want to also collapse into oneness with each other. And so world is lover and world as self and into union. And to that feeling, that belonging, that shared oneness. It's very, very close to each other, and so you can lapse into non-duality.
I've never been all that interested in non-duality myself, but I can see that it is expressed for me in deep ecology what the ecological self sees is able to encompass and see that. There is in our sense of belonging, our mutual belonging, that we are like in one pulsing heart. You can kind of move back and maybe it depends a little bit on what you had for breakfast, but whether you go for a world is lover or world has self.
But there's a bit from the world as as self that I would love to read you from. Um, my, one of my teachers, Vietnamese Zen Master Tich Naht Hahn, and he evokes that as you become one with this yourself, includes the universe. Then that evokes a long, evolutionary journey that you've been through yourself. So that's mirrored in these lines from Hahn, and you can think of them spoken.
Yeah. To you being rock, being gas, being missed, being mined, being the ance, traveling among galaxies at the speed of light you have. Come here my beloved. You have manifested yourself as trees, grass, butterflies, single cell beings, and as crissanthamums that the eyes with which you look at me this evening tell me that you have never died, that you enclose it all.
We are asked to open to that kind of belonging. We are asked to not only busy ourselves and solving every problem and responding to every tragedy, but to let life work through us to rest into this phenomenal, phenomenal, in the sense of pheno man, man of this world. The creativity, the evolving dance of this world.
To rest into that and to experience it as a grace that as through your belonging to this, it can work through you, flow through you. And I, for myself, learned that at the strongest, most decisive moment when I was, 35 years ago in Australia taking my work. At that point it was called Despair and Empowerment work, and then there it turned into deep ecology work in contact with my new friend, John Seed, the rainforest activist, and he told me of the time that changed his life, the epiphany he had.
When he was standing there with his mates to defend the oldest trees dating back to the great trees of that old continent, the mother continent, and as the lumber companies were illegally logging them and they got the police to protect them, and they were just standing in front to protect the trees.
That he and his late while the, an intervention was making its way through the provincial courts in Sydney and something happened for him. Something happened for him that never left him and that he was able to share with all of us and it's never left me. And that is that he suddenly realized that it was not he, John Seed, who was protecting the rainforest.
The rainforest was protecting herself through this piece of humanity that she had cradled into existence. You see the difference, the power that can come through us. We're not the source of it is far bigger than us. Our job is just to love it and let it through to be its hands and its voice.
Because it's the humans that we need a voice that can catch the attention of humans. We need hands that can wield implements as well as pen. And that power flowing through us is the power of our earth. So as we are in this time, often sheltering in place, serving often, many of us at risk. To take care of those who don't have the capacity to shelter in space in place.
Oh, that's interesting. We could learn how to shelter in space.
Victoria: Hmm.
Joanna: Well that in this time we can reflect on our weltbild, our worldview, and try it on. World as lover. World as self. Living world that can supply the energy, supply the vision, supply the patience, supply the creativity to weave us together for the sake of life itself.
Thank, keep for listening.
Victoria: Amen. Thank you so much. Hmm. I have a few questions that we'd like to ask you, Joanna, and really it's just to deepen into what you've, the surface of what you've shared and wondering what you know. Something that that hits me is it's just so ironic that in this and in your call to be close to one another, we're required to not be close to one another.
Do you think that that's, I suspect it is, but I'm wondering yours, you, but how does that draw us closer to the cedar tree outside my window or to the more than human others. And you feel like maybe that's part of what's happening here is in this call to be closer and not closer?
Joanna: Yeah. What's wonderful for me, as I am sheltered in space with such vigilant family keeping me, but I can go out, I can hug any tree, and I'm telling you I do because I can't hug people, but I can get within six feet of a tree or six inches or so that the world going out. I'm from where I sit, I can see hills, Berkeley, home, all of that safe from sort of we can shift our sense of intimacy from the skin encapsulated two, like its around us to every other life form.
It's only the other humans we shouldn't get too close to.
Victoria: There's a few questions around, are there some tools? I know the, the grief itself is a tool, but are there tools to help people who haven't yet really entered into this worldview of world as self and world as lover?
Joanna: There are tools set of the imagination, uh, that even if you're alone, that you can write, for example, a letter to yourself, rather a letter.
A letter to yourself from your planet. That's one that was a, a practice that John Seed himself loved to do with when we in our deep ecology work where you and you started out. So start\, dear Joanna, this is your mother Gaia speaking, and then telling you what she hopes that you will understand and that what she hopes you will understand about your calling, about what she would love to see you understand and do for the sake of life on earth. So just, you know, John and I created the ritual of the, of these council of all beings where you step outside of your human identified self. And take on. You can just step outside.
This always being anchored as a human being. We've been playing the role of a human being, which is only the last chapter of the evolutionary life that has flowed through us and shaped us through the millennia, billennia, that this is a moment that we can be free of to step free of the consumer society.
That maybe it was one of be the great things we can do right now, and we're helped in that. The stores right around here, no stores are open, no restaurants are open. You can order things, but that's getting pretty boring so that we can step free and, and think of what this consumer society has done for us, done to us.
The acquisitiveness and the comparing mind that it has Earthed, that it has called for keeping up with the Joneses to think of what it's like to just have a couple of changes of clothes, you know, we can move toward that is, which is the way humans have lived on this planet from the beginning. If they wore any clothes at all.
Victoria: It's, it's helping people to fall in love, encouraging them to really fall in love.
Joanna: Oh, well, I, I must say that's fa that's happening to me.
Victoria: Hmm. Yeah. Would you, would you talk about that a little more? What, what is it about the world right now? Right now, in the midst of this that you address? It's deepening your love.
Joanna: Well, out that window, you see that tree? Mm-hmm. I love it because it's a hotel and it's a whole little universe. There's words of all kinds in there, and they're so busy. It's a paper bark tree, an Australian paper bark tree, and it has squirrels in there too. And now what's it like? I find myself thinking, what is it like to look at something, to have time to look at something like that?
Mm-hmm. Then you find if you just let that happen, you get engrossed. And then you find that what you pay attention to when you really pay attention, you hanker for it. You love it. Attention breeds love, mystery. Imagine what it's like to live in that tree and you just jump sideways and up and over and quick and see in there and off you go.
And there it is. It just, so whatever it is that you. I would think that we could begin to experience ourselves as being let out of, let Outta school, let out of prison of this shaped by Madison Avenue, inquisitiveness of consumer society and one situation to find ourselves in. That's what, what the doctors want us to do and the healthcare people when we can, if we're privileged enough.
To be able to do that. And if there are those that we know that aren't, then we extend help to them. There are other uses of the mind that we begin to discover that we have time for or that we are released from. What did the consumer society demand of me? How did it train me? How did it get me addicted to owning things?
Oh, that gets really interesting.
Victoria: Maybe open fully to that invitation.
Joanna: Yeah.
Victoria: Joanna, we wish you so much love. Thank you.
Encounters with the holy wild happen when we're open to them. They happen more and more as we approach the natural world with reverence and an open heart. Each week, I offer an invitation to wander in the wildest places of your home and to do so with reverence to enter into sacred conversation with the holy and the wild yourself.
So the invitation for this week, this time, is based on that story that Joanna told of her friend John Seed. I love how he felt that he was like the human part of his ecosystem, his ecosystem of interconnected relations. He was the one who could speak English, who could speak up for and protect his kin from our human kin.
So as you wander and this week or this month, cross a threshold, stop and cross a threshold with intention. To open your imagination and your heart and your playful childlike wonder and ask this question, what can I do for you? How can I be of service to you? Forest little creek, little abandoned field.
And if you do that with deep sincerity, then be open to surprise for what happens over the next months. Because there is a they there and heartfelt, authentic questions like this are heard and the response will likely come in a way that you never expected.
Stephen: Have you experienced an encounter with a tree? Or a wild being or a particular place that felt sacred? Maybe it's an everyday occurrence or something more mystical. Did it occur to you that you may have been entangled in a holy conversation? If you have such a story, we'd love to share your voice in your story in sacred conversation.
This has been another episode of the Holy Wild. For more information about the movement to restore sacred relationship with Earth, visit wildspirituality.earth and please subscribe to the podcast, leave a review and share this episode with someone you know who is hearing the call of the Holy Wild.
Music by Alec, Slater and Sandy from Inside the Silo at the farm.
Produced by Stephen Henning at Highline Sounds.
And hosted by Victoria Loorz.