In honour of Joanna Macy (1929–2025)
Joanna Macy died peacefully on July 19th in her home in Berkeley, California.
For the past six weeks, her daughter Peggy and her long-time friend and assistant Anne have been generously documenting Joanna’s home hospice journey. They invited us into a tender unfolding of love, grief, reverence, and return. At first, there were photos of Joanna—her eyes bright, her smile luminous even in fragility. Then, in the last weeks, just glimpses: her hair, her familiar t-shirts, the sunlight in her room. The shift was quiet and intentional. As if to say: witness, but do not grasp.
They held a global vigil, without calling it that. Thousands of us sat with our candles, our breath, our awe and in doing so, perhaps we came closer to something she spent her life teaching: that death is not an ending but a returning. Not an enemy, but a sister.
Anne wrote, just after Joanna died:
“Joanna wanted us to see the beauty in death. She wanted to show us how to embrace death, as Francis of Assisi did, as a Sister. She wasn’t afraid to die and she showed us that there is nothing to fear. In her dying process, and now in her death, she continues to be our teacher.”
Joanna Macy was more than a scholar, a systems theorist, a Buddhist, and an activist. She was, and will remain, a spiritual ancestor of our time. Her life’s work—The Work That Reconnects—wove together deep ecology, grief, interbeing, and radical hope. Her teachings helped us stay present with a world in crisis without shutting down or turning away. She reminded us again and again that our pain for the world is evidence of our profound belonging to it – our love for the world.
And now, in her dying, she offered perhaps the most intimate teaching of all. A home wake. An open house. An invitation to sit with her body. To bear witness. To be part of something ancient and brave.
She once translated the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote:
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.”
(Rilke, from Go to the Limits of Your Longing)
Joanna didn’t let us lose her. Not in life, and not in death.
She showed us how to stay, how to weep, how to be changed.
To honour Joanna’s work—and because so many in our community have asked, how do we cope with a world in crisis?—we will be offering a very special 3-hour introduction to The Work That Reconnects on Saturday 9th August 2025, 5.00–8.00pm UK time. It will be led by Mutima Imani, a revered elder of the Work, a friend of Joanna’s, and a transformational teacher known for her wise, heart-centred presence and lifelong dedication to healing, justice, and sacred activism.
This work transformed my life when I first encountered it nearly 20 years ago – we would love to share it with you.
If we as a culture could learn to do this—to accompany the dying with such presence and dignity—we might also learn how to live more fully. To honour endings. To root in ritual. To walk each other home, not as a euphemism but as a practice.
I believe Joanna’s death—and the way her beloved community made it visible—is a generational teaching. A blueprint for what it means to live and die in the embrace of community, courage, and deep time.
Rest well, Joanna.