Building the Great Turning

In 1977, the late environmental activist Joanna Macy experienced a moment that she later described as “almost cataclysmic.” At a day-long symposium held by the Cousteau Society, she learned of the relentless assaults the environment was facing from what seemed like all sides. “There was no aspect of the natural world that seemed free of being undercut and losing its capacity for vitality,” she told her friend Jess Serrante on an episode of We Are the Great Turning. “We were destroying our world.”

That realization silenced Joanna for over a year. She couldn’t speak to her friends or her family, and she couldn’t bear to be cheered up from what she knew was “not cheer-up-able.” Finally, after fifteen months of reflection, she recognized the need to create spaces for people to talk openly about their grief for the planet in the context of the emerging climate crisis. Drawing from her study of Buddhism, she developed what came to be known as the Work That Reconnects.

Last year, after nearly fifty years of teaching the Work That Reconnects, Joanna recorded a podcast series with her close friend and student Jess Serrante on the evolution of her thinking and how we can cultivate courage and connection as we face the many crises of our time. In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sat down with Serrante to discuss Macy’s life and legacy, why Macy believed that we should always begin with gratitude, how we can work productively with anger and despair, and how the Work That Reconnects can break us open—and break us free. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, and then listen to the full episode.

James Shaheen: Jess, the podcast you recorded with Joanna traces out some of the key teachings that Joanna developed over the course of her life, including what she called the three stories of our time. So could you tell us about these three stories? We can start with the first, Business as Usual.

Jess Serrante: Yeah, it’s important when we’re talking about the three stories to note that all three of these stories are happening right now. All three are as real as one another in this particular moment. So the story of Business as Usual is the story of what we might call global corporate capitalism. It’s a paradigm of domination and extraction, and it’s a story [that claims that] we have advanced through primitive human history to a pinnacle of human existence. This is a story that we hear from a lot of our mainstream media. We hear it from business schools; we hear it from politicians. It’s a defense of the paradigms of white supremacy and patriarchy and extraction and capitalism. In this story, the identity as consumer is central, where [we’re told] we can buy our way out of our problems. In this story, not only are comfort and convenience available to all, but if we don’t have it, it’s a personal failing—we have somehow failed to play the game correctly.

James Shaheen: Right, and this leads to the second story, the Great Unraveling, which certainly sounds like an apt description of our time. So tell us about this story.

Jess Serrante: The Great Unraveling is a story that is getting louder and louder, and it’s a story told by many of us who see what’s happening with Business as Usual and see the destruction that it’s wreaking on life. In the Great Unraveling story, everything that is sacred is being destroyed. Everything that we love is under threat. It’s the story of rising sea levels, rising authoritarianism, genocide, increased war, inequality, poverty, conflict, and separation. One of the things about this story is that as actors in this story, we see it as the powerful versus the powerless. And in a way, this story is a dead end. 

James Shaheen: Right, it’s a dead end, but it doesn’t stop there. The third story is the Great Turning, which Joanna described as the great adventure of our time. So what exactly is the Great Turning?

Jess Serrante: Fortunately, basically anywhere that you see the Great Unraveling happening, you can also see the Great Turning. It’s always there, even if it’s small, and even if it’s not necessarily what’s being reported on in the news. The Great Turning is a story that’s told by those of us who see the threats from Business as Usual and see the Great Unraveling and refuse to let global corporate capitalism have the last word about who we are as human beings on planet Earth. It’s an emergence of a just and life-sustaining society, and we can see it everywhere. We see it in movements of resistance against authoritarianism and in efforts to clean up our air and our water and our land and our food systems. We see it in mutual aid and solidarity work and co-ops and spiritual practices and communities. The Great Turning is everywhere, and it’s an open door of immense possibility and great adventure. We don’t get to know how it’ll turn out, but we do get to give ourselves to the possibility that something more just and life-affirming will emerge.

Sharon Salzberg: Joanna often structured the work of the Great Turning in a spiral, and the first stage of the spiral is gratitude. Can you say more about the role of gratitude here and how it can open up a space of possibility?

Jess Serrante: So in the Work That Reconnects, we always begin with gratitude because, as Joanna would say, can you think of another better place to start than with our joy and our gratitude that we are alive on planet Earth in this moment? What an extraordinary gift it is that we get to be here, especially in this time of great need, in this time where so much of life is under attack.

The Great Turning is everywhere, and it’s an open door of immense possibility and great adventure. We don’t get to know how it’ll turn out, but we do get to give ourselves to the possibility that something more just and life-affirming will emerge.

One thing about gratitude is that when we root into what we love, it buoys us. There’s an alchemical process that happens when we begin to acknowledge how grateful we are to be here, where what will often happen naturally is that grief comes right on its tail, like, “Oh, I love the waters that I get to swim in, but the chemicals that are being dumped into the bay that make this water less safe.” [The grief and the love] are incredibly connected, and gratitude gives us the strength that we need to be able to turn and face the pain that often comes right on its heels.

James Shaheen: Jess, the next stage in the spiral is honoring our pain for the world. So can you tell us more about this stage?

Jess Serrante: Honoring our pain is about turning to face the fear, grief, anger, numbness, and all the feelings that emerge for us when we look out and see what’s happening in our world. Joanna would often say that our pain and our love are two sides of the same coin. Our hearts only break at what’s happening in our world because of how much we love it. When we can lean into that pain and express it to another person who is deeply listening, there is a coming alive that can happen. A huge piece of my own journey was that I was so heartbroken from years of climate activism, and I didn’t have a place to put my grief and anger, so I cut myself off from it. That, as Joanna later taught me, deadened and cut off my response to all of life. If we cut off our pain, we also cut off our joy. That’s a part of that emergence and that coming alive: By leaning into the pain, acknowledging it, honoring it, speaking it with one another, and expressing it, so much more vibrancy can move through us. And I’ve seen this happen time and time again as a facilitator of the Work.

Sharon Salzberg: You and Joanna also talked extensively about hope, which can be a contentious or misunderstood term—sometimes people think it’s just a form of false positivity or wishful thinking. So how did Joanna think about hope in the context of the Great Turning?

Jess Serrante: Joanna famously wrote a book called Active Hope, and active hope, as she defines it in that book, is about acting in service of the future that we want. It’s simply giving ourselves again and again to the possibilities and outcomes that we want to see for the world. The episode that we did on hope was actually the hardest of the entire series—I had to write three different scripts for that episode, because I found that I kept trying to convince myself or convince the listener something about hope. And of course, the key to talking about it was in recognizing that Joanna wasn’t that interested in the word “hope.” Whenever I would bring it up, the thing that she would want to talk about was courage. 

I’m less interested in the conversation about whether or not we should have hope. But I am interested in acting courageously, and I’m interested in acting with devotion to what I love.

Joanna would say time and again that even if I had the smallest, tiniest little glimmer of possibility that I could change something, of course I would give myself to it. What else would I do with this precious life that I have on this extraordinary planet but give myself to the tiniest possibility that we might change something? And so I found through this that I agree with her. I’m less interested in the conversation about whether or not we should have hope. But I am interested in acting courageously, and I’m interested in acting with devotion to what I love. Those things are actually bigger and more of a renewable fuel than playing the game within myself about whether or not I think we’ll be successful in our efforts to try to change things.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, this feels tied to the next part of the spiral, which is seeing the world with new eyes, where we shift from seeing ourselves as individuals to experiencing our interconnectedness with all of life. So I wonder if you can say more about this stage of the spiral. What are some ways of actually experiencing this shift?

Jess Serrante: Well, I’ll say first that it naturally emerges out of the work of honoring our pain. Whenever I really touch into pain, be it in a ritual or just in a conversation with a friend, and I offer myself fully to acknowledging the depth of it, what comes up on its heels is this little spark of possibility: “Oh, I feel this because of how connected I am, because of my sense of the sacred and because of my devotion to our interconnection.” And that’s really what seeing with new eyes is about: We emerge into this view of the reality of our interbeing.

In this part of the work, in the practices that we do in the Work That Reconnects, we recognize that interconnection with what we might call the more-than-human world, or the living world, with the plants and animals and rocks and water, but also to deep time, to the ancestors and the long lineage of human history that is behind us and the the people and beings who will inherit this planet from us. In this seeing with new eyes part of the spiral, we locate ourselves amid all of that, which is so wildly enlivening and resourcing.

From recognizing this and studying this over the years with Joanna, I’ve developed a practice where whenever I’m going into something that I’m nervous about, or whenever I’m stepping into work that feels daunting, I’ll locate myself between all of these things. I’ll feel the living Earth beneath me and the ancestors behind me and the future ones in front of me. There’s something about recognizing that connection to all of these seen and unseen beings that gives me an experience of what Francis Weller calls becoming immense—having a wider sense of self and being resourced in a bigger way.

There’s one more thing about seeing with new eyes that I want to share, which is often less talked about but also very important. It’s in this stage of the spiral that in addition to coming into connection with interbeing, we’re also laying down our attachments and our allegiances to the harmful dominant systems. We begin to see those systems of white supremacy and patriarchy for the forces of danger and threats to life that they are, and we let go of any sense of security that we might consciously or unconsciously find in those systems.

James Shaheen: Jess, you mentioned deep time, and tapping into this sense of deep time often involves imaginative practices, including imagining ourselves many generations into the future, as you suggested, or imagining the perspective of other living beings. So how can playfulness and imagination help us in this work?

Jess Serrante: It’s so important. There are so many things that I so deeply love about Joanna, and her playfulness is one of the things that has impacted and changed me the most. It’s her willingness to stretch her awareness of who she was, to say, “Yeah, I’m going to channel the voice of an ancestor or of a future person.” You know, one of the things she told me is that just by imagining a connection, we create one. I think it’s really important that we practice playfulness and trying on new perspectives and stepping into different modes of being and relating to one another. Sometimes the Work That Reconnects can be very playful, and it can be a new experience, especially for folks who are used to taking themselves very seriously and thinking that that’s the only way that we make change. I’ve learned that it’s actually through imagination and playfulness that we access more of our strength and our resources. We can think more creatively, we can respond in ways that we never would’ve never thought to respond, and we can make connections that we never thought of when we tap into imagination and playfulness.

Sharon Salzberg: The final stage of the spiral is going forth and actually building the Great Turning. So what does this stage look like in practice, and how can we use this spiral as a guide in our daily life?

Jess Serrante: Well, there are as many ways to go forth as there are human beings. There’s not one single way, that’s for sure. I think part of the potency of going forth and emerging after the first three stages of the spiral is that we’re so resourced, and we’re so much more connected to our humanity from filling ourselves with gratitude, from making space for our outrage and our pain, and from emerging into our sense of interconnection. There’s the spark of what I might do, how I might offer myself to life today. It’s like what we were saying before about playfulness. Creative things can happen there, and the ways that we can be a part of the Great Turning can stretch from the smallest, most private actions to the biggest collective ones, and they all matter. 

An important thing to note about the spiral is it’s a spiral, not a circle. We carry ourselves through it again and again and again. And so we can always use it as a guide, and we can practice it by asking ourselves, Where am I now? We can drop in and ask: Is pain present in this moment? If pain is present, how do I honor it? Am I feeling motivated to act? Am I feeling connected to gratitude? We can drop into it and let it alchemize. So much of letting the spiral flow in our lives is simply about telling the truth about who and how we are in that moment and being real with another person about that truth.

So much of Joanna’s work and so much of what she’s taught me, ultimately, is about staying on the living thread of the present moment. All of these different emotions that we’ve been talking about are things that I am holding onto every single day as I wake up and ask the question, “How can I be of service today? What is mine to do?” I know that Joanna taught many people this, and I hope that our podcast can help inspire more and more people to lean into their aliveness and tell the truth about their fears and their despair. Even Joanna had moments of asking, “Is there really any point?” That’s not something to be ashamed of—even that can be an entry point into pathways to be in service.

This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.