Hi Friend,

I admit that I was initially suspicious when an unknown publicist reached out to me about a potential guest for our ReMembering and ReEnchanting Podcast. When I read the name, I had to laugh: Deep Ecologist John Seed.

I chuckled. Oh, yeah, I'll absolutely have John Seed on my podcast.

It took a while to get the timing right, but we recorded the episode last week. I hope you like it!!!

I asked him (as I am doing more often these days) if there was someone else he wanted to bring onto the podcast with him. He suggested Niamh Murray, a young person whom he is mentoring in the work of Deep Ecology. John, who is based in Australia, is about 85, and I appreciated his understanding of both the value of intergenerational collaboration and passing along the torch through stepping back and actively handing the mic/space/responsibility over to younger people. 

We were all aware that we were recording this episode at a moment when one of John’s primary thought/action/creative partners, Joanna Macy, is actively in this liminal space, transitioning to the next world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Joanna was very much in our conversations. And so the rest of this email is a musing on deep ecology … and especially Joanna Macy, whom I know has been in many people’s hearts, perhaps even your own.

I also realized that I don't do that much foundational work for the contemporary work of reMembering and reEnchanting on my podcast or even in this newsletter.

Foundational knowledge/understanding for me includes: walking with the embodied knowledge that we are of this earth, not fully separate from it; that all beings are part of an interconnected and a dynamic web of life; that animism is real and not oppositional to world religions; that art and music is part of the path of well-being; that its not just about head knowledge its about heart and soul and somatic knowings; that hurting the planet is directly related to hurting people, especially feminine energies; that the industrial revolution was not all that great, that shifts in consciousness are necessary as well as shifts in economic policy and technology if we have much hope of survival; that survival is not guaranteed for our species (though I'm sure this rock of a planet will carry on circling the sun just fine without us).

Deep Ecology is, in my opinion, one of the basics. It encompasses much of what is above. John Seed and Joanna Macy are amongst the co-founders of this work (along with, amongst others, Arne Naess, who coined and popularized the term itself.) even as I write ‘co-founders’ I know that’s not really the correct phrase- it’s not about them … these ideas are way older and come from a source way greater than any small human being. John shares some of his story on the podcast.

I was lucky enough to grow up learning and understanding much of these ideas. I don't recall when I first heard the term 'deep ecology'.

But I do recall my first 10 day retreat with Joanna Macy.

I was 22, living in Berkeley, CA, with my then-partner. I was volunteering at the Quaker Institute for the Future, which was a Quaker Think Tank developing Quaker epistemologies (ways of doing research that had a spiritual and somatic dimension to them) and trying to be an independent writer.  I was researching the progressive religious movement's response to the rise of the religious right and climate change. (It was a fascinating and important research project that never became an actual article, although I did give a few talks on the topic.) It was a (long) moment in my life when I was chasing some big ideas, Trying to understand my call to ministry,  and had basically no money.

A member of my Quaker meeting, Strawberry Creek Friends meeting, suggested I attend Joanna's 10 day retreat that was being held at a Buddhist temple, I think in the Santa Cruz mountains. She put in a good word for me, and I got a scholarship. Thank goodness for the generosity of people who provide scholarship funds for those kinds of initiatives! (And it is in part because of my own experience of receiving those kinds of scholarships that I keep making a point of ensuring the teachings that I offer are available for people with a wide range of financial means.)

I can't imagine my work today without that grounding in deep ecology and the Work That Reconnects.

I still remember Joanna telling the story of John Seed, who stood, as a rainforest activist, in front of the rainforest to protect it during a direct action, and then, in that moment, felt his whole consciousness shift: he was not protecting the rainforest, he was part of the rainforest protecting itself.

She storied moments in ways that brought you right there. I felt I saw the event that had happened before I was born, on another continent, to a man I never imagined would reach out to me and want to have a conversation.

I still recall watching her create a new ritual (one that was not part of her published list of exercises) because she felt the group needed it. I watched her do it, and the thought arose in me: Oh! I can do that. I know how to do that… That's what I want to do! 

It was one of a steady, persistent stream of nudges from Spirit to become a minister in an eco-spiritual key.

Since then, I've created many, many embodied practices, mini-rituals, and big rituals. I attribute some of my confidence and my capacity in doing so to walking alongside her and her practices.

In my early twenties, I would sit with her and her husband, Francis at their kitchen table overlooking their garden in their elegant flat in Berkeley as I tried to understand my call to eco-spiritual ministry. They gave me some excellent advice, which I largely ignored.

The ideas of the Great Turning shaped almost all of my intellectual  pursuits, and the understanding that "lover as earth, lover as self", "body as earth", ‘survival is not guaranteed’ and "we need to keep reconnecting".... stayed in my body and spirit through the ups and downs of relationships,

Almost immediately after that first workshop, I started helping Joanna out in other spaces, including accompanying her at various talks and gatherings she went to. I co-led a few Work That Reconnects short (an afternoon) retreats. A few years later, after having spent six months in Kenya, I attended her 30 day retreat on the wild edge of the northwest coast and practiced all of her major exercises and, if I recall correctly, she developed some new ones. Every 7 days we spent one day out connecting with the land, leading to an overnight on the land. What a glorious experience that was. I still have the ecologically-orientated vows that we all took in my wallet that she gave us then. Eventually, I moved to England. We loosely kept in touch.

After living overseas for several years,  completing Seminary in New York City and launching Sequoia Samanvaya, I came back to her kitchen and shared my M.Div. thesis with her. She loved it.

She immediately signed up for my ReMembering Course. I was flabbergasted. Joanna Macy is taking my course???? Whaaaa.....???

Did I tell her how much the work of remembering was informed by the work that reconnects? I don’t recall. 

It turned out that navigating an online portal and going for regular zoom calls was a bit more than the 80-something woman could easily manage, even with the help of her assistant, so she ended her active engagement in the course. But she insisted that I come over to her home and teach her some of the important parts of the course.

And so there I was, again in her kitchen, slightly less floundering than I was in my early 20s, sharing with her what I was calling the Triangle of Terror - the connection between Africa, America, and the Great European Witch Hunts and the Papal Bulls that connected them all. I drew her a diagram and rattled off some dates and showed her how it connects, the histories of racism and ecological destruction and the damage to sexuality, sensuality, traditional ecological knowledge, queerness, and women's bodies. She sat there, her blue eyes off in the distance for a while, nodding. I don't know what she saw, but I know that she saw something.

And then those bright eyes turned to me. You must come teach to some of my friends, she said to me. 

She, of course, had a small group of women Buddhist teachers who were meeting in her living room on a regular basis. They dove into the feminist dimensions of Buddhism, including the long histories of patriarchy within that tradition. She wanted me to teach them on the witch hunts.

And so I did. There were six women in her exquisite living room. I taught, and we shared, and energy moved, and a ritual emerged and someone's hair caught on fire (no kidding) and we used the ritual knife to cut away some latent spirits of patriarchy that arose in the space between us, and it was totally wild in that deeply rooted way.

Two women invited me to teach to their communities.  Some remain good friends to this day.

To say I am grateful is beyond accurate.

Which is not to say I am not critical of her work. We can be both.

My emphasis on the importance of incorporating decolonization both historically and as a contemporary approach into the wider search for purpose and the bigger alignment with our ecological selves came in part because of what was missing in many of the teachers I had learned from. That includes Joanna, but it also includes ecotheologian Larry Rasmussen (who changed his narrative after he advised me on my thesis), the co-founders of the Yale Forum for Ecology and Religion, John Grimm and Mary Tucker, and even the work of the great and late Thomas Berry. These missing pieces were also missing from my teachers in international development and participatory democracy such as participatory methodologist Robert Chambers and (another) great ecologist and forester, Gus Speth. And many others. It was missing because it’s been missing in dominant culture as a whole. 

I am fully capable of critiquing their work and learning from them and loving them and being in community with them. 

I hope - I dearly hope - that this same grace will be granted to me, because I am sure I too am missing things, and I too will (and in some ways have) had a hard time changing. I hope I can be as good a mentor. I hope my kitchen table can (continues) to be a place of the kind of nourishment that she offered me.

So it was special, and poignant, and one of those 'the universe winks at us' moments, when I got to have this podcast episode with John Seed, and we spoke with such love for her, Joanna, and the thousands (millions? it's hard to say) people she has influenced.

By the time I started the podcast, just a few years ago, Joanna was no longer giving interviews nor really writing reviews (though I suspect she still on occasion did). I wanted to respect that line, so I never asked her to come on the podcast. Or to write a review of my work. I knew her love and her support, and that was enough. There are hundreds of videos of her talking and thinking and articles and whatnot all over the internet. There's the Deep Time journal and the global community of practice.  Her circle has been cast, and it is wide and continues to ripple even as I do my work.

But I wish I had shared with her more about how my thinking/ministry keeps evolving. Just because I love her. She would have loved our Cyclical Time ritual.

With a very full heart I end this missive with one of her favorite poems. I still carry with me her translation of Rilke, which is where this translation comes from. And her book on sarvodya, and mutual causality in living systems, and and and….

"I live my life in widening circles

that reach out across the world.

I may not ever complete the last one,

but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, that primordial tower.

I have been circling for thousands of years,

and I still don't know: am I a falcon,

a storm, or a great song?"

by Rainer Maria Rilke

English version by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

Original Language: German

Blessings on your own widening circles -

Sara Jolena