End of an era?

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Subject: End of an era?

Dear ones -

First, thank you to those of you who reached out to me after my last missive, where I lifted up both our most recent podcast and my own relationship with Joanna Macy. It happened that that letter went out to you beautiful people the morning of Saturday, June 19 - and Joanna passed over later that afternoon. We can't plan these things even if we were to try.

It also happened that I was in Berkeley that same Saturday for the memorial service of an old friend and companion of mine, Leonard Joy, who had died in February earlier this year. On my way home from his service, I passed by Joanna's house and offered a prayer, probably an hour or so before she passed over. The following Monday, I consider myself to be amongst the lucky ones (200 or so people?) who attended her wake- two days when her home was open to friends, students, and community members who could come to offer their respects and be with her transition. I was deeply impressed with that beautiful death ritual, with its many components (gongs and singing and silence and rose petals and flower bouquets and the Spiral of Gratitude and social re-connections). The ritual itself was a remarkable reflection of a spiritual culture that has formed (especially the East Bay but also other places) and developed - part Buddhist, part circle-song, part eco-spiritual, part deep ecology. It’s a spiritual culture that Joanna was part of co-shaping; one that I understand and recognize, though I don't have a clear name for it. I continue to offer a deep bow to the Spirit of the Community that made that exquisite ritual possible. Something has transpired in her passing, enhanced through that ritual. I dare say I’m learning a fair amount about death rituals these days… and have helped others recently to create some.

Both my old friend Leonard and Joanna were in their mid-90s: theirs was a generation that is (and for a while has been) leaving this world. They leave at a time when the world they helped to create is quickly changing.

In so many ways, we are shaped by our times; in our own often small ways, we can shape our times. It is in that mystery that I find myself dwelling recently. (As well as with death rituals - I created one this week for a student who also just passed.)

An era is ending.

A new one has not yet begun.

Transitions are upon us.

Not least because so much is and will be written about Joanna, I'll look here at Leonard's life to showcase a glimpse of what I'm speaking of.

When he was a boy small enough to sit upon his father's shoulders, his father took him to witness one of what was a series of hunger marches in London during the Great Depression. Eight decades later, that childhood memory was still strong in him - he could still see the people marching, on and on, in a powerful, unbroken silence. At one point, his father told him, "It doesn't have to be this way." That idea - of agency, of societal choices and values, of macroeconomic policy and structures making a difference for everyday people - became the cornerstone of his life, which in turn influenced people all around the world. It’s hard to quantify his impact. Life energy is not measurable in mere numbers.

Leonard's family was "respectably poor." In his father's generation, it was unlikely that a man in his class would rise much beyond his working-class context. But those were times of change. Leonard was an adolescent during the London Blitz and enlisted in the Royal Air Force during WWII. There, he worked in radio and loved it; perhaps more importantly, he learned he could learn anything he put his mind to. After the war, Oxford and Cambridge opened up spaces for bright young men who had served, even if they couldn't afford to pay. Leonard was in the right place at the right time. He studied macro-economics with a keen interest in alleviating hunger and poverty. He married his first wife and moved to Uganda, where he took on a position in one of the first universities there, even as the British Empire was falling apart, ushering in the age of post-colonial International Development. Leonard firmly believed in the dissolution of the Empire and was excited to support African nations (and other levels of governance) in re/claiming their sovereignty. He quickly became a beloved faculty member and entered into an advisory position to the heads of state and the growing United Nations, where he shaped policies around food and nutrition. At some point, he moved back to England, where he co-founded the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex (where I, probably four or five decades later, studied) along with three other economists. Later, he described himself as a "recovering economist" who encouraged multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral approaches to problem solving whenever possible.

I think he was most proud of his work in what he called "process consultation" and "systemic self reflection" - creating participatory processes for national and international organizations to support various forms of sovereignty and collective discernment (at the level of villages, regional areas, between states, as ways of engaging with natural resource conflict, etc). It was/still is its own form of peacemaking, though it was rarely considered that. If I understand it correctly, many parts of the UN embedded that process into their own processes, at least to some extent. He consulted in over 50 countries, finding ways for the system (defined by whichever group he was working amongst on a given mission) to better see itself. He advised many people in their doctoral dissertations; he himself never got (or needed) a PhD.

He wrote many, many reports. He kept copious notes. He never wrote a book about his experiences or the processes or philosophies he developed during those decades (despite many, many people asking him to - after all, he had all his old notes right there!). Like many civil servants, he did not seek to become famous, or even a well-read author.

After his first marriage fell apart, he moved to Berkeley, CA, where he continued consulting and did some teaching at UC Berkeley, married again, and became a Quaker, where he served in many greatly appreciated roles.

At some point, probably in the 1990s, he reflected to a friend of mine that it was really quite different 'back in those days', when he had a wife who took care of his household and a secretary who managed his work affairs.

Um, yeah....

I might add to that, it's quite different when you have a really cool and prestigious job that gives you access to pretty much anyone you want to talk to and they all want to work with you and see you as, by and large, someone who can help them with real issues....

Oh, privilege....

I co-hosted 'tea with Leonard' with Leonard, interviewing him about his work experience, etc.

I think, when I first was hanging out with him, and we would take long walks by the ocean in Bar Harbor, Maine, where we were both working at a Quaker spiritual thinktank that was developing research methodologies that centered Quaker process, the Quaker Institute for the Future, a part of me really wanted to be like him. I, too, wanted to have a really cool international career doing systemic-reflection-type work.

I couldn't figure out how to get there from where I was. Over time, I realized that not only could I not get from "where" I was to "where" he was, but that his life and career and contributions grew out of a very, very particular context. A context that was not the context I was in.

To ‘get’ to where I could make a difference, I had to more fully engage in the context that I was in. Including understanding what that context was. What changes were worth paying attention to.

I can tell many tales of Leonard's shortcomings as well as the ways that he was an extra-ordinary individual.

But I'm not really trying to tell you about his life. Or about the life that he and I once shared.

I'm trying to speak to a moment: our moment, and to the passing of an era.

When Leonard lived in East Africa, where he raised his son from his first marriage, it was known for being a safe place. He never locked his door. In some villages where he worked, people would rummage through his things - mostly because they were curious about this strange white British man with a long nose and bushy eyebrows. Rarely did something go missing, and if it did, it was returned. Most of the time, the people around him did not see themselves as poor. Most of the time, from what I understood, he didn't see them as poor, either. He saw them as dignified, and he respected their dignity.

The slums came later. In certain ways, poverty itself came later. Often accompanied by 'development'. There are many forms of colonization... and of taking away people's sense of agency in their own lives.

When I went to Kenya at the age of 25, probably 50 years after he had lived in the neighboring state, there was no academic university that would take me on as a professor without a PhD. Kenya had local-level violence, especially during election season. I volunteered with a few community-led peace-making groups. Most of the people I met thought that they were poor, and most of the "evidence" around them reinforced that narrative. People didn't just see my lack of maletonin as a curiosity (which they did - kids loved touching my skin and playing with my hair, which I mostly tolerated), many people saw it as more beautiful than their skin (when I told Leonard that he was shocked). I spent a little bit of time in the Kibera slums, none of which existed when Leonard lived there. Almost every place I stayed, with a few exceptions in some villages, everyone locked their door.

He worked and shaped different agencies in the United Nations, especially UNICEF, at a time when the world believed it could address child malnutrition and end hunger for everyone (macroeconomic policies that worked against this aside - I'm talking about mindsets).

His work was in breaking down silos to help departments work together better (a need that kept being needed for a long time)... not to make the argument about why those departments deserved to be maintained.

Leonard's was an era - many decades - when the United States was proud to be contributing funds to address international peace and poverty.

Leonard lived in the United States on a green card for many decades, and never feared that he might be treated with anything other than respect (he switched to become a citizen in his late 80s during T.v1.).

His was a world with respect for the civil service. Hundreds/thousands of people, many of them his colleagues, contributed the intellectual and organizational skills to develop (highly imperfect and unequal and often falling short) systems that tried to do some small form of wealth redistribution within a context that recognized that society is a whole fabric and as such its wealth was not only for a few elites.

He assumed - correctly at that time - that applied science and numbers, and economic data were important parts of decision-making, and acted accordingly. And he worked to bring in heart spaces and body/breath awareness and ecological beings into decision-making. These days, science is increasingly being considered unimportant, as we are increasingly loosing scientific instruments and data that was developed to help everyone (ie, the dramatic cuts to the weather service). And who needs heart spaces when you've got 'bots?

His was an era when governance was increasingly understood to be a function of the collective. Not leadership primarily shaped by one man/ a small set of men. Within that context, he kept trying (and sometimes succeeded) to help governance systems become more and more collectively-oriented at all levels.

At his memorial service, I heard that awareness again and again as people said how distressed he would be at what is happening now. I don't think it was just projection: I think it was an acknowledgement of how the values he kept trying to find ways to lift up are no longer prioritized by national leadership.

The loss of that generation is not only a loss of individuals. It also feels, at least often, that their deaths speak to the end of an era.

And so if you are feeling that loss, even just the edges of it, I hope you can really let yourself mourn for it and feel into it. In the face of loss, we don't need to turn ourselves away in order to protect our hearts - at least, not fully (sometimes a bit of turning away is really helpful.... to an extent).

Which does NOT mean that the Spirit is not moving.

It doesn't mean that our actions and values and the stories we tell and the institutions we shape and the initiatives we are a part of suddenly no longer matter. They do.

The gifts that we bring are honed and shaped by our times. Nature and nurture; context and charisma - not just individual charisma, but also how the spirit of the moment meets certain people and is reflected in them.

Joanna once said that dark times offer possibilities for great innovation.

I am not always sure about that, though I like the sentiment.

I do know that Spirit keeps moving. Keeps opening up windows even as doors close. We can never do what another has done, not only because we are not that person, but because each person is of their context, and contexts are dynamic.

So take courage and keep asking the questions I know many of you are asking: what are you being invited into? What is it that these times are opening up for you? What revelations are coming from your collectives, as well as from your own internal questions?

Upcoming Event:

Celebration of Life for Joanna Macy August 5, 2025 @ 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm PDT

By Work That Reconnects

Organized by Frieda Nixdorf

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Subject: End of an era?