Joanna Macy's Widening Circles

Joanna, Rilke and a new/old Poem

Dear Friends,

A great light has recently died, or more accurately, has relinquished more deeply into the earth she loved and with which she knew herself to be inextricably and forever joined. Joanna Macy, the brilliant eco-spiritual writer, philosopher and teacher, Buddhist lover of the earth and deep walker of the spiritual quest, died quietly in her home on July 19, 2025. She was 96 years old.

Many of us are honoring her life and her extraordinary writing and teaching, as we grieve her loss. Some of you know her work well, and others may not have heard of her before. Either way, this is a holy moment and profound invitation to dive deeply into the teachings of this truly wise woman and great prophet of our time.

I met Joanna Macy briefly in 2007 when I was editing the anthology Sisters Singing: Blessings, Prayers, Art, Songs, Poetry and Sacred Stories by Women. I was organizing the last section of the book and I hoped to include a beautiful poem that she had written called “Prayer to the Future” for a 1999 collection Prayers for 1000 Years. Joanna graciously gave us permission to include the poem, and, as an internationally-known teacher and writer, offered Sisters Singing a beautiful endorsement when the book was published.

It was during this time that I first read her stunning memoir Widening Circles. I highly recommend this book of elegant prose and thrilling storytelling. Joanna’s extraordinary life ranged from working for the CIA at the beginning of the Cold War to the Peace Corps in India and Africa, to anti-nuclear and environmental activism in the US, and later, her worldwide teachings on Buddhism and deep ecology.

In Widening Circles she wrote of Tibetans she met in India in the 1960s who had experienced exile from their country and life-threatening hardships, yet evinced an effervescent love of life and inner contentment. Joanna came to see that their spiritual understanding of a core reality—that none of us are separate from each other or the earth—carried them into a deeper dimension of being. Having relinquished the linear focus of her childhood Protestant Christianity, she saw something essential to her own authentic soul in Buddhism, and began a life-long practice of learning, following and teaching the Buddhist tradition.

I will never forget a particular passage in Widening Circles about her early embodied understanding of a basic Buddhist (and, to me, a universal) truth of existence.

She was traveling from New Delhi to Dalhousie in India to attend a meditation retreat in 1966, at 37 years old. At the train station she was overwhelmed by the massive crowds boarding the packed train, with travelers ten to twenty deep at each door. She was almost crushed as the crowds moved and she was rammed through the door, and found her way to an upper berth. Shaking, she tried to banish the last terrifying half hour by disappearing behind a book on Buddhism in her bag. The chapter was about the cause of suffering, which is held to be the desire to pull oneself away from the rest of life, and seek fulfillment only within the narrow confines of what we call our separate “self.”

Every few lines she would lift her eyes and gaze down upon the packed coach, to let the words seep in. Here is her description of what happened next.

My breathing deepened, each breath filling more of my body, as if to ground and steady me for a physical challenge. My mind stilled in wonder, for the thing that then occurred seemed outside its control. Suddenly I was no longer enclosed inside my own body, but I wasn't outside it either. It seemed to be silently exploding, expanding to the point where everything else was inside it too. Everything out there—each gesticulating, chewing, sleeping form; each crying baby and coughing heap of rags; and the flickering, swaying carriage itself—was as intimately my body as I. I had turned inside out, like a kernel of popcorn shaken over the fire. My interior was now on the outside, inextricably mixed with the rest of the world, and what I had tried to exclude was now at its core.

My mind, when it could think, repeated one thing: "Released into action. Now we can be released into action." The world from which I could not protect myself became a world I was free to enter – to be. …

Joanna would later recount an unexpected event that occurred a year or two earlier which was instrumental in opening her mind and psyche to this experience. She was living in Germany with her husband, just after the birth of her second son. On a snowy day in Munich she strolled into a bookstore and happened to pick up The Book of Hours by the brilliant Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

The pocket-size, cloth-bound book, in German, was exquisite and quite old, an original version published in 1905. It opened spontaneously to the second poem, and Joanna, who read German, found herself transformed—in particular by the first line: “I live my life in widening circles.”

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours, trans., Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

At a point in her life when she had relinquished Christianity, and believed she had failed as a spiritual seeker, Joanna later said in an interview with Krista Tippett that, “something immediately rearranged in the furniture of my mind. I identified completely with it and I saw—it was just eight lines in that poem—that it could redefine that I was on a spiritual path. The constrictions that my culture had made around the sacred—it just fell away like dried crusts. And I felt an excitement about being alive now in a world that itself— yes, of course, it was—my world itself is sacred.”

She kept the luminous book of poems nearby, and packed it to take with her when she and her husband moved to India for the Peace Corps not long after. Thirty years later, in 1996, she and the poet Anita Barrows published an exquisite English translation of that very volume. Their Rilke’s Book of Hours is a celebrated and highly-regarded translation of Rilke’s first major published collection. He would go on to write some of the most brilliant and luminous poetry of the 20th century. Notably, Joanna and Anita Barrows’ version included Rilke’s poems in the original German alongside each translation. They later published excellent new translations of Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, and more recently, Letters to a Young Poet.

And, of course, Joanna titled her memoir after the Rilke poem that had opened spontaneously in her hands, like a mirror offered to her by the universe.

I first encountered Rainer Maria Rilke’s stunning poetry in the mid-1990s, during a time of my own spiritual awakening. In 1996, at 38 years old, I traveled to an exquisite, isolated Irish island called Bere Island, where I stayed for a month in a traditional stone cottage that had been lovingly renovated. I’d brought along a collection of Rilke’s poems, and on one sleepless night around 2 am I found that I was able to read and fully absorb Rilke’s incomparable Duino Elegies. In the otherworldly Irish twilight at the edge of the sea, I took in the poems at a cellular level; I was changed, and in many ways shaken and undone at my core.

A little over ten years later, as I was working on Sisters Singing, I encountered Joanna’s extraordinary memoir, her translations of Rilke, and her life-changing work on deep ecology in her classic book World as Lover, World as Self. She was writing and teaching about what it means to understand that we are of the Earth, that the Earth is sacred, and how to bear our outsized grief at what humans are doing to our only home.

Joanna called it grief work. She came to see that naming our grief and allowing ourselves to speak of it to others was actually enlivening, the opposite of being depressed or overcome. As she worked with people in groups, Joanna witnessed something again and again: when participants spoke their grief about environmental degradation, and also bore witness to other people’s grief, they actually came more alive. They were not relieved of their grief, but somehow the shared burden made it more possible to carry their grief—without going numb.

I was reading Joanna’s work during the year I was organizing and traveling to Sisters Singing readings all over the country in 2009. That September, I journeyed back to the lovely Irish cottage by the sea on Bere Island for a month alone, to think, rest, and take stock. Thirteen years after I first stayed there, I tossed a few books into my suitcase without much forethought, including Joanna’s translation of Rilke’s Book of Hours. Little could I have imagined how central that book would become in my life.

I had never deeply read this first major book of Rilke’s poems, and I knew that the translation by Joanna and Anita Barrows was said to be exquisite. It turned out to be the perfect companion to my silent sojourn on a lonely island. I wrote about it later:

After two weeks of silence in the Irish air, and many hours outdoors with the ancient stones and the land, I could feel the sacred presence alive within the Earth. In those quiet days I began to read Rilke’s Book of Hours. The poems, written over a century ago, rang in me like supple chimes. I came to see that each poem, often short and simple, was so full of sublime beauty that I needed to read only one each day, in order to drink its medicine deeply. It was indeed, a Book of Hours, a daily hymnal.

—from Communion: In Praise of the Sacred Earth

In my own echo of what happened to Joanna in Munich forty years earlier, I recognized my own spiritual longing in the pages of Rilke’s luminous Book of Hours. The poems, so full of Rilke’s own longing, anguish and embodied love, illuminated a venerable spiritual path that in some cellular way felt familiar to me.

I began to write out each poem in my journal, and I soon found that one line in the poem would stand out, offering itself to my imagination. I wrote out that line, rendered into English by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows, and it became a title for a new poem of my own. From the very first poem, I found myself addressing my writing to the Beloved, the embodied presence of the Earth herself.

I brought this practice home with me to Santa Cruz, and for more than a year I wrote every morning with Rilke at a writing table set by an open window looking out to redwood trees and the sky. Ultimately I wrote through the Book of Hours twice, producing 150 poems. The practice culminated in my collection of fifty poems in Communion: In Praise of the Sacred Earth.

In my Introduction to that collection I thanked Joanna and Anita for their exquisite translation of Rilke’s Book of Hours. In a way, they had been my daily writing companions along with Rilke himself. Their Preface and Introduction were historically grounded and richly textured, providing a vital orientation for me as a new reader. And perhaps most significant, they offered a brief endnote for many of the poems on choices they made during translation or other deep commentary. I never failed to read their note with each day’s poem, and thus they were with me morning by morning as I sat by my window with their book, Rilke’s poetry and my journal.

In the years after I first met Joanna in 2007 she went on to develop The Work that Reconnects as an extension of her grief work, and to speak of The Great Turning—the possibilities inherent in the breakdown and unravelling of our time to envision and build an entirely new future. Among other works, she published Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in Without Going Crazy, which has been translated into eighteen languages. By the time of her death, Joanna had written a dozen books, taught countless workshops, and had mentored an entire generation of environmental and spiritual activists.

Since hearing of her death I have spent many days immersing myself in Joanna’s interviews, podcasts, and writing. In many ways, there is no greater voice or teacher in this particular historical moment. I've included resources at the end of this essay for those who like to dive in and learn more of Joanna Macy’s extraordinary life and work.

Also in these past few days—remembering how much her translation of Rilke’s Book of Hours meant to me—I recalled how I had continued writing with Rilke after I completed Communion. I went back and reread many of the poems I wrote with Rilke’s next collection, The Book of Images. It was a feast of surprises. As any writer will attest, going back to old writing can sometimes be astonishing. We often have no recollection of setting down those words—but they are there, and they are ours.

Below is a simple unpublished poem I wrote to the Beloved with one of Rilke’s poems as companion around 2011. It carries some of what Joanna has taught so many of us through her extraordinary life.

I send prayers of thanksgiving to the Universe in honor of the life and teaching and brilliance of Joanna Macy, as her very essence becomes more deeply embedded within all of us and the Earth.

Thank you Joanna.

Let Your Beauty Manifest Itself
by Carolyn Brigit Flynn

Beloved, in our separate skins
we can believe we are not tree,
leaf, and light. We can believe
we are not sibling, mother, friend.

Beloved, we can believe we are only 
us: alone on our separate islands.
So lonely is this cold ocean,
so wide and deep in the vast otherness
of its miles-wide depths. 

Sometimes, Beloved, I feel
I cannot reach anyone. And I sit 
and reach for you, in my aloneness,

and in my aloneness
you are a still voice within me,
saying, Grieve, daughter, grieve.
Your losses are your losses
and your grievances have weight.

Do not renounce your sadness:
it bears the weight of all you love.
Use it as bridge, for there is 
no thing that does not cry.

Take your weeping skin out into 
the day, and show it the sky.
Let it show you how heartbreak can shine.

Grieving eyes see. Let the broken world 
glint as it looks back at you. 
Do not look away, do not seek 
to become glad too soon.
Simply remain. Remain.


Title from “Initial," by Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images, translated by Edward Snow

---

RESOURCES:

There are many interviews and resources online. Here are a few.

Joanna Macy’s excellent website includes her books, publications, teachings and multi-media

The Work That Reconnects Network website.

“Entering the Bardo,” Joanna’s brilliant essay on our current moment in Emergence Magazine, 2020.

Three fabulous audio interviews:

“Widening Circles: An Emergence Magazine Podcast with Joanna Macy,” (2018) is an excellent and wide-ranging review of Joanna’s life and the need to live within an ethic of care for the earth.

“Joanna Macy’s Message of Hope,” is another fabulous conversation with Joanna in 2021 on the Zen Buddhist podcast “The Way Out Is In,” with monk Brother Phap Huu and lay Buddhist practitioner Jo Confino, discussing the relevance of Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings to the crises we face today as a species.

“A Wild Love for the World,” On Being interview with Krista Tippett focuses beautifully on the poetry of Rilke as a lens into Joanna’s work in 2010.

Also, a podcast series not to be missed:

“We Are the Great Turning Podcast” a 2024 Sounds True Production with Joanna Macy and her longtime student and activist Jess Serrante. Through ten extraordinary episodes, they offer the deep teachings and simple practices of The Work That Reconnects, and offer abiding wisdom to help us stay joyful and energized as we work toward a more just and life-sustaining world.

Joanna’s books and translations mentioned in this essay:

Widening Circles: A Memoir

Rilke’s Book of Hours, translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

World As Lover, World As Self, 30th Anniversary Edition: Courage for Global Justice and Planetary Renewal

Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in Without Going Crazy

Other books mentioned:

Communion: In Praise of the Sacred Earth by Carolyn Brigit Flynn

Sisters Singing: Blessings, Prayers, Art, songs, Poetry and Sacred Stories by Women, edited by Carolyn Brigit Flynn.

Prayers for a Thousand Years: Blessings and Expressions of Hope for the New Millenium—Inspiration from Leaders & Visionaries Around the World, edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon.