“What have my children done to my body?” Joanna Macy wailed, collapsing to the floor. Her voice broke through choking sobs, channeling the grief of a river. “How can my human children pollute me and turn away?”
To the uninitiated, such raw grief might seem at odds with Buddhism. But it’s not. Macy viscerally demonstrated what true interbeing, a central Buddhist insight of interconnectedness, looks like. She wasn’t performing; she was the embodiment of the river’s sorrow, mourning its poisoning.
Macy’s life was as expansive as the causes she championed. A scholar, activist, and teacher, she spent decades weaving together Buddhist practice, deep ecology, and systems thinking into what became the “Work That Reconnects” (WTR): a body of group work that has helped countless people face ecological crises without turning away. Through books like Coming Back to Life and World as Lover, World as Self, she offered not just ideas but practices that married intellect with heart. She wrote and taught around the world, carrying both the authority of a seasoned academic and the warmth of someone who had sat in circle after circle, holding space for grief, rage, and possibility. It was this rare combination—clarity of mind, rootedness in practice, and a profound willingness to feel—that she brought into the retreat where I first met her.
Macy was eighty-five then, leading a WTR retreat in Boulder, Colorado, where I live. The ceremony—where participants were invited to share their grief, rage, fears, and uncertainties with the group—changed me. As a climate scientist, I carried a deep intellectual awareness of impending ecological collapse. My professors had drilled in me the facts about the state of our planet, but no one had ever created space for my heart to break. Until that ceremony with Macy, the knowledge had never reached my bones.
Macy showed me how to honor grief and rage. She gave me permission to feel it all—beautiful pain and unbearable love—and to hold gratitude and joy alongside the deepest heartbreak. She taught me, as my Zen teachers had, that paradox is where our strongest resolve to love and act is born.
I’m just one of many across generations who’ve been transformed by her. She offered Western Buddhists something radical: permission to treat grief, fear, and rage as sacred. In an era when many Buddhist lineages saw these emotions only as defilements to be overcome, Macy reframed them as proof of deep connection—signs that we belong to life itself. Perhaps this is her most impactful legacy.
Because Macy was an established scholar with decades of academic research and teaching, her embrace of emotional alchemy wasn’t dismissed as naive. Her voice carried weight, and her ideas entered mainstream Buddhist discourse with legitimacy. She insisted that we respect our emotions as if they held deep sentience and intelligence; by honoring pain, Macy asserted, we could dismantle the “skin-encapsulated ego” and awaken to interbeing.
Macy considered emotional numbness one of the greatest threats to the environment. The grief we carry for vanishing species, burning forests, and suffering people is not a pathology, she taught, but evidence of love.
“What batters you becomes your strength,” she’d say, quoting her translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower.” “If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.”
In my first grief-rage ritual with Macy, I could barely speak. Emotions churned inside me, but only fragments escaped: “Men…in moving buses.” Then I wept while the circle lovingly witnessed me. I’d processed much of this pain in Zen practice, but I’d never publicly spoken about the sexual molestation I faced as a little girl in India’s buses and trains.
It struck me that in a ceremony meant to honor ecological pain, what emerged was my pain tied to toxic patriarchy—where men felt entitled to everything a woman is, has, or stands for. Over time I came to see that, for many women of color, ecological trauma is deeply interwoven with the traumas of colonization, hetero-patriarchy, and racism.
Macy helped open channels in my body that had been holding on to grief. She set me on a path of integrating racial, intergenerational, and ecological pain—work I’ve carried forward by leading grief and rage ceremonies for the past decade.
In the summer of 2015, a few months after witnessing Macy channel a river, I created and performed a solo WTR dance at the annual talent show at the all-staff meeting for the Environmental Defense Fund, where I worked as a climate scientist. Wearing a traditional Indian folk costume, I danced to the four stages of Macy’s WTR spiral—gratitude, grief, transformation, and moving forth with courageous actions—while images of ecological distress and racial injustice flashed behind me.
Foremost in my heart was Tamir Rice, the beautiful twelve-year-old Black boy murdered by police while holding a toy gun. There was barely any discussion within my organization of this tragedy, as if the systems that kill Black children are separate from the systems destroying the earth. My grief poured out through my dance.
The talent show was a celebratory tradition, filled with music and skits. No one else expressed grief or fear on that stage, despite our daily confrontation with climate catastrophe. It was nerve-racking to break that silence—not only to name my climate and racial grief in front of a thousand colleagues, but to do it while embracing my Indian heritage.
At the time, I led two separate lives: one as a Zen teacher, one as a scientist. Speaking of climate grief and racial trauma in my professional circles was uncharted territory. Macy gave me the courage to merge them. Several colleagues wept with me, grateful to see truths named openly.
When I hosted Macy later that year in Boulder, I told her about the dance. She received it like a proud, loving mother. She had a way of making everyone feel like they were her favorite.
Joanna Macy passed away peacefully on July 19, 2025, at the age of ninety-six. Hearing the news, I felt as if her compassionate radiance had dispersed into the world, leaving it subtly brighter.
On July 23, the day her body was taken to the mortuary, my sangha created an altar in her honor. There were photos, wildflowers, candles, and, in a large bowl, a statue of Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion. One by one, we poured warm, fragrant tea made from wildflowers and herbs over the statue.
As I bowed, my breath deepened and grief finally surfaced after days of stunned quiet. I felt Macy’s delight in the offering, though I wasn’t prepared for what came next.
In my home, herbal tea usually spoils within hours in summer heat. But the tea from that ritual never turned. I drank from it for five days before pouring the last of it out on July 28, the day Macy was buried. It felt like a blessing: her presence accepting our offering.
As philosopher Báyò Akómoláfé wrote in his tribute to her: “Visit during the swelling of the tides, will you?”
I know she will.
