lestai jammiia gottfrid
Inacayal Tanoesoedibjo
The world in BENEATH THE HAUNTING SEA was born from two images: a tree inexplicably growing in the middle of the ocean, and gods wearing stars on their rings instead of diamonds. An entire mythology grew out of trying to explain those images to myself, and the rest of the world followed from there. The story itself, however, came from a different image: a girl riding on the back of a whale to go and save her mother.
The bardo occurs not just when you die; it also can be a huge change in the conditions of your existence. [Tibetan Buddhist teacher] Mingyur Rinpoche talks about something like this in his book Falling in Love with the World, describing so powerfully how totally disoriented he was after leaving his monastery and going out into the world completely alone.
Not only does Joanna take viewers to popular tourist destinations, but her sense of curiosity sometimes navigates the show off the beaten track toward sights that might escape the radar of the average tourist.
Her documentaries often contain glimpses into the day-to-day lives of the people behind those destinations, highlighting their personal stories and experiences with such sensitivity, kindness and generosity.
To me, the most endearing part of her documentaries is her sense of wonder. The way she genuinely marvels in amazement at the discoveries along her journey is a joy to behold and an invitation for the viewer to share in her serendipitous moments.
Given the extent to which I love her documentaries and her unique storytelling style, how can I not feel inspired by the way Joanna welcomes viewers to her programs as she recounts her journeys with us in such a friendly, joyful and accessible way?
As Joanna continues to guide us along her travels in the four corners of the world, I will remain a loyal fan and true, not only for the wonderful tour guide that she is but for her inimitable enthusiasm and love of the world and its people, which can serve as a source of inspiration to us all.
Macy, a scholar and teacher of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology, is the author of 13 books and a respected voice in movements for peace, justice, and ecology. She originated The Work That Reconnects, a framework and methodology for personal and social change. It is influential work that, in the face of overwhelming social and ecological crises, helps people transform despair and apathy into constructive, collaborative action.
It was February 2005, and after several months of frontline reporting from Iraq, I had returned to the U.S. a human time bomb of rage, my temper ticking shorter each day. Walking through morgues in Baghdad left scenes in my mind I remember even now. I can still smell the decaying bodies as I write this, more than a decade later. Watching young Iraqi children, shot by U.S. military snipers, bleed to death on operating tables left a deep and lasting imprint.
My rage toward those responsible in the Bush administration bled outward to engulf all those participating in the military and anyone who supported the ongoing atrocity in Iraq. My solution was to fantasize about hanging all of the aforementioned from the nearest group of light poles. Consumed by post-traumatic stress disorder, I was unable to go any deeper emotionally than my rage and numbness. I stood precariously atop my self-righteous anger about what I was writing, for it was the cork in the bottle of my bottomless grief. To release that meant risking engulfment in black despair that would surely erupt if I were to step aside, so I thought.
Six months after having tea with Joanna, I found myself with her and a few dozen others in the redwoods of coastal California, where for ten days we dove deeply into the violence that was happening to the planet, what it meant to humans and all other species, and how dire our situation really was. (Today, more than a decade later, it is, of course, far, far worse.)
The natural progression of my journalism work took me from the front lines of the occupation of Iraq to the front lines of human-caused climate disruption. I had been researching and writing feature stories about climate disruption for six years before beginning the field research for my book The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption. Much of my research was gleaned from monthly climate dispatches I had been writing for Truthout, the news website where I worked full time. Each dispatch was essentially a collection of scientific studies and extreme weather events tied to climate disruption over the previous thirty days. Pulling all of them together in one place was always overwhelming to write as well as to read.
But I was angry again. I was writing these dispatches hoping they would wake people up to the crisis upon us, to the fact that we were already off the cliff and needed to begin adapting to our new world. And it was that energy I was taking into my book, thinking the writing would be something along the lines of 75% climate dispatch and 25% personal stories and nature writing.
Excerpted from A Wild Love for the World: Joanna Macy and the Work of Our Time edited by Stephanie Kaza 2020 by Stephanie Kaza. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications Inc., Boulder, Colorado.
The Female Man is explicitly a feminist science fiction novel. It uses the device of four (loosely speaking, they differ in time) parallel worlds to explore gender roles by challenging each of the main characters from each of these pre-conceptions of femininity.
Jael, in the novel, is less driven by emotion than the other three main characters, as she comes from a world with a literal war of the sexes, she has become hardened and it is her who engineered the four women meeting.
Yeah I was wondering last night why Ty wasnt the first point off the bench. If you have J.R. Smith, Birdman, and Lawson coming in the game to change the pace, it would be something to see. A fast pace, high energy squad wh2;o8#17&s game would complement each other would definitely change the game. Karl must really not trust Ty or like old guards who look bad against everyone in the league. Hold on, that thought process sounds kinda familiar.
This book is both a celebration and commentary on Joanna's life and work. Her colleagues and disciples have brought together 46 articles exploring different aspects of these contributions, organised into five sections concerned respectively with understanding ourselves in the world, the need to accept and act on despair, dependent causality (I'll come to this), deep time and 'the work that reconnects' - empowering present and future generations to build a more resilient world that works for us all. Joanna offers eleven of these articles herself, drawn from her great body of writing, typically short and autobiographical, reflecting on how particular ideas and practices emerged from particular times and life experiences. The other 35 examine key ideas in more detail and show their application in many different places and contexts.
Fundamental has been Joanna's embrace of Buddhism. Throughout her life Joanna has travelled widely. She lived in India in the early 1960s and characteristically, finding a resonance for her ideas in Buddhism, invested in becoming a scholar. But more than this, she pursued what Thich Nhat Hahn calls 'socially engaged Buddhism', a commitment to changing the world not only contemplating it.
Demonstrating the breadth of her studies, Joanna also saw that there were related ways of thinking emerging in the new sciences. Rather later (in 1978) her Ph.D. thesis (undertaken in a Department of Religion) was entitled, 'Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: The Dharma of Natural Systems'. She was not alone of course in seeing these connections. Margaret Wheatley, Otto Scharmer and Fritjof Capra among others have found that a Buddhist world view offers an important window on the nature of our existence.
In truth, I understand the language of the new sciences better than I do that of Buddhism so in this review I will stick closer to the former but I am persuaded that several recent advances in the natural and biological sciences have their correlates in Buddhist ideas going back a thousand years and more.
I want to give one example because it's central to Joanna's engaged practice. I have reviewed Capra (and Pier Luigi Luisi's) book The Systems View of Life elsewhere on this site. They identify two essential things about our reality. First, the 'Gaia hypothesis', that life is a vital feature of our macro world that has emerged as a dynamic process over its lengthy evolution. Second that all life can be understood as a continuous process of interaction among systems embedded in larger systems, from the simplest cell up to this living world as a whole. For Capra and Luisi, the ecology of these relationships is a critical discipline.
In Joanna's language, 'deep time' attends to the vast history of our planet; the 'ecological self' (and its 'Gaia consciousness') locates us as part of the living world; 'dependent causality' alerts us to the reality that our own well-being is intimately linked to the well-being of others. Engaged Buddhism is the activism that connects us to each other and this understanding of our global interdependence in the face of threats to the beautiful gift - our world - that we have inherited and pass on to our descendants.
These threats are many. I mentioned 1945. Much later Joanna visited the peace camp at Greenham Common, protesting the deployment of US nuclear weapons on UK soil. Much later still, her work was further energised by the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima. Nuclear waste leaves a very long and dangerous footprint.
Of course there are many needs for peace-building. One of the articles (Helena ter Ellen) describes the use of Joanna's methods (the 'Truth Mandala') as part of the recent truth and reconciliation process in Colombia, a country I know well.
Then there is the protection of nature. Joanna describes her time with a community in the Australian rain forest, resisting the logging that intentionally destroys our precious inheritance. And climate. Leaders of Extinction Rebellion have found inspiration in Joanna's 'wild love for the world'.
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