Joanna Macy in Toronto: The Great Turning, the third human revolution

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.

Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent Earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
From Joanna Macy's and Anita Barrows' translations of Ranier Maria Rilke Part Two, Sonnet XXIX

This poem was read last night in Toronto by the extraordinary ecologist Joanna Macy. My friend Jackie has been working with Joanna for a long time and co-facilitates reconnecting workshops in BC. Joanna is also featured in my friend Velcrow Ripper's new film FierceLight: When Sprit Meets Action now showing in Canada and soon to open across the U.S. I have always found her deep ecology a little too woo woo for me. Yet I have enough respect for my friends to have decided to go hear her in a rare appearance in Toronto last night and I'm glad I did.

While the whole world online and off is riveted by the extraordinary people's movement in Iran, Joanna talked about what she calls the Great Turning, "a name for the essential adventure of our time: the shift from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization." She points out that we are in the midst of the third great revolution of human kind. The agricultural revolution changed everything, the industrial revolution changed everything and now we are in the midst of another profound and wide ranging revolution of a similar kind. I make the same point in Transforming Power. She comes from a spritual perspective and I from a political one but we are seeing the same thing.

From her web site: "The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world-we've actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other."


I loved the way she challenged her audience explaining that the consumer society is designed to make us feel ashamed of ourselves, to feel insufficient and that the only way we can feel better is to buy more. Her solution is to practice gratitude for the wonderful things around us and developing a deeper connection to the natural world. Her ideas are influenced both by Buddhism and Indigenous spirituality. What was most significant for me was the connection she makes between this personal change and the need for those aware of the need for change to go into the corridors of power and challenge "the power holders."

This convergence of the spiritual and political is a theme of my book and of Velcrow's film and it is a powerful movement emerging. There were only a handful of people in the packed OISE auditorium that I recognized. When I mentioned that to a man I had worked with in the anti-racist movement, he put his finger to his lips, saying "shhh," jokingly letting now that he was in the closet about his spirtuality.

Maybe because I really have never had a spiritual practice, my tendency is to shout from the root tops that there are masses of people who have never been involved in traditional politics, from those with a spiritual practice who as Van Jones says are starting to put feet under their prayers to the geeks online who are madly figuring out ways to support the people of Iran. The are now called by the multiple crises faced by our planet to join the movement for change and in joining it are transforming it.

Please check out my new book and web site at http://www.transformingpower.ca