Grieve and Love, with Joanna Macy
Hope Portal, Session 5
Our teacher and inspiration for this session is Joanna Macy. What she embodies is a wild love for the world and a fierce hope that rises irrepressible from that. And she carries and lives an important reminder to us that when we love, we will also know pain, and we will know grief that can feel too awful to bear. When we talk about the muscle of hope being reality-based, that means that it does not call us to be brimming with optimism where that is not warranted. What we’re called to do is stay present. And when you’re present, there will be grieving to do, but that this — strangely, interestingly, kind of miraculously — increases our capacity to love this world. And it unleashes intelligence and ingenuity to sustain that love across a lifetime, as Joanna Macy has.
Journaling prompts for Session 5
What is the love on the other side of your pain?
What is a loss you have perhaps not quite acknowledged?
The despair that you began to write about at the outset of this experience, the despair you may be feeling for the world today — what would it mean to stand reverently before your grief? Can you imagine what it would mean — to sit with what it would mean — to turn it into a mourning that brings you more deeply into the love that lies just on the other side of your pain?
We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE.
Or listen wherever podcasts are found.
Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page.
Just beginning? Read our introduction for a possible way to organize your experience.
The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org.
Thank you 🙂 just some thoughts:
"Love always hopes". I experienced this when my dog, then young, was on the edge of death through illness. I couldn't bear the loss because I loved him so much - for that reason I "hoped against hope". I had the same experience with my son. I could not bear the pain of his self inflicted demise - love meant I could do nothing else but squeeze every slight indication of hope - if I didn't care I wouldn't have bothered to do so. Maybe this is the connection between hope and love - if we didn't care we wouldn't hope and the measure of care is proportional to the measure of love. Btw my dog is alive and well and my son is now doing great!
This was beautiful. I've written down Joanna Macy saying 'THIS moment we're alive: you can dial up the magic of that anytime'. Thank you