We can come home again (Joanna Macy)

In the first movement, our infancy as a species, we felt no separation from the natural world around us. Trees, rocks, and plants surrounded us with a living presence as intimate and pulsing as our own bodies. In that primal intimacy, which anthropologists call “participation mystique,” we were as one with our world as a child in the mother’s womb.

Then self-consciousness arose and gave us distance on our world. We needed that distance in order to make decisions and strategies, in order to measure, judge and to monitor our judgments. With the emergence of free-will, the fall out of the Garden of Eden, the second movement began — the lonely and heroic journey of the ego. Nowadays, yearning to reclaim a sense of wholeness, some of us tend to disparage that movement of separation from nature, but it brought us great gains for which we can be grateful. The distanced and observing eye brought us tools of science, and a priceless view of the vast, orderly intricacy of our world. The recognition of our individuality brought us trial by jury and the Bill of Rights.

Now, harvesting these gains, we are ready to return. The third movement begins. Having gained distance and sophistication of perception, we can turn and recognize who we have been all along. Now it can dawn on us: we are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again — and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way than before, in our infancy. ― Joanna Macy,  from World as Lover, World as Self

For another wonderful post featuring Joanna Macy’s work see:  ●  Transforming Despair  — “I learned, when I began to work with groups 20 years ago, that despair arose in relation to something larger than individuals, personal circumstances.”

Books by Joanna Macy:

●  Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy

●  Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World

●  World as Lover, World as Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal

●  Pass it On: Five Stories That Can Change the World