Joanna Macy – A Totara Has Fallen

 Tōtara

Kua hinga he tōtara i te wao nui a Tāne. Within Māori culture, this saying is said when a great person dies. Translated it tells us that a tōtara has fallen in the great forest of Tāne.¹ Joanna Macy has been one of the mightiest of all tōtara – a tree that grows up to 30m in height and can live for up to 1,000 years. Tōtara have been growing in Aotearoa (New Zealand) for some 100 million years.

Just as tōtara have been the source of material benefit and of inspiration, so too has Joanna Macy provided comfort, inspiration, and generosity of spirit for the last eight or nine decades. Joanna Macy died this week (on 19 July 2025) at the age of 96.

Joanna’s life and work could be described with many different metaphors, including that of a tōtara. The metaphor that she herself describes came to her during meditation in India at the age of thirty-seven. In her own words:²

‘To my inner eye appeared a bridge, slightly arching, made of stone. I could see the separate rocks of which it was built, and I wanted to be one of them. Just one, that was enough, if only I could be part of that bridge between the thought-worlds of East and West, connecting the insights of the Buddha Dharma with the modern Western mind. What my role might be – at the podium of a college classroom? at a desk in a library tower? – was less clear to me than the conviction possessing me now: I would be a stone in the building of that bridge.’

Seven years later she published her first book, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age. Early on Joanna Macy recognised the links between activism, love for the planet, and grief and despair. She had begun to build that bridge. Throughout the rest of her life Joanna Macy found more and more stones to build that bridge. She brought together Buddhist thought, grief work, deep ecology, and systems thinking, along with a highly engaging personality.

Joanna designed and facilitated dozens of experiential practices to help others connect their own personal power with that of the spirit of the world. In 1998 (updated in 2014) she and Molly Brown compiled these exercises and practices into the widely read, and applied, book Coming Back To Life: Practices to reconnect our lives, our world. The exercises and practices that she developed have been repeated all over the world. Undoubtedly, they will continue to be repeated for decades to come.

When Bill Plotkin was writing his influential Nature and the Human Soul, he wanted to interview two people for his chapter on elderhood. He chose Joanna Macy as one of those people. Macy graciously spent time with him. In this remarkable discourse Macy and Plotkin speak of how Joanna Macy did not so much make things happen, but allowed things to be spoken through her. One of the stones in the whole bridge.

Joanna Macy is certainly one of the western world’s true Elders. She will be missed, but not in a lasting sorrowful manner. She will be missed with love and affection, and her work will continue.

One further metaphor for Joanna Macy’s life is that of a Shambhala warrior. Rather than attempt to repeat the prophecy of the Shambhala warriors here, let me allow Joanna Macy to tell it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc42aNYo8vw As you watch this and understand the contribution Joanna Macy has made to this world, it becomes evident that Joanna Macy is a Shambhala warrior – it is not a metaphor of her life. She held both “weapons” within her hands – compassion and insight.

One final thought. Many years ago, Joanna Macy was being introduced at a public event. The MC introduced her by saying, ‘Joanna Macy has thousands of friends, many of whom have not been born yet.’ Her death is likely to see her gain many thousands more friends.

Notes:

1. Tāne is the Māori god of trees and the forest. He is responsible for separating Mother Earth from Father Sky, thus enabling people to dwell in the space between their parents.

2. From her memoir Widening Circles, and cited in Bill Plotkin’s Nature and the Human Soul.