Climate Activist and Buddhist, Joanna Macy, passed away this year and left us with her legacy, The Work That Reconnects. This work is inspirational and based on the following:

1. Our Earth is alive. It is not a supply house. Nor is the Earth a place for disposing of waste from the Industrial Growth Society. The Earth is a living, complex system – with its own intrinsic value.
2. Our true nature is far more ancient and encompassing than the separate self defined by habit and one encourage by consumerism. The planet is a living system that has self-reflexive consciousness – and in this way can know and see itself through us – and respond to its own suffering.
3. Our experience of moral pain for our world springs from our interconnectedness with all beings.  We can enhance our power to be part of the the healing of the world, when we turn towards our pain for the world and what grieves us about current circumstances. In Buddhism, the cultivation of compassion begins by turning towards ‘suffering’, also known as ‘dukkha’.
4. Unblocking occurs when our pain for the world is not only intellectually validated, but also experienced and expressed. We need more than cognitive information about the social and ecological crises. We need to experience our hurt and grief for the world. In this way, we can become mobilised to act, our of compassionate free will – and a recognition of our belonging to the world and interconnectedness to the web of life.
5. When we reconnect with life, by willingly enduring our pain for it, the mind retrieves its natural clarity. Not only do we experience our interconnectedness in the Earth community and the human community, but also mental eagerness to match this experience with new paradigm thinking. Significant learnings occur as the individual re-orients to wider reaches of identity and self-interest.
6. The experience of reconnection with the Earth community, human and other-than-human, arouses desire to act on its behalf.  Through the truth of our interconnectedness, we may notice a deep yearning for healing and concern about the welfare of all beings. We may become motivated to act – and even more beyond a habitual ‘comfort zone’ that has been numbing us to the cries of suffering of the world. Through courageous and spontaneous compassionate action, we can live more fully, authentically and experience moments of pure joy.
7. Collective liberation within our species is essential to the flourishing of the larger web of planetary life.  We are all in this together and no one is free until we are all free of the systemic inequalities. The Industrial Growth Society is based on and sustained by inequalities and generational and contemporary oppressions (see also the work of the Anti-Oppression Resource Group)