Active Hope by Joanna Macy

Author:Joanna Macy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781577319733
Publisher: New World Library

Our extermination of other species has been compared to popping rivets out of the wings of an airplane in flight. How many rivets can the plane lose before it begins to fall apart catastrophically? How many species can our planet lose before we cross a critical threshold where the integrity of the web of life is so compromised that it begins to come apart, like an airplane that loses too many rivets and disintegrates?20

“We need to live together,” the Ladhakhi villagers say. “Or we will not live at all” is the message modern biologists would add. To stop the extinctions, we need to declare peace with our world. For that peace to take root and grow, we need active reconciliation and community building.

In the mid-1980s, Joanna and John Seed developed a group process that strengthens our felt relationship with other life-forms. Called the Council of All Beings, it invites us to step aside from our human identity and speak on behalf of another form of life.21 It can be an animal, a plant, or a feature of the environment — an otter, an ant, a redwood, or a mountain. We represent these life-forms at a gathering of beings who meet in council to report on the condition of our world. On one level we can see this as an improvised group drama, where we build empathy by looking through the eyes of another party. We could also approach this as a spiritual process, as a ritual inviting a shift in consciousness that allows another part of our world to speak through us. Either way, we are dropping our normal lenses and taking a perspective that sensitizes us to the needs and rights of other beings.

In preparation, we take time “to be chosen” by the life-form we will represent. Then, in silence, we make masks. At the appointed time, often announced with the beat of a drum, we join together in a circle and listen as each being speaks in turn.

When we speak on behalf of another life-form, a shift happens in our relationship with it. If we have spoken for ants or glaciers, bringing our imagination to bear in reporting their experience, they are no longer strangers to us. What emerges is a deepened appreciation of how they are affected by human activity, and with this, a sense of solidarity with them and a desire that they be well.

Like Arthur drawing on the strengths of creatures Merlin had sent him to spend time with, we can experience the beings we speak for as sources of support. Here Chris describes a time when this happened for him:

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