Seeing, feeling and acting in a time of chaos and violence

Letters to the Earth Co-Founder Kay Michael remembers our teacher Joanna Macy, deep ecologist, environmental activist and Buddhist scholar, and reflects on these times of grief and hope.

“The elders are leaving us,” a friend says to me, one week after Joanna Macy’s death.

Joanna was a hugely loved and respected beacon of hope. And whilst she leaves behind a legacy of fierce love and wisdom - born from decades of helping people face the despair of a world in crisis with courage and compassion - she also leaves us in a time of upheaval: war, enforced starvation, mass migration, climate breakdown.

It sometimes feels terrifying, helpless, crushing to be alive in this moment. Have the elders prepared us with what we need to weather this storm? I wonder. I hope.

Joanna Macy and her body of practices, The Work That Reconnects, was born out of ‘despair and empowerment’ workshops that she and others led in the 1970s in response to the threat of nuclear war. Through it she calls us to feel and express our pain for the world – allowing the range of complex and sometimes messy emotions to flow. Outrage, alarm, grief, shame, guilt, frustration, numbness, helplessness. ‘It is a healthy response to a world in trauma’, and such compassion is a healthy expression of our belonging to all life.

In honouring our pain for the world and giving voice to it in shared space with others, we can break the spell that maintains ‘business as usual’. Of course, it can be scary to let our defences down and confront how we push crises out of view and let in the reality that things are so much worse than we think. But, as Joanna Macy says in her groundbreaking book Active Hope, whilst facing our distress doesn’t make it disappear, it does allow us to ‘place our distress within a larger landscape that gives it a different meaning. Rather than feeling afraid of our pain for the world, we learn to feel strengthened by it’.  Furthermore, these feelings are vital information telling us that humanity is off course, and they rouse our response to make change.

‘When people are able to tell the truth about what they know, see, and feel is happening to their world, a transformation occurs. There is an increased determination to act and a renewed appetite for life’.

Joanna Macy

And what if we also looked inward when confronting the harm we see in the world - looked at how we might be contributing to it too? How am I maintaining, enabling and expressing business as usual? How do I take life? How do I rob another of their subjectivity and sovereignty? How do I extract or exploit? We are part of this. This too is to be unravelled and grieved.

"As within, so without. As above, so below." 

Hermetic Principle

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." 

Mahatma Gandhi

It can hurt to open our eyes to the painful realities of our world and our complicit entanglements in it. Whether that is genocide, the displacement of people, the 6^th mass extinction or increasing climate catastrophes. And it can feel like a failure that despite all efforts nothing seems to change. But, as renowned trauma psychologist and Holocaust survivor Gabor Mate says so powerfully in response to the increasing horrors in Gaza right now: 

‘Even if you feel broken hearted and helpless and hopeless and in despair, don’t let that get to you: because you have a larger goal here which is to contribute to the light and the truth in the world as best you see it, and that is a long term struggle, a long term calling, and all of us can contribute to it.’

Joanna Macy, who died peacefully on 19^th July 2025 aged 96 in her home in California, invites people with her work to go on the ‘spiral journey’, a journey that ‘helps us develop our inner resources and our outer community, strengthening our capacity to face disturbing information and respond with unexpected resilience’. Honouring our Pain is only one part of the spiral. What precedes it is Gratitude for the gifts of life, and what follows it is ‘Seeing with New Eyes’ where we naturally experience a wider sense of self that is connected to all life, resourced and creative. The final ‘Going Forth’ allows us to access our unique vision, power and gifts to take forward into practical action and make our contribution to a life-sustaining society.

At Letters to the Earth our work follows this journey, giving space for people to share their feelings in response to the state of the planet and give voice to their visions of change and possibility. Writing a letter to (or from) the Earth helps people access their wider sense of self, one that is interconnected with the web of life, and write their vows and commitments for action as a promise to the Earth. We offer all of this and more in outdoor settings too, taking people on long-lasting journeys of transformation within community and by building deep relational attachments to the natural world.

We must speak our despair, our fear, our broken hearts. We must shake it out of our bodies. Dance, move, stomp, bang pots, put pen to paper: let the body express what the mind has numbed. We must let nature and the bare earth under our feet soothe our nervous systems. And we must keep working to make the world just and right, one in which all life can thrive.

‘Convert your rage to action and your grief to love. I think the planet feels us when we do this. Perhaps it will even help us.’ - says Emma Thompson in the introduction to our book Letters to the Earth, Writing to a Planet in Crisis, which follows Joanna's spiral journey, taking readers through chapters of Love, Loss, Emergence, Hope and Action.

May we each find the courage to feel, the strength to act, and the community to carry us forward. In memory of Joanna. For the Earth. For each other.

“The sorrow, pain and grief we experience for the world come from our love for it.

It is that love that will sustain us.”

— Joanna Macy