29 Quotes by Joanna Macy

The central purpose of the Work that Reconnects is to help people uncover and experience their innate connections with each other and with the systemic, self-healing powers of the web of life, so that they may be enlivened and motivated to play their part in creating a sustainable civilization.

To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe – to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it – is a wonder beyond words.

Walk boldly through your life with an open, broken heart.

We are making choices that will affect whether beings thousands of generations from now will be able to be born sound of mind and body.

Compassion literally means to feel with, to suffer with. Everyone is capable of compassion, and yet everyone tends to avoid it because it’s uncomfortable. And the avoidance produces psychic numbing – resistance to experiencing our pain for the world and other beings.

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.

The wave of the future is on the local level. Don’t waste your heart and mind trying to pull down what is already destroying itself. But come into where you’re almost below the radar and reorganize life. We want communities where we live and work and fight for the future.

Gratitude is liberating. It is subversive. It helps us to realize that we are sufficient, and that realization frees us.

It is my experience that the world itself has a role to play in our liberation. Its very pressures, pains, and risks can wake us up -release us from the bonds of ego and guide us home to our vast true nature.