Joanna Macy on Work That Reconnects

have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Joanna Macy, an environmental activist, author, and scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory,

and deep ecology. She has too many accomplishments for me to even begin to go into, but she is the author of twelve books, and Eric and Joanna cover many topics in this great interview. Hi Joanna welcome to the show. I'm going to be here. It is such an honor to have you on. I was joking with you beforehand and you were asking me, you know about the people who come on the show, and I said, well, the people come on the show are the sort of people

who quote Joanna Macy all the time. In reading for about eight years for this podcast, and I read every guest book, and so I've read a lot of books. You were in the top five most quoted people. I think in all these books you the doll a Lama and Ian McGilchrist, and there's a couple others, but you're way way up there in both ecological and spiritual circles. So it's a real honor to have you on. Well, Eric,

I'm so happy to meet you. Thank you. It's not that I can see your face, which our listeners can't, but you look very accessible. The fact that you actually wanted to talk about a real gun and his letters or any other part of this poet who has accompanied me through my life makes my heart open. Yeah. You know, I had wanted to talk to you for years, based on the work you've done around systems thinking and Buddhism

and deep ecology and all that. And then when I saw that you recently had put out a new translation of perhaps my favorite book of all time, Letters to a Young Poet, I was like, that does it? I have got to talk to her. So here we are, and before we get into all that, let's start like we always do, with the parable. There is a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always

at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second, and she looks up at her grandmother. She says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in

your life and in the work that you do. Oh yeah, well, it's right at the top of my and the important notions. Because what we're facing now with climate change, your climate catastrophe, and systems of war weapons and warmaking and the preparations for that, that seem to be accelerating that we have to really look at how has this come about? You know,

what have we been doing? So whatever is inside of us that we're trying to satisfy seems to have to do with power over others, possessiveness, greed, having just what we want and not worrying about its effect on other people, etcetera. And that's what so many of us are trying to

do right now, is to give us choice. That's what's great you to give choice to people and say you can continue the way you've been rolling along, or you can notice what's happening and see what you want to happen and what you need to do to express and express what that part of you that loves life, that part of you that it's grateful for the gift of life. So let's start by talking about Rilka. When did your

interest in Rolka start? Because you recently again a new translation of Letters to a Young Poet, but I believe you've translated or co translated many before this. Where did that interest start? This was the first book of prose, but in writing the Letters to a Young Poet, while it was less fun for us in terms of the task than poetry. He gives it was he was writing in a hurry as well as we'll not as we

talk about it. But so it wasn't like each sentence crafted like a necklace of jewels, you know, which was what it is with poems, and it made it so precious to say how to translate it. Here he was writing at a eight clip to a person he didn't know, and he was traveling often as he almost every letter was written from a new place, and to someone he didn't know, a young cadet, even younger than he. He

was twenty seven and the military cadet was nineteen. But he had written some poems and he wondered whether he was in the right occupation. Maybe he should be a poet instead of army officer. And so Wilka did have a book that would have just been published, and he had been reading it, and he was encouraged to write him out of the blue and send him some of his poems and asked for advice, which was a little nervy now that you think about it, but nobody ever

asked it. Wilka himself was only twenty seven and he hadn't been asked for this, and he was also extremely sampatique and sympathetic to people and the artists or somebody in the army wants to be a poet and he wants me to give him some critical comments about how to succeed, and I can't do it, and starts right out saying that, don't believe other people who are giving you advice about your writing. So and so he said,

I cannot advise you about your writing. But what he then proceeded to do, perhaps without meaning to it was just his art opening was sharing views about how to live a life. And that's what's caught the attention of people over over a century. Yeah, and you know, it's interesting because it's possible and you would know this better

than I do. And maybe this is just here in the US that this is the case, But it seems to me that letters do young poet, at least in the U S would have outsold all of Rilka's other works of poetry. Is that accurate? I believe. So it's been by far the most popular and um, yes, this totally astonishes me. But then you know, for moments, how many times have you heard some of these in weddings? Yeah, they're everywhere they're everywhere. Yeah, I mean I first came

across that book. I was a young, very bad poet when I first read them slash Songwriter. But I mean, so that's thirty years ago probably, and it made such an impression on me. And every few years I go back and I read it and I just am struck by you know, just how much of an impression it's made on my whole life. Oh, that is quite wonderful. Now I really want to interview you. Just think of what you've done with your life. And I can tell instantly that you're someone with an open heart and a

lot of energy and love for life. And so what did you take? Seriously, must have been a pretty good medicine you've been drinking. Yeah, well, I've had lots of good medicine to drink, for sure. Roca has been a part of it, Buddhism has been part of it, so many different things. Twelve step recovery has been a part of it. Yeah. I've been fortunate. Yeah, and that's why you're so believable to people. So tell me what made you, at this stage in your life, decide that we needed

a new translation of Letters to a young Poet. It was because my co translator and I, Anita Barrows, so loved hanging out with La. It was genuinely, truly, I'm telling you, Eric translating Lka was the most one either. It was that it was just totally engrossing, and we come to believe that for translation, it really is a huge asset to do it together, to do it diological and not to just be sitting there listening to the

inside of your own head. So we would start, whether it was poem or a letter, reading it in the German and then listening to it and that's particularly important with the poetry, of course, and then working it into English so that it kept some of the feel of it, the personality that comes through to sort of keep that because we're going back and forth and listening, rather than sitting with a piece of paper and jotting notes and with lots of uh energy and laughter in it because

you're doing it with another person that you love to work with. Now do you speak German? Yeah, Okay, that's where I found them. I I'm not chairman or don't have that ancestry, but I was living in my twenties with my young family in Munich and right after the birth of my second son, Uh, and I was over at the university I love to hang out. And I walked into a bookstar on the snowy morning, stomping the snow off my feet because they're right up against the alps.

There and there on this book store was a little table, all just one book on several copies, and I walked in and picked it up and opened it and read a little short poem, I lived my life in widening

circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one, but I give myself to it and that right then, and they're just when I had thought my journey, my spiritual journey in life had been a linear, that it had been toward the Golden City or at board the heavenly gates, and it had been such a hodgepodge of trying this and trying that, and doing this and doing that that I had I thought that I was hardly on a spiritual path, and that

saddened me a little bit. And suddenly I thought, a wait a minute, I've been doing that. That's the way as felt. And then the second and last verse that I read was in that same little second Paul I've been circling around God, that primordial tower. I've been circling for thousands of years, and still I don't know. Am I a falcon, a storm or a great song that was enough the grab ale of my heart for the

rest of my life. Those are pretty remarkable verses. I loved these poems so much, and they had come to him interestingly, by there's a word for this, almost like the divine dictation when he picked up a pen and it would just pour out, never changed it, never changed a word. This was for the book of Hours, and for this honads to Orpheus towards the end of his life,

the same thing and never pausing. Well might put it in another way, just as if God were or some uh great angelic presence was whispering in his ear by the mountains and rivers themselves were whispering in his ear. Yeah. So I was reading them in German, and the thing is that they were all rhyming and and and in German. It's very beautiful to do this D's Kish league and do the bif league, and then you know the German with the verbs at the end in the past tense.

It makes it very lovely and I would try to do that in English, and it made them sound sing song to put things in meter and rhyme, and so I gave up because I thought this, this really sounds tacky. But when I met Anita Barrows about thirty years ago here in California, and she's a poet and a psychotherapist, and she's a published poet. But she said, you know, it's been pointed out and the great poet Denise Levertov.

We did this out that in a world, in the modern age, where there's so much change in anxiety, loves that, so much questioning, deep questioning, don't try to write in rhyme and meter. A rhyme and meter make things sound too sure, you know, kind of eyed up, as if you already know where you're heating. But we don't know where we're hitting. And so so then we tried some and then it came it just two things happened. We were talking them into existence, and we were forgetting about

the rhyme and meter. You'll be interested in this. The first poem we picked of the Book of Ours was one that I asked another translator, Stephen Mitchell had gone him said there's a poem in the book of ours. I'm dying to give my American friends who are activists. They need this poem. Anybody who's an activist in the twenty one century needs this poem. And he said, no,

I don't do it, do it yourself. Okay, So they that's what we did first, and then I'll just tell you the first two lines and then you'll know why I wanted that from the storm was voked. You're not surprised at the force of the storm. You have seen it coming. The trees flee their flight, says, the boulevards streaming, and just the this sense of things falling apart. Yeah. So Stephen Mitchell told you then that he did not

translate poems. No, No, he was a translator. He's got they had a whole book on real come and but hadn't done this home and he said he wasn't doing anymore. I see. Yeah, it's his translation of Letters to a Young Poet and his translation of dowd Ching that I have loved so much over the years. That's wonderful to

see all of that he does. He does. I was fortunate enough to get to talk to him once for this show, and he does know that so do you have any particular parts of letters to a young poet that speak to you most in your life right now? Oh yes, oh yes. One that I have loved is let me see what if I can remember where he was when he wrote that. But he talks about God. He's cheering up the young cadet who apparently you never

get the letters that the military cadet wrote back. But it does sound as if he's complaining and that he has a little sorry for himself, because continuously Arelka is kind of buoy him up. He's apparently been saying, but I've even not only have I beene failures, and but I've lost God. And so this is a letter where says, now, wait a minute, how can you lose God like you? It's God's not like a little coin er pebble in

your pocket that you can lose. And then he goes with the flight of fancy, where Lka says that maybe God is growing along with you and along with all of us, and maybe he's not complete now, but it's matures and ripens along with the ripening of our life, and that we're building God by the choices we make, that He is coming into being through our needs and our adventures. Yeah, I love that section of the book. Also. I think it's a beautiful idea. I think he goes

on to sort of say in that section. I think he talks about something like you could only lose him like a little stone. That's right. Yeah. And I think he says the final fruit of a tree whose leaves we are, I think is another description that's used. Yeah it is. Yeah, Well that's also the kind of holy or divine a patience and curiosity even that he seems to encourage us to develop like that great phrase that one can never tire of, which is to live the

questions now. And that also uh advises patients, doesn't it m to hang in there and let's something so he that's another verb Eric that he loves. He uses the verb ripen. We can ripen, questions can ripen, relationships can ripen. And that from the natural world, which he found to be such an unfailing source of inspiration for himself. Another word that I think runs through that book a lot is trust. He's always going on about trusting, trusting in

the difficult. Like you said, I think to give something time to ripen is to trust it, you know, you trust it will come along. I think that that is practically the stance, the posture, the activity that we most need right now is we're facing so much hardship, fear and explicable challenging, falling away of what we used to be able to have faith in, and whether it's our government or are notions of God and his angels? Do

you have any German Eric, I don't. I should, given a lot of my ancestry is German, but I do not speak it well that you all love that just the trust trust is fair thrown, fair trowing, because throwing it is the word. It linked to truth. It's sort of hanging on to a confidence that there's truth, it's truth, and being patiently and faithfully with something. This has been

very much in my mind. It's interesting that you mentioned it because I'm thinking of the young people now looking at a lifetime that's so challenged right now, with what's falling apart, and with what's the climate is doing and what science is saying, and how can we build trust

in each other and in ourselves? And when we ask ourselves that question, the question itself helps I want to be trust worthy, trust myself, and how how hard that must feel when it'll look at what's happening around us, both with the falling away of the natural world, but

also what's happening in our human culture. We're not acting very trustworthy when we're starting to bad mouth other world leaders as if you're trying to build towards the hostilities and creating concredible you know, when you think of that defense budget we just passed over three quarters of trillion, when people are hungry and sounds of what are we

preparing to mount on ourselves now? So I gave a talk just a couple of days ago at the Zen Center, and I found myself saying, how wonderful it is to be thinking of doing what you can trust? How can you make yourself trustworthy to yourself? How you can be being to trust yourself? And it's a suite because there's an awful lot of counsel that we can find on that.

You know, a lot of gu items there. Yeah. Well, Zen talks about the three indispensables you know, great faith or slash, great trust, great doubt, great determination, and all three of those you know, which which I find the great faith, slash great trust to be the hardest of those three. Determination I do alright with doubt. Yeah, I got that one down, all right. Yeah, that's a beautiful question.

Because again and again, while walk in these letters to the young poet, while he speaks of fell talent of trusting, he again and again says, uh, go into the natural world, get close to nature in hell it be with it, Gaze upon it, let it speak to you. Look at the little things. How the grass grows, I guess, or mushrooms that grow, or the trees drink the rain, which they're doing right now here in Berkeley. We're having good

good Oh it is. It's like we're all standings and it's a look of shock and stunned and and yes and even fair throwing on our faces. Well, let's turn our attention a little bit to the other big part of your life, which has been something called the work that reconnects, And it's really about, you know, how do we reconnect to ourselves into the world and reconnect to feeling, really feeling the world. Yeah, we didn't know what to call it. We had all different names for the events

we would our intensives or what. But it was when we were doing the last manual on it, which actually is twenty years ago. My co author and I we said, well, we need a generic name for this. And my husband, I was alive then and who he loved the work and he spent a lot of his life and focused on Russia and the former Soviet Union. He took it there too. He said, what are you doing and they said, well, everything's fine. We're wearing up the book. As the book,

by the way, that's called coming Back to Life. Defined a term for the work itself, sort of just a definition of it, and he said, well, what does it do? Okay? I said, come on, you know it as well as I do. You know it connects the mind with the heart, It connects the reason with hands, it connects the inner with the political, and he went on. He was looked and he said, well, I guess it sounds like it's a work that we connects. And I said, well, yes,

but that is such a clunky word. Never work that reconnects. And then we thought, way, you know, nobody could ever misrepresented. So that's what we got. Well, I like the description there, and there's so much in this that we're not going to have time for, but I wanted to make sure to get to at least the most commonly held stories that we tell about the world. You say, story is our vision of reality, the lens through which we see

and understand what is happening now in the world. And you talk about three sort of dominant ways we could view what's happening right now. Could you walk us through those three? Yeah, Well, when we wrote that book, these stories were and particularly that became a little more clearer in a very popular book that does about the work called Active Hope. And the first is business as usual, and by that we really mane the growth economy, industrial growth society, and we tended to use that it's the

same thing as capitalism. But there are very powerful nations and economies that wouldn't want to call themselves capitalists, but they're competing with capitalism and and have the same effect on the body of living body of Earth and other species and us. And it is terrifying because it has an addictive grip on us that it's entered into our psyche in the way that to sense restlessness that we have to succeed, we have to keep growing, We have to do more. It has to be more, We have

to make more. We have to grow. If we aren't growing something then it's no good. And it is this that is turning the species, other species, and the natural world into money, the earth itself. And it's terrifying because we have built such powerful instruments and organizations that enshrine this addiction to grow. So that's business as usual. But what it does to the world now and what we're seeing the story we used the phrase we got from

David Corton called the unraveling. I like that phrase because that's what systems do. Ecosystems, political systems, human systems, biosystems. They don't fall over dead. They begin to unravel, They begin to lose their coherence, to lose their memory. And then the third the story is the great tourney, and that is the coming to our senses that it's choice based. Starts with the choice as we can make in any life, any community, and any institution, to begin to slow down

the destruction of earth or three steps. There first step is or not step. It happened at the same time. But what we tend to think of as activism is this slowing down the destruction of our world, of the slowing down the destruction of the forest, the oceans, you know all that, but it also is more than that.

It is building in new ways of doing things. And when we were developing this, I got so excited to realize how we're doing this at such a clip and with such ingenuity us as a species, that we are building new ways of growing and cultivating for food. We're but new ways of settling arguments, new ways of making energy, new ways of settling differences. It's like there's more things sprouting right now that we can remember from any other time,

so much ingenuity. You know, when people have started doing something that matters to them, they get so sharp. The third part of the Great Journey is just as essential because these ways of doing it, these institutions, these forms of activity, the ways that we're building, are all going to turn to dust if we don't have this, if we don't in the values and the purposes for which we're inventing and caring for the earth. And this means the inner revolution, they moral or spiritual. What is the

flame burning in our hearts? I love that that's my definition for me, a bodhicitta in the Buddhis and the caring for all beings. This has to work this time, not just for us, not just for you, but for all of us, because this is a planet, and we've got a planet to save and a planet to care or and a kind of definition for ourselves that we can begin to own that we're a planet people. We have different ways of showing it, different things to do, but so much to do. It's a wonderful time. I

love this idea of these three visions. I think we're most often presented with two visions, right, and the two that I'm most often here are the business as usual view, as you're saying, which is like, all right, we're just going to carry on. Everything's fine, nothing to see here, just you know, go on, everything's fine. And the other is we are all screwed, like you know, it's all falling apart. There's nothing you can really do. The forces

are too big, corporations are too powerful. As somebody who never likes only being given binary choice like this or that, I love this idea of the great turning, which you say. It involves the emergence of new and creative human responses that enable us to make the transition from an industrial

growth society to a life sustaining society. And the central plot is about joining together for how we act and I love this idea that another way we can see things is that there is a turning happening in the three ways that you talked about in actually people starting to slow down, the destruction of the Earth, the starting to try and save the commons, transformation in the way

we're doing things. And then as you say this sort of fundamental shift in worldview and values, you know, the roots of this go back to the mid twentieth century because we had in science with systems thinking, with a holographic view in science coming forward to see how intricately interwoven this living planet Gaia theory. Our planet is life, and not only that, but it's who you are. Every molecule in your body is given you by this planet.

We have a terrific heritage. And then you can lean back against this living world as something that supports you like at any moment you can feel it like grace

supporting you, acting through you. I got a lot lot of help with that from Australia when I went there with his work and started working with this fellow John c Rainforest Action rainforced activist, because he had had an experience that was his actual experience of in the action that it was not he who was saving this remains of an old growth forest from when it was from Gondwanalan, you know that Ryan Mordal continent. It wasn't his force.

It was the rainforest. The rainforest was just acting through him, was at his back, and he could just stand there with the kind of long range confidence. I'm just showing up for it. But it's it's big Mama. Who's who's real? Yeah, well, it's back to the trust idea from Rocco there. Yeah, yes, yeah. One things that you say is that of all the dangers we faced, from climate change to nuclear wars, none

is so great as the deadening of our response. Say more about that, Well, that question of yours actually leads back to how I got started with this work because I felt that did me among people who even knew what was happening. And this was back, oh good fifty years ago and more when I was in thanks to one of my sons, in nuclear power concerns, and and we started trying to stop the more reactors getting built, and I was involved in a lawsuit, so I learned

what was involved. I did the research that showed that people knew that what was happening, that when you're close to a reactor. The miscarriages, the birth defects, they still births. All of those grew as well as the cancers hugely, and so people knew, but it was very hard for them to talk about it, or not just because it involved female bodies, but that if it was distressing, it's hard in America, which is a country built on manifest destiny and being cheerful and smiling a lot. I mean,

that's how you sell everything from cars to politicians. It struck me as uh, this numbing. I felt it myself, and I sensed it and other people, and I saw that there were very admirable psychiatrists that we felt that it was somehow un American, and it was unpopular if you were to talk about how worried you were, or how depressed you were, or how sad you were, or how shocked you were by what you saw happening around you.

I think that's even more so true for men than women, And that couldn't allow you to respond as a human being. And so I thought, how can we come alive? How can we come alive to what we're actually doing? You know, we seem to accept that there are things that we can't change, then we might as well not talk about it. There's going to be a famine Afghanistan and we still't have war sanctions against that country, so we can't get

any money in there. But it's hard to talk about things that are really really stressing you or that stressing the world. And so that's what I start did with and invented ways in a group that we could actually

come clean or spontaneous. We had, you know, invented ways of talking like open sentences or practices like the truth Mandela, where it was almost ritualized that you could and it was so incredibly powerful to see what happened when they felt free and to speak their hearts, people from all walks of life, ages, backgrounds, and then what came was this when they could do it together, this explosion of energy and high spirits, even to hilarity. Suddenly you know,

you're just feel oh, I can face anything. I'm up for anything. You know, if you can just say it as it is and not nervously look over your shoulder and chew on your lip or you know a nawyer from nil or and this is not for me to talk about and to realize that you don't want it. You don't want people treat it this way, or you don't want this people made sick in this way. And with that comes such energy and as I said, sometimes even the hilarity laughter. And so that was the discovery.

And then as soon as we worked, as the years went by, it and this work, it developed into a spiral that has become identified with the work that recollects of four stages. Maybe you read about that too, I definitely did. I'm gonna ask you a little question about

that and a little comment. I mean, the first thing is you were just talking to made me think a little bit about experience in twelve step groups where all of a sudden you notice a sense of hilarity and energy when people are suddenly talking about things that up till now you just never talked about and all of a sudden once that comes out, Like you said, I think that was a great way of describing it, sort of hilarity and energy, and I relate with that absolutely.

It's the same. Yeah, Now we don't start with, you know, ask people to start with admitting a higher power, but I think and there's a feeling of also it's close to hitting bottom, and that when you can face some of the worst fancies you have about what could happen. I had some military people in the commander of a nuclear submarine and to actually talk about what some of the nightmares were, to share some of them was let free,

Set Free. You know. I think the other piece of it is you talked about how we have sort of this American sense of optimism, and you know, it's fine,

and you know, smile and move on. But the other thing that runs through this, I think, and and I know this certainly plays to me perhaps more even than being American, is that a lot of our at least the way we have perhaps co opted our spiritual traditions to make them more American, has brought this in also, which says that, you know, we've got the serenity prayer, which exposes some some real wisdom, right, you know, the serenity to know what we can change and what we can't.

But you say in the book also that if we only allow ourselves to care about what we can actually control, that diminishes us as people. And when you said that, I went, Wow, that really kind of hit me, because I'm a definite like focus on what you can control aspect it. It caused me to look at that differently. Well pointed out, I love that you're saying that because there's a lot now that we can't control and that we have to learn to live with and still see

where we have choice. It's made a big difference for me. Eric that not at the beginning, but pretty soon we found that we needed if we're going to really look at some of the dysfunctions and suffering in our cultures and it why that we're gonna need something to ground us to look at that. And you couldn't start right off coming together and facing and talking about it. You needed to feel somehow held and so it actually was happening.

It was happening naturally that we would be talking about what was working in our lives and what we were grateful for. It's amazing that because that didn't come in by a decision, but it was them by the time in the year ninety eight or ninety nine. At the end of the twenty century, Week wrote another book about it. We had a book in eighty three, and then a book at the end of the nineties, and then that's when the gratitude came in, and that has had an

incredible effect on well, I guess, but on me. It's changed me, changed my life. I always had a lot of love, but that's why I was able to handle the pain. But this pattern of doing the work in that first station, where you know, you take stop and with some and say it's gonna take ten minutes and just run the spiral, and then you do it together. But it's automatically what's going for me right now? Just

say something that you are so incredibly thankful for. You just mentioned as we talk about the spiral, or you describe the work that reconnects as a spiral mapping through four stages. You talked about coming from gratitude. Um, we've talked a little bit about honoring our pain for the world. We're running out of time, but let's talk about the third stage of the spiral, which is seen with new eyes. Yeah. Well, one of the things that happens. I think of the

whole thing, the critical point is honoring the pain. It's not diagnosing it and it's not pathologizing it, which is what the power holders in the current world system. It's very convenient for them to pathologize people suffering because then it's not a judgment on. It doesn't lead you to want to change a system if it's just somebody's crankiness and paranoia. And what happens in honoring the pain is that you begin to see that it's not from craziness

that you're feeling this grief, but it's from caring. And this caring is your love for life. It's like two hands pressed together, or that your pain for the world, moral pain, physical pain, dread, all the emotions, and your love for the world are in separable. There are two sides of the same coin. It helps to remind people, but it becomes evident in doing the work. And so then when you realize your oneness with the world them your capacity is everything is seen looks afresh. Then your

identity with the world. You are caring for the world, your anguish for the world. It is the most natural thing in the world because that's your true identity. Yeah, and then that is such good news. But it opens things. It opens your relationships with every other part of the planetary body and this being. That's in terms of space, but also in terms of time and what we have found.

The changes that makes in our relations with our past, past civilizations, past ancestors, become intimately related to us, and it's been so beautiful in some of the rituals, like harvesting the gifts of the ancestors is incredibly beautiful, empowering or in relation with future beings, intimate sense of connection with those who aren't born yet, but they are in

us because they are in our bodies. Our bodies carry in our DNA, the future ones, and they can be poisoned by what we breathe in or take in, even though they may not be born for another thousand years. That is an amazing idea to really reflect on that that, like you know, the future versions of us exist in us today. It is such an interesting idea, and they can help us so that it's a two way street.

So the entire at work is a celebration, i would say, and cannot be understood from a linear standpoint, but rather from the awareness of the great reciprocity at the heart of the universe. We're doing it with the ancestors and the future ones and the other beings. Like the ritual of the Council of All Beings. When you let in another quitter talk through you in your voice, you step aside from your human identity it's this broadening of what it's like to be a conscious choice making being on

a planet like Earth. Sky's the limit. That's such a beautiful sentiment. And I love the fact that in the middle of that sentiment you use the word critter, which just makes me, just makes me happy. It's such a great word. So we're out of time, but I'm going to bring us back to where we started, and I'm going to read just a short bit of Rilka from your latest book, and then all allow you to sort of add anything you'd like to to the end of it.

This is just a couple of lines where it says, furthermore, life happen to you. Believe me, you can count on life in any case. And as to feelings, all feelings are pure that hold you together and lift you up. Impure is the feeling that arises from only one aspect of your being and thus tears you apart. Thank you. Yeah, we're on the way to coming together in this time if we choose that to be. It is true. It may not be coming together enough for what we'd like

to see happen, but we are. We're facing and making choices to trust each other and trust ourselves and it's wonderful to have beings like Realca to remind us and like Eric Zimmer to remind us as well. It's been such a joy listening to you and talking with you. Thank you well, Thank you so much. And you may have just made my life by putting me in a sentence with Rilka. So thank you so much, Joanna. It is such a pleasure and such an honor to have

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