Joanna Macy, In Memoriam — Beauty and Wisdom and Courage (and Rilke) to Sustain Us
On Being with Krista TippettShow Notes
This rich, gorgeous conversation will fill your soul. The singular and beloved Joanna Macy died at home at the age of 96 on July 20, 2025. She has left an immense legacy of beauty and wisdom and courage to sustain us. A Buddhist teacher, ecological philosopher, and Rilke translator, she taught and embodied a wild love for the world. What follows is the second and final conversation Krista had with Joanna, together with Joanna’s friend, psychologist and fellow Rilke translator Anita Barrows, in 2021. Joanna and Anita had just published a new translation of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. At the turn of the last tumultuous century, Rilke was prescient in realizing that the world as he’d known it was passing away. Joanna’s adventurous life and vision took shape in the crucibles of the history that then unfolded. Relistening to her now is to experience a way of standing before the great, unfolding dramas of our time — ecological, political, intimate. We stand before the possibilities of what Joanna called “A Great Unraveling” or “A Great Turning” towards life-generating human society. All of this and so much more comes through in the riches of this life-giving conversation.
Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.
More from On Being with Krista Tippett
From Krista: I'm on record bemoaning across the years that “love” is the most watered-down word in the English language. I know that invoking love feels very soft for our hard realms of politics and war. Yet it is an enduring truth that love is the only force as powerful in a human body as fear. And we inhabit a world that calls us to grow up our capacity to love — and to redeem our relationships to neighbors, strangers, and enemies — as never before, both in the present and for the sake of the world beyond this age of violence we've come to inhabit. Rabbi Shai Held has written an epic theological work called Judaism is About Love. And, as he interrogates Judaism's complicated history with love, he makes an offering that is of relevance to us all.
From Krista: I was longing for a deep dive on the radiant and common-sense hope that Jason Reynolds embodies after I interviewed him at a Georgetown event last year. I got my chance at the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival. Jason’s perspective is so urgent for the world we've now walked into: on giving ourselves grace to be hopeless, the virtue of stamina, and the hope that stays strong in him from his life in relationship with the very young in our midst — "the arbiters and purveyors of the future" — as well as an occasional stranger in a bar. Jason himself is preternaturally wise as well as talented and kind and humble. He's become a friend across the years and is one of my favorite people in the world.