Joanna Macy, In Memoriam — Beauty and Wisdom and Courage (and Rilke) to Sustain Us

0:03Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell and as you ring what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change What's it like, this intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine In this uncontainable night Be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses The meaning discovered there And if the world shall cease to hear you, say to the silent earth, I flow, and to the rushing water speak, I am.

1:16For many years, when I have found myself feeling unmoored by life and this world, I have listened to this poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. It's read by Joanna Macy, who also translated it and brought it to life afresh for our century. Joanna has now left this world, but this beloved Buddhist teacher and ecological philosopher and activist has left an immense legacy of beauty and wisdom and courage to sustain us. What follows is the second conversation I had with her, together with her friend, the psychologist and fellow Rilke translator, Anita Barrows, which we recorded amidst pandemic and lockdown in 2021.

2:04Rilke sought the shape of meaning in a now-vanished Central Europe at the turn of the 20th century. He was prescient that the world as he'd known it was passing away. Joanna Macy's adventurous life and vision took shape in crucibles of the history that later unfolded, from an early career with the CIA in post-war Cold War Germany, to India with her husband, who was leading the nascent Peace Corps there, as the very young Dalai Lama arrived into exile. Now, re-listening to her perspective on the world and how she channels Rilke, we experience a way of standing before the great unfolding dramas of our time, ecological, political, intimate.

2:53We are at a newly existential, pivotal moment in history, and Joanna Macy long foresaw this. We are standing before the possibilities of what she 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 our 2021 conversation. Joanna, who was born in 1929, was 92 as we spoke. in his letter that he wrote he wrote an amazing letter from Sweden and he starts out saying I've been thinking he's not responding so much to the cadet but he's speaking about there's something going to happen it is enormous it is huge we must accept our reality and all its immensity everything even the unheard of, must be possible within it.

3:57This is, in the end, the only courage required of us. The courage to meet what is strangest and most awesome. I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.

4:15The conversation that follows is infused with friendship as much as ideas. Joanna and Anitia, have translated Rilke together across decades, alongside many other professional and life adventures. I have come into friendship with both of them as guests on this show, Anita on the soul and depression, Joanna on her spiritual and activist wild love for the world. And all three of us have communed with Rainer Maria Rilke across time and space. The bohemian Austro-Hungarian world into which he was born in 1875 was utterly remade by the tumult of the young 20th century. Amidst the tumult of our young century, I spoke to Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy via Zoom.

5:05Well, I wish I were sitting in a room with the two of you, but here we are. Can I see you? No, you can't see me. You're just going to hear me. I'm going to be like, I'm like the voice of God coming straight into your thoughts. And you into mine. I'm not even going to look at my screen. I'm going to look at the tree in front of my house. Yes. That's a good idea. Yes. I mean, this is a little hard to get used to, but I mean, I sometimes close my eyes so I can completely listen. Yeah. And it's such a joy to be with the two of you. And I can't really tell you how excited I was when I heard that you were translating Letters to a Young Poet.

5:57Which, you know, I feel like this book has, it's been part of my life for such a long time. Since I think, Joanna, one thing you and I have in common is those the early years we spent in Berlin and or in Germany. And, you know, I was and we were both there and in chapters of its 20th century tumult, which was kind of a fault line of the world's 20th century tumult. And I have my book with me. I think the two of you have your books with you. and I really just want us to kind of talk about this book and read to each other and, you know, I was just amazed recently I'm not sure I knew this or had ever taken it in to read, well, it's in your book too but I had read it recently somewhere else that Rilke himself was only 27 when he replied to these letters That's right, and I did not take that in at all when I read it I assumed he was an elderly man.

7:06Yes, yes. Well, he never got to be elderly. Right. Right. No. There seems to me, you know, something that I have identified with in the last period that wasn't there for me when Rilke entered my life, which was in the last couple of decades of the last century, is that he was a turn-of-century person, just as we have become turn-of-century people. It feels like there's something in the heft of what he said and how he said it, that he also, in 1903, when he was writing those letters, was on the cusp of this unimaginable tumult and carnage and transformation of that last century. Yes. You know, in the book of ours, which we're not talking about, but he then, just a couple of years younger than when he is writing to the military cadet, in his letters to this young poet, he said, the leaf is turning like a century is entering.

8:25Just at that moment, at the becoming of the 20th century. And you could feel his, what would you say, his awe and a troubled sense. What is in store? And the fates that are turning this page to the 20th century look at each other and say nothing. Yes. And he senses he could have known nothing about the two world wars, the death camps, the nuclear bombs. Yeah. The terror, none of it. And yet he sensed that to his core. Yes, very much. And he was very aware of the dangers of industrialization, which were already beginning to have their effect, certainly on Europe. And I think that was a piece of it, that there was an ominous sense of what was happening to the natural world, which he loved.

9:35And all of that, everything that you two have just mentioned, is with us still and again, right? Yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly. That's what I kind of feel emanating from these pages, from these words. I've had to say, in the last week, I have had his language of living the questions has become absolutely central to my work and to my life. And just in the last week, for example, I've had it quoted at me by a neuroscientist and by a television actor. And so it does feel to me like if there is in it. So let's just maybe start with living the questions. Let me just read that passage. very particularly that experience of standing before great personal and civilizational questions, which right now have no answers.

10:44So he said, and which letter was this? This was letter four. It's the fourth, yeah. Yeah. I ask you, dear sir, to have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms, like books written in a foreign language. Don't try to find the answers now. They cannot be given anyway because you would not be able to live them, for everything is to be lived. Live the questions now. Perhaps you then may gradually, without noticing, one day in the future, live into the answers. What a wonderful way to relate to uncertainty. Yes. Yes. And I think, you know, so much, especially in our very consumer-oriented society, where we're looking for answers all the time.

11:51And we're looking for solutions, rapid solutions, immediate solutions. Here we are being told to live into the questions, to be able then to say, I don't know. I have to sit with this. I have to be with it. It's a practice that we're not taught by anything in our society. But it's the only way to be in the present moment. because when we want to know, oh, where's this heading? Are we heading to war? Are we heading to, can I have it now? Shall I be, can't I have hope? All of those things, even the question of hope takes you out of the present moment. And the present moment is the only place you're really present.

12:43the only place where you can actually choose. You know, I have actually really taken this teaching as a life practice of, you know, holding the questions, loving the questions. And I've taken it as a life practice with a question to actually very actively do that. put the question before me, hold it, treasure it, nurture it, walk with it. And I have found that if you are faithful to a question like this, it will be faithful back, right? It will do this thing that he says, which is that you live your way into whatever the form and answer takes. Yes. Then it comes toward you. Then it has more to say to you.

13:41then you can hear it and then you have a capacity you are with the question in a way that invites you to become something that you haven't been yet right it extends a hand so this is what I have been feeling even more in this last year or so with all the work with Rilke is feeling in him this sense of opening to the reciprocity of life. It's a living world. We can listen to it. We can open to it. It's not a machine that we poke and press and push a button. It's a mystery. And we make the mystery. And then it talks.

14:58I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, delving into Rainer Maria Rilkes' Letters to a Young Poet with Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows. They've just released a fresh new translation of that work.

15:22Joanna, I would say, so Living the Questions is perhaps the part of the book that I feel I've watched people culturally discover, so many people discover or have it be part of their life. I have also always felt and never more than recently that the things that Rilke said about gender a hundred years ago in this book that our world has met him there now or almost I think that we still have a lot to learn I think he's a little bit beyond us at the moment but there's one part And also in that fourth letter where he says, perhaps the genders are more closely related than people think. The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that male and female freed from all false feelings and disinclinations do not seek each other as objects, but rather as siblings and neighbors to become human together, simply, seriously, and patiently helping each other bear the burden that sexuality has placed on them.

16:32Isn't that wonderful? Well, to me, it's a description of, yeah, where we are, as you say, fitfully, imperfectly, but I think heading as a culture. But then, of course, there's the extraordinary part in the letter from Rome, letter seven, where he talks about the girl and the woman. I don't know. Does one of you want to read some of that? Yes, sure. Page 59, 5960 is where I'm looking. Oh, yes. Oh, that's wonderful. Yes. Or maybe, yeah, One Day the Girl and the Woman Who Don't Define Themselves. There's more. Just whatever you'd like to read, as much as you'd like to read there. Let's see. I'm looking for exactly.

17:13Oh, here we go. One Day the Girl and the Woman Who Don't Define Themselves in Masculine Terms, but as something in themselves, female humans, will require no other completion. this enormous shift will transform the character of love which is hampered today by the resistance of men and generate a relationship from human to human not from man to woman and this more human love endlessly considerate and light and good and clear consummated by holding close and letting go will resemble that love that we so arduously prepare, the love that consists of two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other.

18:06Yeah, I love that passage. Yeah. Yeah, two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other. Yes. So it's not the merging, not the convention bound ways of acting. And I love that Rilke speaks. I mean, you know, I could see where it could be critiqued. critiqued. But I love that he speaks at the beginning of that paragraph about the ways in which women need to be careful of not just stepping into the patriarchal system, the patriarchal values, which, you know, has happened, you know, to a large degree. We've had the feminist movement, but in many ways, we have not yet brought the feminine sufficiently into our culture.

18:59And the feminine. I think Rilke, you know, Rilke was talking about this so early on at the beginning of the last century. He was also concerned that in the freeing of coming to experience, being free to experience one's sexuality, it was male sexuality. So much of what, how sexual freedom in our country and even sexual fulfillment has come to be identified with what he calls here the lust and thrust and restlessness. Right. I don't think that was in the Herter Norton translation. No.

19:49Right. Right. We had a good time translating that. And what we're talking about is a feminine aspect to humanity, right? Yes, exactly. It's not just about women. It's about a fullness of human nature and human capacities. Yes, yes, exactly, exactly. I'm just curious. And, Joanna, you've lived such a long time. You're so amazing. I wonder how you see, you know, again, well, so we should clarify that, you know, Franz Kapos was writing to Rilke as this lovesick young person. So he was bringing sexuality into these letters. But Rilke did always reply to that in, well, he replied in a very tender, personal way, but also in the whole context of relationships, of gender, really.

20:48That certainly 100 years ago was so much of a box and a container and compartment. Joanne, I'm especially curious about how you've watched this evolution. Yeah, I'm thinking of the love between Rilke and Lou, Lou Andreas Salome, when he was 21 and she was 35 and they met. And it was just a totally powerful experience that outgrew the sexual part, at least from her point of view. but they were stayed best friends. And she took them walking barefoot through the fields at dawn in the foothills of the Alpine Meadows along the Isar, near where we used to live. And that he adapted so quickly to this natural singing of the earth itself in his bones.

21:57And he combined it also with the simplicity of the Russian peasant that he acquired when he went with her to Russia. And singing the earth became, he could feel that. What a shift from in his late teens and 20, 21, becoming such a dandy and to let himself open to the natural world so widely, so fully. and let that shift what love of man and woman or love for anything felt like was the freedom in that. And then even what that could mean for politics. And that gave him a trust in life that I sense in him, in his words, in his poetry. Life comes toward him to meet and be met. It rings in his lines and it reaches me.

23:15And standing here, a hundred and what? Almost 120. Yeah. When we cannot be sure or even have the trust that complex life forms will endure beyond the next few decades, we're seeing a huge shattering of life itself. And yet, having been with Ryoka, his trust in life is still with me. and so I trust being with life even though life, the web of life might crumble but then I'm still with it I'd be with it anyway even in the crumbling the song is so deep in him

24:41After a short break, more with Joanna Macy, Anita Barrows, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

24:58I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, as a new rendering of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet is released in a world in which his voice and vision feel as resonant as ever before, we are delving into that work with the translators. Joanna Macy is a philosopher of ecology and Buddhist teacher. Anita Barrows is a psychologist and poet. They are the closest of friends and former guests on this show. They've previously created splendid translations of three other books of Rilke's writing. Rilke sent his 10 prophetic letters about life and love to a young, lovesick military cadet and would-be poet between 1903 and 1908.

25:47So, let's talk about solitude for Rilke, which was also so defining, so permeated. His poetry, his life, his writing. it's so interesting to be speaking about solitude right now in the post-2020 world where civilizationally we went through almost the global we although with huge variation in terms of the experience but of of social isolation right and i wonder i'm curious about this world that we move into beyond that, at least, you know, the parts of the world that are emerging from the worst of the pandemic. Do people start to reckon or work with or play with solitude in a new way? And what would Rilke have to say to that?

26:47Well, I'm so struck by how members, even in my own family, my own children, my own grandchildren, how the pandemic and the lockdowns and the care has resulted for so many of them of more time out of doors in the natural world in direct contact, even if it's when it's their backyard or walking in the park and giving them a habit of this that they do not want to give up and that the solitude becomes as it was for Rilke, not being by yourself, but by being in, with, surrounded by and of the living natural world, that you're surrounded by the rustle and touch and reach and murmur of the natural world.

27:58Yeah, yeah. And I think that was really something Joanna and I discussed throughout the process of doing this translation, because there are moments in the letters where Rilke seems to idealize solitude at the cost of community, the cost of some belonging to the collective. And we were at moments irritated by that because... Yes. He also seems to emphasize it at the cost of probably being a good partner to the woman. Exactly. Oh, my God, yes. Right. So, go on. Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, we kind of got fed off with it at moments. Yeah, we worried about if the young cadet were to take him seriously.

28:49You have to be, if you're forbidden to write poetry, you're forbidden to write, then you're not, you must be ready to die. Right, right, right, right. You know, here, this is, I'm going to read a little bit from, this is page 56. This is from letter seven. You know, I have to say this is a passage that was so important to me in my 20s and really life-giving. I mean, this is to me a robust definition of solitude that is about, yeah, about making and defending that home within oneself. So he says, don't let your solitude obscure the presence of something within it that wants to emerge. Precisely this presence will help your solitude expand.

29:36People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult as it is true for everything alive. Everything in nature grows and defends itself in its own way and against all opposition, straining from within and at any price to become distinctively itself. It is good to be solitary because solitude is difficult, and that a thing is difficult must be even more of a reason for us to undertake it. And then he says, to love is good too, for love is difficult. For one person to care for another, that is perhaps the most difficult thing required of us, the utmost and final test, the work for which all other work is but a preparation.

30:26With our whole being, with all the strength we have gathered, we must learn to love. This learning is ever a committed and enduring process. So he's always, even as he is defending solitude so fiercely, and as you say, sometimes extremely, it always moves back and forth with the notion of loving. Yes, yes, exactly. And he really emphasizes the need to love from that place of solitude, that love is not about merging, but it's about being oneself fully and from that place of fullness. Yes, I love that. Yes, yes. Yeah, right here he says, love is not about merging. It's a noble calling for the individual to ripen.

31:20to differentiate, to become a world in oneself in response to another. I love that. Yes. It's so interesting. You know, I remember being so moved by that and it being so helpful to me in those young years when I was, you know, tempted. I mean, because he's really saying to Franz Kapus, to his young correspondent, like, become yourself before you join with another human being. But I say also that language after my marriage ended, after my divorce, I read it again and realized how wise it was, right? I mean, it's incredible wisdom. Yes, I know. I felt the same after my divorce and I thought, all right, you know, the love I have for my children, the love I have for my friends, that love also needs to come from that place of wholeness.

32:26Joanna, I'm curious about that phrase for you and that notion. Just what I was sitting here was remembering because our first conversation was shortly after my husband died after a marriage of 56 years. And I remember about a year before we married, I'd been talking away, talking away as he was driving. And then he just looked at me and he said, what a world you've got inside you. and then I knew that it was my own world and he could tell it he didn't want to own it he didn't want it to be explained but he was so glad it was there all of that was in his voice and was and that stayed with me throughout all those five and a half decades a world in myself and being a stranger to each other to some extent.

33:32We always affirmed that. And Rilke helps us there. Yes. And in your memoir, Joanna, you wrote about your long marriage and it was an adventure, right? And it had hard parts and it had parts in which that, the fact of being strangers was defining. Yeah. And yet you kept finding your way back to each other. That's right. That's right. It was always interesting. Always interesting. Yeah. Never finished. Never finished.

34:31I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, delving into Rainer Maria Rilkes' Letters to a Young Poet with Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows. They've just released a fresh new translation of that work.

34:50Well, speaking of growing and seeing with expectations and not knowing, did you catch the part in these when he talks about you haven't lost God because, you know, the cadet, Franz Kappas, was a complainer. You could tell that. And so he complained that he'd lost God. And so because he believed in God as a child, and now he didn't anymore. And then he even complained about that. And so remember? And he has this great idea. He says, just think, where do I have that? Page 51. I just, it tickles me. Do you want to read? Would you like to read? Yeah, he says, do you think that anyone who really has him, God, could lose him like a little stone?

35:57Don't you think that one who holds him, God, could only be lost by him? Why not think, rather, that he is the one who is coming, moving toward us from all eternity? the final fruit of a tree whose leaves we are. What stops you from projecting God's birth into times to come and from living your life like a painful and beautiful day in the story of an immense pregnancy? don't you see how everything that happens is ever again a new beginning and couldn't it be his beginning for to begin in itself is already so beautiful if god is the fulfillment must not what is lesser come before him so that he can emerge from fullness and overflow Must he not come last in order to include everything in himself?

37:15And what meaning could we find if God for whom we yearn belongs to the past?