Soulcraft Musings

In Honor of Joanna Macy

Part IV – Joanna Macy’s Delivery Systems: The Great Turning

Friday, August 15, 2025

This is the fourth part of a multi-part Musing (one per week).

Joanna Macy’s two soul encounters (explored in the previous three Musings) inspired and made possible her soul work as an international leader in cultural transformation and evolution. Her first vision — of the Great Turning Wheel — directly shifted her Ego by gifting her with two things: the somatic and psychospiritual experience of paired opposites as the essential structure “at the heart of reality,” and a liberation from her fear of the hole inside her that had formed when, in her early twenties, she left Christianity. This hole, around which the Great Wheel turns, became for her a symbol of the necessary not-knowing at the center of the human psyche.

Her second vision endowed her with a core element of her mythopoetic identity — the image of a stone in a bridge “between the thoughtworlds of East and West, connecting the insights of the Buddha Dharma with the modern Western mind.”

How did these two visions animate her eventual delivery systems?

Becoming the Stone

In 1969, after living in Asia and Africa for several years, Joanna and her family returned to the United States and settled in Washington, DC. This was at the time of the Vietnam War, and Joanna became active in the antiwar movement. She was forty. Three years after her Stone in the Bridge revelation and twelve years after her Great Turning Wheel vision, she was still in the Enactment phase of her Descent to Soul, not yet having identified or chosen a delivery system. She was seeking a cultural setting in which to embody what her soul encounters had moved in her. She began with a part-time job with a civil rights organization and became a speechwriter for a Black politician. These were Enactment projects [Enactment being the fifth of five phases of a Descent to Soul]: “The civil rights work and these antiwar actions helped me take even more seriously than before the mystical openings I had experienced.” [12]

After a few years of actively living the question of how she might become a Stone in the Bridge, she decided, at forty-three, to enter graduate school in world religions with a focus on Buddhist philosophy. “Maybe I could find a way to translate the Buddha’s understanding of self — or non-self — into a Western mode, to help my countrypeople come home to each other and play their part in building a world not based on fear.” [13]

Early in her graduate studies, she noticed a core pattern in the work of certain progressive Western poets and thinkers:

…a loss of belief in that pillar of Western thought: the autonomy of the individual self.…How delusory was the separate, Cartesian ego, and how imprisoning its pretensions. So I began to see my own response to the Buddha Dharma as part of a larger paradigmatic shift in the West, as an urge arising within the Western mind — the urge to reconnect. [14]

In particular, Joanna was tracking correspondences between the Buddha Dharma and the work of two Western writers: the American poet Theodore Roethke and the Argentinean novelist Jorge Luis Borges. Through this Enactment project, she was bridging East and West — and seeing that the Buddha possessed a more mature and expansive vision that could help the modern West take its next steps in understanding the nature of the self.

Joanna was in the process of choosing her first delivery system for her soul work, a way to be a Stone in the Bridge: She would become a scholar both of Buddhism and of the germinal Western urge to move beyond the delusion of an unembedded self and to reconnect with the world through a greater identity. Making this choice marked her passage of Soul Initiation.

During her second year of grad school, Joanna came across a Buddhist scripture that “broke into my life,” altered her understanding of Buddhism, and eventually became the conceptual hub of her work. This is the teaching known as Prajna Paramita, or the Perfection of Wisdom, the core insight of dependent co-arising that, because of its pivotal position in Buddhism, has been personified as the Mother of all Buddhas:

Wisdom is not about bits and pieces, she said, it’s about relationship. It’s about the compassion that comes when we realize our deep relatedness. In this fashion, she brought forth in new words the Buddha’s central teaching: the dependent co-arising of all phenomena. [15]

This core insight of interbeing — or, as I like to express it, ecologically, everything is what it is by virtue of its relationships with everything else — became known as the Second Turning of the Wheel (of the Buddha Dharma). Likewise, in the evolution of Joanna’s soul work, her discovery of Prajna Paramita was the second turning of the wheel that she first saw as a vision at her son’s birth, some fifteen years earlier. This second turning was a pivotal event in her scholarly exploration of the fruitful resonance between Buddhist thought and contemporary Western science. Her intention, at the time, was to “make new translations of the Perfection of Wisdom scriptures and to write commentaries on them.” [16]

Excerpted from The Journey of Soul Initiation (New World Library, 2021).

To read previous musings click here.

References

[12] Macy, Widening Circles, 128.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid., 132–33.

[15] Ibid., 135.

[16] Ibid., 140.