The Stories of Our Times
I recently listened again to The Hidden Promise of Our Dark Age: Discovering Our Wisdom, Strength and Beauty in the Midst of Crisis, the late Joanna Macy’s keynote at Bioneers in 2018. It is worth listening to again in full. Her words are only more to the point now as the crises of which she spoke then have only gotten worse.
She spoke about the three stories at play in this time: The industrial growth economy in which no cost is spared to keep us in comfort and secure.
The second is the story of the great unraveling of living systems. The story of the impacts an economic system which treats the earth as nothing more than a stock house and a sewer. And the heartbreak that this unraveling causes.
She said, “I don’t know how to talk about it. I can say words like 6th mass extinction, biodiversity loss, a billion people living in slums, but those words don’t begin to encompass what is beyond our capacity to comprehend.”
She paused, “Our comprehension resides in the grief we carry, each one of us.”
Our Love Will Pull Us Through
And then she moved on to the third story, The Great Turning, which is arising from our resistance to this desecration of life.
The Great Turning, she continued, springs from the recognition that our earth is alive. And that the great unraveling is not a done deal.
“Our love for this world is going to pull us through,” she said. But for our love to pull us through requires that each of us step forward and say that the earth, these plants, are living beings, the people working with them are humans both of which take care.
Unless we each stand up for life, business as usual will carry the day.
Which is, again, the central question that the Sustainable Herbs Initiative is exploring: How can we use business to be a pathway that celebrates and honors life? Not a force desecrating it?
The Great Turning
Joanna Macy died July 19, 2025. In honor of her life, I began the July SHI Monthly meeting by reading this poem, inspired by her work. It was written in 2018. But again, these words are even more important at this moment now.
The Great Turning by Christine Fry
You’ve asked me to tell you of The Great Turning, of how
we saved the world from disaster. The answer is both
simple and complex:
We turned.
For hundreds of years we had turned
away as life on earth grew more precarious.
We turned away from the homeless men on the streets,
the stench from the river, the children orphaned in Iraq,
the mothers dying of AIDS in Africa.
We turned away because that is what we had been taught.
To turn away, from the pain, from the hurt in another’s eyes,
from the drunken father or the friend betrayed.
Always we were told, in actions louder than words, to turn away, turn away.
And so we became a lonely people caught up in a world moving too quickly,
too mindlessly toward its own demise.
Until it seemed as if there was no safe place to turn.
No place, inside or out, that did not remind us of fear or terror,
despair and loss, anger and grief.
Yet one of those days someone did turn.
Turned to face the pain.
Turned to face the stranger.
Turned to look at the smoldering world
and hatred seething in too many eyes.
Turned to face himself, herself.
And then another turned.
And another. And another.
And as the wept, they took
each other’s hands.
Until whole groups of people were turning.
Young and old, gay and straight. People
of all colors, all nations, all religions.
Turning not only to the pain and hurt
but to the beauty, gratitude and love.
Turning to one another with
forgiveness and a longing
for peace in their hearts.
At first the turning made people dizzy, even silly.
There were people standing to the side gawking, criticizing,
trying to knock the turners down.
But the people kept getting up, kept helping one
another to their feet. Their laughter and kindness brought others
into the turning circle until even the naysayers began to smile and sway.
As the people turned, they began to spin, reweaving the
web of life, mending the shocking tears, knitting it back
together with the colors of the earth, sewing on tiny
mirrors so the beauty of each person, each creature, each
plant, each life form might be seen and respected.
And as the people turned, as they spun
like the earth through the universe, the web wrapped
around them like a soft baby blanket, making it clear all
were loved, nothing separate.
And this love reached into every crack and crevice, the
people began to wake and wonder, to breathe and give
thanks, to work and celebrate together.
And so the world was saved, but only as long as you, too,
sweet one, remember to turn.