The 3 Dimensions of Joanna Macy’s Great Turning: How to Create Change in a Time of Crisis
The late great Joanna Macy invited each of us to “cast [ourselves] as a character in the story of the Great Turning.”
By this, she meant to embolden us to take up our place in the world – to remember our agency and creativity in bringing about healing through our lives and relationships. And by invoking this image of a great turning, she was also positioning us within a specific moment in history saturated with change and potential.
But what exactly was Joanna Macy’s vision of this “Great Turning?”
For her, it had three dimensions:
Holding Actions that Slow Destruction
From Macy:
“This economic system is doomed because it measures its success by how fast it uses up the living body of Earth – extracting resources beyond Earth's capacity to renew and spewing out wastes faster than Earth's capacity to absorb.
It is now in runaway mode, devouring itself at an accelerating rate.
Holding actions are important because they buy time. They are like a first line of defense; they can save a few species, a few ecosystems…”
“Holding actions” was Macy’s way of saying working together to mitigate disaster.
What can we do to minimize pain; to remove barriers; to slow down catastrophe?
For each of us in our daily life, the invitation is this:
👉 What can I do – and with whom – to reduce harm in my communities and environments?
Each action held is vital and imaginative of a better, healthier future. No matter how small.
But as Macy went onto say: “holding actions are not enough to create a sustainable society.”
Building Alternative Structures and Analysis
From Macy:
“People are wising up to the assumptions and agreements that allow a few to get richer and richer while more and more people sink below the poverty line. Fresh social and economic experiments are sprouting, and new alliances are forming too.”
The Franciscan priest Richard Rohr likes to say “the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.”
This same sentiment is what led Killian Noe, with help from my friend Randall Mullins, to establish the Recovery Café in Seattle. It is what Grace Lee Boggs spent more than fifty years doing in Detroit. It is the positive vision that drove Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis (and so, so many others) to work toward building the “Beloved Community.”
The Great Turning is an invitation into brave acts of co-creation: new experiments and relationships; new attempts at building unlikely coalitions and alliances; putting new ideas into motion in the face of obscene odds.
And as with anything new, this means an invitation into the Unknown. (Hence the importance of bravery in this moment.) The building of new structures and networks asks us to go beyond what is comfortable and enter into a new way of being.
👉 What am I doing to practice embodying the future I want to experience? How am I inviting others to do the same?
Shifting our Consciousness
From Macy:
“This is the third dimension of the Great Turning, and it is, at root, a spiritual revolution, awakening perceptions and values that are both very new and very ancient, linking back to rivers of ancestral wisdom.
I loved the banners and banter of yesterday's marchers [referring to protests in Seattle in the early 2000s], how they conveyed these values with such exuberance and humor, making fun of our greed and shortsightedness, and celebrating solidarity with all life, from sea turtles to butterflies.”
For Macy, a shift in consciousness was not simply about personal enlightenment or individual awakening. It was – at its very core – a communal experience of expanding the circle wider: of beginning to see ourselves as intricately woven into a fabric larger then just ourselves.
To see others as part of “us,” and also animals and plants and everything beyond us – and to do so with values of humor and joy and solidarity.
👉 How am I expanding my circle of who is “us,” what has value, and where dignity exists?
Macy goes onto say:
“Of course, a consciousness shift by itself is insufficient for the Great Turning; you also have to have the holding actions and the creation of alternative structures. These three dimensions are totally interdependent and mutually reinforcing.
I love seeing it this way because it gets us off that dead argument: "Is it more important to work on yourself or is it more important to be out there on the barricades?" Those are such stupid arguments, because actually we have to do it all.
And as we do it together, it gains momentum and becomes more self-sustaining.”
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