Paperback, $15.00
Book Review by Marilee Jenkinson
I purchased World as Lover, World as Self in a bookstore up in Ashland, Oregon as a solstice present for a friend who had shared an article about the author, Joanna Macy, earlier in the year. As I had two to three weeks before delivering it here in Ukiah, I was to find myself opening the holiday wrapping two to three times with significant curiosity about its contents.
At the time I read the magazine article about Joanna Macy, it seemed her area of social and environmental concerns as a deep ecologist were for me like finding a desert oasis in a large lonely sea of confusion and despair. I'd worked on my own personal grief process in therapeutic settings but I hadn't yet truly looked at my overwhelming sense of loss where the conditions of the planet were concerned and I started the long journey into a whole new arena of loss.
I'm still travelling and most appreciative of her book World as Lover, World as Self as a helpful companion in the process. In this book she shares her own journey and her own reflections on creating hopefulness through right action. She uses the mystical world of Dharma and her travels in Tibet as the vehicle for living joyfully in the moment even through the veil of suffering told by the Buddha as being the First Noble Truth. The authority of our experience, states Macy, is where the journey begins and "trusting our own experience means acknowledging our deep, inner responses, our anguish for the world. This pain is ours, it is real. If we are brave enough to confront it and own it, it has much to tell us. It tells us that we are alive and capable of suffering with our world - that we are by nature compassionate beings, or boddhisattvas. This capacity to suffer reveals our caring and our deep interconnectedness with all life-forms. From that 'interbeing' arises the power to act and the power to heal. Indeed a fresh perspective on the very nature of power emerges, freeing us from outmoded, hierarchical views. It emboldens us to walk out into the world as into our own hearts." World as Lover, World as Self is enjoyable reading chapter by chapter or in my case I enjoy opening it much the same as I would the I Ching. Each page holds a candle of hope and a deep and never-ending well of wisdom.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 2004
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited