When Teachers Become Ancestors

This past week, the world said goodbye to two luminous voices who have fundamentally shaped my understanding of what it means to embrace awe in reconnecting with our planet: Joanna Macy and Andrea Gibson.

I'm writing this not just as someone who admired their work from afar, but as someone whose life was changed by their teachings. Sometimes we lose voices that feel so essential to our understanding of how to be human that we need to pause and remember what they gave us.

96 Years of Radical Aliveness

I discovered Joanna Macy's work over a decade ago, and it changed everything I thought I knew about how to hold planetary grief. Before Joanna, I thought caring deeply about the world's suffering meant I was either naive or slowly going insane. Her "Work That Reconnects" pointed out to so many of us that our pain for the world is proof of our aliveness, our interconnectedness with all life.

Joanna was an eco-philosopher, activist, and scholar of Buddhism and systems theory. She was a force.

Of all the profound teachings Joanna Macy offered the world, the concept of "holonic shifts" is what I carry most deeply as I continue exploring Systems Feeling. Her understanding that we are living through an evolutionary moment where collective self-reflexivity might emerge - where humanity could develop the capacity to think and feel together as interconnected wholes rather than isolated parts. This feels like the beating heart of everything I write about.

Joanna showed us that this shift doesn't require sacrificing our individual uniqueness but actually depends on it, that diversity and differentiation are what allow larger systems to develop their own intelligence. When I witness people feeling climate grief together, or communities organizing around shared values, or even strangers connecting over mutual concern for the world, I see glimpses of this holonic emergence she described. Her vision that we might learn to "open to flows of information from the larger system" and trust our pain for the world as feedback from our interconnectedness - this is the foundation upon which my dedication to this work grows. Just last year, I had the profound privilege of sharing a conversation with her co-author Molly Young Brown (you can listen to it here).

Joanna's wisdom is something I will quote forever, something I'll tell the next generation about, and the generation after that. Joanna planted the seed; now it's our work to tend the garden.

I hope to live as long as she did - 96 years of radical aliveness! But not just in length. I hope to live with the depth she embodied, as a forever student and the wisest of mentors for people she would never meet. Like me. Like so many others.

The Conductor of Love

Andrea Gibson's poetry came into my world more recently, about a year ago, when friends began forwarding me their Substack posts and Instagram reflections about awe. They quickly became a favorite of mine - someone who could speak to us as though we were sitting together in the park, pulling at heartstrings with such tender precision.

Andrea was a conductor of love, and we were their orchestra. Even as they faced terminal cancer, they turned their storm into medicine, writing poems that helped the rest of us remember that our mortality isn't our enemy, it's our teacher.

In one of their final poems, Andrea wrote:

“I have never felt awe and shame at the same time, awe and loneliness at the same time, awe and judgment at the same time... and nothing wakes us to awe more than life's brevity.”

And their life was brief. Last week, at the young age of 49, Andrea’s life as we knew it came to an end. But their life has already continued to ripple through the poetry that marked so many of us.

Thank you, teachers.

Both Joanna and Andrea, in their own profound ways, taught me that awe is not a luxury - it's medicine. It's what happens when we stop taking our days for granted and start living like we remember we're temporary visitors to an astonishing world.

Our work certainly stands on the shoulders of these two giants.

There's something almost mystical about losing both of these voices within five days of each other. It feels like the universe is asking us to pay attention to what they spent their lives teaching: that our time here is borrowed magic, and every moment is an invitation to marvel.

With kindness and curiosity,

Laura