Joanna Macy, In Memoriam — Beauty and Wisdom and Courage (and Rilke) to Sustain Us

Summary

Podcast Summary

On Being with Krista Tippett:

Joanna Macy, In Memoriam — Beauty and Wisdom and Courage (and Rilke) to Sustain Us

Release Date: July 22, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode is a tribute to the late Joanna Macy—Buddhist teacher, eco-philosopher, activist, and beloved recurring guest on On Being—who passed away recently. Krista Tippett revisits her 2021 conversation with Macy and her friend, psychologist and poet Anita Barrows. Their dialogue centers on Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which Macy and Barrows newly translated. This conversation explores living with existential uncertainty, ecological grief and hope, solitude, the evolution of gender and love, God, and the practice of spiritual courage in turbulent times. The tone is reflective, intimate, and deeply grounded in poetry, friendship, and the wisdom that Macy carried through her ninety-two years.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Opening: Rilke’s Poetry as Medicine for Uncertain Times

• Joanna Macy opens by reciting and interpreting a Rilke poem—her own translation—setting a contemplative and hopeful tone.
  • “Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. And as you ring, what batters you becomes your strength.” (00:04, Macy quoting Rilke)
• Krista Tippett frames the episode as both memorial and reminder: Macy’s life and teaching “left an immense legacy of beauty and wisdom and courage to sustain us.” (01:16, Tippett)

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2. Rilke as a Voice for Tumultuous Times

• Tippett situates Rilke as someone who felt the 20th century’s approach and sensed the world changing.
  • “He was prescient that the world as he'd known it was passing away.” (01:16, Tippett)
• Macy and Barrows discuss how Rilke wrote on the cusp of immense historical upheaval, making his search for meaning feel newly relevant during today’s planetary crises.
  • “Everything, even the unheard of, must be possible within it. This is, in the end, the only Courage required of us, the courage to meet what is strangest and most awesome.” (03:26, Macy, quoting Rilke)

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3. Living the Questions

A Deep Practice for Times of Uncertainty (09:35–14:58)

• The panel dwells on Rilke’s enduring advice to “live the questions now”—important both personally and civilizationally.
  • “I ask you, dear sir, to have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves...” (10:53, Tippett reads Rilke)
• Macy: Embracing questions anchors us in presence; the drive for certainty is an escape from the sacred “now.”
  • “...even the question of hope takes you out of the present moment.” (12:15, Macy)
• Barrows: Society pushes answers, but Rilke’s practice is countercultural and necessary for real growth.
  • “Here we are being told to live into the questions, to be able then to say, I don't know...” (11:35, Barrows)
• Tippett: Commit to a question, and “if you are faithful to a question like this, it will be faithful back.” (12:50, Tippett)

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4. Rilke’s Vision of Gender, Love, and Relationship

Moving Beyond Patriarchy (15:52–23:22)

• Tippett and her guests highlight Rilke’s startlingly modern insights on gender fluidity and the evolution of love.
  • “The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that male and female...do not seek each other as objects, but rather as siblings and neighbors to become human together...” (16:00, Tippett paraphrasing Rilke)
• Barrows reads Rilke on “the girl and the woman who don't define themselves in masculine terms, but as something in themselves…” and the vision of “two solitudes that protect, border and greet each other.”
  • “...a relationship from human to human, not from man to woman. And this more human love, endlessly considerate...will resemble that love that we so arduously prepare. The love that consists of two solitudes that protect, border and greet each other.” (17:10, Barrows reads Rilke)
• Macy and Barrows discuss how sexual liberation has often merely mirrored male patterns, not brought true feminine fullness.
  • “Much of how sexual freedom...has come to be identified with what he calls here the lust and thrust and restlessness.” (19:08, Macy)
• Their translation attempts to recover lost nuances about the feminine and relational wholeness.

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5. Solitude and Love: Rilke’s Paradox

Challenging the Easy Answers (24:41–34:32)

• The discussion shifts to solitude, especially relevant post-pandemic.
  • Macy: The “solitude” Rilke championed is not isolation but immersion in the natural world; the pandemic encouraged rediscovery of this.
    • “The solitude becomes as it was for Rilke, not being by yourself, but being in, with, surrounded by and of the living, natural world…” (26:47, Macy)
• Barrows and Macy admit frustration with Rilke’s sometimes extreme stance, worrying about its implications for community—yet appreciate his complexity.
  • “...at moments irritated by [how Rilke] seems to idealize solitude at the cost of community…” (27:58, Barrows)
• Tippett reads a pivotal passage, highlighting how solitude is the ground for real love: “for love is difficult, for one person to care for another, that is perhaps the most difficult thing required of us...the work for which all other work is but a preparation.”
  • (29:02–30:48, Tippett reads Rilke)
• Macy reflects on her own marriage, affirming Rilke’s vision of two full “worlds” in relationship.
  • “We always affirmed that. And Rilke helps us there.” (32:30, Macy)

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6. Spiritual Generosity: Rilke, God, and the Sacred

Faith in an Unraveling World (34:50–43:47)

• Macy shares Rilke’s poetic vision of God as an ever-emerging, future reality—God as “the final fruit of a tree whose leaves we are.”
  • “Do you think that anyone who really has him, God, could lose him like a little stone?... Why not think rather that he is the one who is coming, moving toward us from all eternity...” (35:46, Macy reading Rilke)
• Tippett: “As bees gather honey, so do we reap the sweetness from everything and build God.” (37:27, Tippett quoting Rilke)
• Macy’s spiritual practice, inspired by Rilke, is gratitude and readiness for both the “great unraveling” and the “great turning.”
  • “There is something for us to behold and be part of and to be there. The great moment is there for us to be present to this incredible moment, we've got to realize we will realize that we belong to each other. That's coming forward now.” (37:42–39:20, Macy)
• Gratitude is Macy’s response to loss: “How do you say goodbye to what is sacred and holy? And that goodbye has to be in deep thanksgiving for having been here, for being part of it.” (41:27, Macy)

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7. Poetry, Suffering, and Gratitude

Our Mission: To Name the Beauty of the World (43:47–48:33)

• Tippett connects Rilke’s integration of solitude and love to Macy and Barrows’ life/vocations—offering presence to the beauty and pain of being alive.
  • “…if people can hear the voice within, they hear that the voice within wants to live. And when people can share that voice within, they fall in love with the world.” (43:47, Tippett)
• Barrows: Her own poetry stands “at the intersection of the sacred, the daily, and the holding of the pain of the world,” inspired by Rilke’s mission—“Perhaps we are here to say...” (45:00, Barrows)
• Macy reads from their translation of Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy:
  • “Earth, isn’t this what you want to arise in us invisible? …I seek no other law than yours, and know I can trust the death you will bring… Sheer abundance of being floods my heart.” (46:54, Macy reading Rilke)
• The episode closes with collective gratitude for Rilke, for Joanna Macy, for the gift of presence and the work of naming what is precious amidst uncertainty.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. And as you ring, what batters you becomes your strength.”
  — Joanna Macy reading Rilke (00:04)

• “Everything, even the unheard of, must be possible within it. This is, in the end, the only Courage required of us, the courage to meet what is strangest and most awesome.”
  — Macy quoting Rilke (03:26)

• “Live the questions now. Perhaps you then may gradually, without noticing, one day in the future, live into the answers.”
  — Tippett reading Rilke (10:53)

• “All of those things, even the question of hope, takes you out of the present moment. And the present moment is the only place you’re really present, the only place where you can actually choose.”
  — Joanna Macy (12:15)

• “This more human love...will resemble that love that we so arduously prepare. The love that consists of two solitudes that protect, border and greet each other.”
  — Anita Barrows reading Rilke (17:10)

• “The solitude becomes as it was for Rilke, not being by yourself, but being in with, surrounded by and of the living, natural world.”
  — Joanna Macy (26:47)

• “For love is not about merging. It’s a noble calling for the individual to ripen, to differentiate, to become a world in oneself in response to another. I love that.”
  — Joanna Macy (31:10)

• “Do you think that anyone who really has him, God, could lose him like a little stone?... Why not think rather that he is the one who is coming, moving toward us from all eternity, the final fruit of a tree whose leaves we are?”
  — Joanna Macy reading Rilke (35:46)

• “How do you say goodbye to what is sacred and holy? And that goodbye has got to be in deep thanksgiving for having been here, for being part of it... I cry from gladness.”
  — Joanna Macy (41:27; part condensed)

• “Earth, isn’t this what you want to arise in us invisible? Is it not your dream to enter us so holy there’s nothing left outside us...Oh, thank you, Rilke.”
  — Joanna Macy reading Rilke (46:54)

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Thematic Timestamps

• 00:04–01:16: Opening poem and introduction to Joanna Macy’s legacy.
• 03:26–07:59: Rilke’s historical context, sense of the world shifting.
• 09:35–14:58: “Living the questions”—embracing uncertainty as spiritual and practical discipline.
• 15:52–23:22: Gender, love, and relating beyond binaries; feminism and relational evolution.
• 24:41–34:32: Solitude, its joys and complications in love and society.
• 34:50–43:47: God, loss, gratitude, the “great turning” versus “great unraveling.”
• 43:47–48:33: Poetry’s mission: naming suffering and gratitude, concluding readings and tributes.

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Tone and Style

This episode is meditative, generous, and rooted in poetic language. Tippett, Macy, and Barrows weave together philosophy, lived experience, spiritual longing, and activism—always returning to Rilke’s words and how they sustain courage, beauty, and presence amid turmoil. The conversation is an invitation to live bravely and gratefully, holding space for both heartbreak and wonder.

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For Listeners

If you need reorientation or replenishment in these uncertain times, this episode offers deep companionship: poetry, friendship, wisdom, and spiritual courage to help “live the questions” of our day.

Transcript

[Joanna Macy]

Quiet friend who has come so far. Feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. And as you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What's it like, this intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine in this uncontainable night. Be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there. And if the world shall cease to hear you say, to the silent earth I flow, and to the rushing water speak I am.

[Krista Tippett]

For many years, when I have found myself feeling unmoored by life and this world, I. I have listened to this poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. It's read by Joanna Macy, who also translated it and brought it to life afresh for our century. Joanna has now left this world. But this beloved Buddhist teacher and ecological philosopher and activist has left an immense legacy of beauty and wisdom and courage to sustain us. What follows is the second conversation I had with her, together with her friend, the psychologist and fellow Rilke translator Anita Barrows, which we recorded amidst pandemic and lockdown in 2021. Rilke sought the shape of meaning in a now vanished central Europe at the turn of the 20th century. He was prescient that the world as he'd known it was passing away. Joanna Macy's adventurous life and vision took shape in crucibles of the history that later unfolded. From an early career with the CIA in post war cold war Germany to India with her husband, who was leading the nascent Peace Corps there as the very young Dalai Lama arrived into exile. Now, re listening to her perspective on the world and how she channels Rilke, we experience a way of standing before the great unfolding dramas of our time. Ecological, political, intimate. We are at a newly existential, pivotal moment in history and Joanna Macy long foresaw this. We are standing before the possibilities of what she called a great unraveling or a great turning towards life generating human society. All of this and so much more comes through in the riches of our 2021 conversation. Joanna, who was born in 1929, was 92. As we spoke

[Joanna Macy]

in his letter that he wrote, he wrote an amazing letter Rilke did from Sweden. And he starts out saying, I've been thinking, he's not responding so much to the cadet, but he's speaking about there's something going to happen. It is enormous, it is huge. We must accept our reality in all its immensity. Everything, even the unheard of, must be possible within it. This is, in the end, the only Courage required of us, the courage to meet what is strangest and most awesome.

[Krista Tippett]

I'm Krista Tippett, and this is on being. The conversation that follows is infused with friendship as much as ideas. Joanna and Anita have translated Rilke together across decades alongside many other professional and life adventures. I have come into friendship with both of them as guests on this show. Anita on the soul in depression. Joanna on her spiritual and activist wild love for the world. And all three of us have communed with Rainer Maria Rilke across time and space. The bohemian Austro Hungarian world into which Hugh was born in 1875 was utterly remade by the tumult of the young 20th century. Amidst the tumult of our young century, I spoke to Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy via Zoom. Well, I wish I were sitting in a room with the two of you, but here we are.

[Joanna Macy]

Can I see you?

[Krista Tippett]

No, you can't see me. You're just gonna hear me.

[Anita Barrows]

Okay.

[Krista Tippett]

I'm gonna be like. I'm like the voice of God coming straight into your. And you into mine.

[Anita Barrows]

I'm not even gonna look at my screen. I'm gonna look at the tree in front of my house. Yes.

[Joanna Macy]

Oh, that's a good idea.

[Anita Barrows]

Yes.

[Krista Tippett]

I mean, this is a little hard to get used to, but, I mean, I sometimes close my eyes so I can completely listen. And it's such a joy to be with the two of you. And I can't really tell you how excited I was when I heard that you were translating letters to a young poet, which, you know, I feel like this book has. It's been part of my life for such a long time since I think. Joanna, one thing you and I have in common is those. The early years we spent in Berlin or in Germany, and, you know, I was. And we were both there and in chapters of its 20th century tumult, which was kind of a fault line of the world's 20th century tumult. And I have my book with me. I think the two of you have your books with you. And I really just want us to kind of talk about this book and read to each other. And, you know, I was just amazed recently. I'm not sure I knew this or had ever taken it in to read. Well, it's in your book, too, but I had read it recently somewhere else. That Rilke himself was only 27 when he lied to these letters.

[Anita Barrows]

That's right. And I did not take that in at all when I read it. I assumed he was an elderly man.

[Krista Tippett]

Yes, yes.

[Joanna Macy]

Well, he never got to be Elderly.

[Anita Barrows]

Right, right.

[Krista Tippett]

No, there seems to me, you know, something that I have identified with in the last period that wasn't there for me when Rilke entered my life, which was in the last couple of decades of the last century, is that he was a turn of century person, just as we have become turn of century people. It feels like there's something in the heft of what he said and how he said it, that He Also, in 1903, when he was writing those letters, was on the cusp of this unimaginable tumult and carnage and transformation of that last century.

[Anita Barrows]

Yes.

[Joanna Macy]

You know, in the Book of Hours, which we're not talking about, but he then, just a couple of years younger than when he is writing to the military cadet in his letters to this young poet, he said, the leaf is turning like a century is entering just at that moment, at the becoming of the 20th century. And you could feel his. What would you say? His awe and a troubled sense what is in store and the fates that are turning this page to the 20th century look at each other and say nothing.

[Anita Barrows]

Yes.

[Joanna Macy]

And he senses he could have known nothing about the two world wars, the death camps, the nuclear bombs. Yeah, none of it. And yet he sensed that to his core.

[Anita Barrows]

Yes, very much. And he was very aware of the dangers of industrialization, which were already beginning to have their effect, certainly on Europe. And I think that was a piece of it, that there was an ominous sense of what was happening to the natural world, which he loved. Mm.

[Krista Tippett]

And all of that, everything that you two have just mentioned is with us still. And again. Right.

[Anita Barrows]

Yes, yes, exactly. Exactly.

[Krista Tippett]

And that's what I kind of feel emanating from these pages, from these words I've had to say in the last week. I have had. His language of living. His language of living the questions has become absolutely central to my work and to my life. And just in the last week, for example, I've had it quoted at me by a neuroscientist and by a television actor. And so it does feel to me like if there is in it. So let's just maybe start with living the questions. I think. Let me just read that passage. Very particularly that experience of standing before great personal and civilizational questions which right now have no answers. So he said. And this. Which letter was this? This was letter four.

[Anita Barrows]

It's the fourth.

[Krista Tippett]

Yeah, yeah. I ask you, dear sir, to have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms, like books written in a foreign Language. Don't try to find the answers now, they cannot be given anyway, because you would not be able to live them. For everything is to be lived. Live the questions now. Perhaps you then may gradually, without noticing one day in the future, live into the answers.

[Joanna Macy]

What a wonderful way to relate to uncertainty.

[Anita Barrows]

Yes, yes. And I think you know so much, especially in our very consumer oriented society where we're looking for answers all the time. We're looking for solutions, rapid solutions, immediate solutions. Here we are being told to live into the questions, to be able then to say, I don't know, I have to sit with this, I have to be with it. It's a practice that we're not taught by anything in our society.

[Joanna Macy]

But it's the only way to be in the present moment. Because when we want to know, oh, where's this heading? Are we heading to war? Are we heading to Can I have it now? Can't I have hope? All of those things, even the question of hope takes you out of the present moment. And the present moment is the only place you're really present, the only place where you can actually choose.

[Krista Tippett]

You know, I have actually really taken this teaching as a life practice of, you know, he talks about holding the questions, loving the questions, and of. I've taken it as a life practice with a question to actually very actively do that, put the question before me, hold it, treasure it, nurture it, walk with it. And I have found that if you are faithful to a question like this, it will be faithful back. Right. It will do this thing that he says, which is that you live your way into whatever the form and answer takes.

[Anita Barrows]

Yes.

[Joanna Macy]

Then it comes toward you, then it has more to say to you, then you can hear it. And then you have a capacity, you are with the question in a way that invites you to become something that you haven't been yet.

[Krista Tippett]

Right.

[Joanna Macy]

It extends a hand. So this is what I have been feeling even more in this last year or so with all the work with Rilke, is feeling in him this sense of opening to the reciprocity of life. It's a living world, we can listen to it, we can open to it. It's not a machine that we poke and press and push a button, or it's a mystery and we meet the mystery. And then it talks.

[Krista Tippett]

I'm Krista Tippett and this is is on Being Today, delving into Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet with Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows. They've just released a fresh new translation of that work. Joanna, I would say so. Living the questions is perhaps the part of the book that I. I feel I've watched people culturally discover. So many people discover or have it be part of their life. I have also always felt, and never more than recently, that the things that Rilke said about gender 100 years ago in this book, that our world has met him there now, or almost.

[Joanna Macy]

I think that we still have a lot to learn. I think he's a little bit beyond us at the moment.

[Krista Tippett]

Well, let me just like there's one part also in that fourth letter where he says perhaps the genders are more closely related than people think. The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that male and female, freed from all false feelings and disinclinations, do not seek each other as objects, but rather as siblings and neighbors to become human together, simply, seriously and patiently helping each other bear the burden that sexuality has placed on them. Well, to me it's a description of. Yeah. Where we are, as you say, fitfully, imperfectly, but I think heading as a culture. But then of course there's the extraordinary part in the letter from Rome, letter seven, where he talks about the girl and the woman. I don't know. Does one of you want to read some of that? Sure. Page 59 is 5960 is where I'm looking.

[Anita Barrows]

Oh, yes. Oh, that's wonderful. Yes.

[Krista Tippett]

Or maybe.

[Joanna Macy]

Yeah.

[Krista Tippett]

One day. The girl and the woman who don't define themselves. There's more. Just whatever you'd like to read, as much as you'd like to read.

[Anita Barrows]

There, let's see. I'm looking for exact. Oh, here we go. One day the girl and the woman who don't define themselves in masculine terms, but as something in themselves. Female humans will require no other completion. This enormous shift will transform the character of love which is hampered today by the resistance of men and generate a relationship from human to human, not from man to woman. And this more human love, endlessly considerate and light and good and clear, consummated by holding close and letting go, will resemble that love that we so arduously prepare. The love that consists of two solitudes that protect, border and greet each other. Yeah, I love that passage.

[Joanna Macy]

Yeah, yeah.

[Anita Barrows]

Two solitudes that protect, border and greet each other. Yes. So it's not the merging, not the convention bound ways of acting. And I love that Rilke speaks. I mean, I could see where it could be critiqued, but I love that he speaks at the beginning of that paragraph about the ways in which women need to be Careful of not just stepping into the patriarchal system, the patriarchal values, which, you know, has happened, you know, to a large degree. We've had the feminist movement, but in many ways we have not yet brought the feminine sufficiently into our culture. And the feminine, I think Rilke, you know, Rilke was talking about this so early on, at the beginning of the last century.

[Joanna Macy]

He was also concerned that in the freeing of coming to experience and being free to experience one's sexuality, it was male sexuality. So much of how sexual freedom in our country, and even sexual fulfillment has come to be identified with what he calls here the lust and thrust and restlessness.

[Krista Tippett]

I don't think that was in the Hurter Norton translation.

[Joanna Macy]

No.

[Anita Barrows]

Right, right. We had a good time translating that.

[Krista Tippett]

And what we're talking about is a feminine aspect to humanity, Right?

[Anita Barrows]

Yes, exactly.

[Krista Tippett]

It's not just about women. It's about a fullness of human nature and human capacities.

[Anita Barrows]

Yes, yes, exactly. Exactly.

[Krista Tippett]

I'm just curious. And Joanna, you've lived such a long time. You're so amazing. I wonder how you see, you know, again. Well, so we should clarify that. You know, Franz Kappos was writing to Rilke as this lovesick young person.

[Anita Barrows]

Right.

[Krista Tippett]

So he was bringing sexuality into these letters. But Rilke did always reply to that in. Well, he replied in a very tender, personal way, but also in the whole context of. Of relationships, of gender, really. That certainly 100 years ago was so much of a box and a container and compartment. Joanne, I'm especially curious about how you've watched. Well, I'm remembering evolution.

[Joanna Macy]

Yeah. I'm thinking of the love between Rilke and Lou. Lou Andreas Salome, when he was 21 and she was 35, and they met, and it was just a totally powerful experience that outgrew the sexual part, at least from her point of view. But they stayed best friends. And she took him walking barefoot through the fields at dawn in the foothills of the alpine meadows along the Isar, near where we used to live, that he adapted so quickly to this natural singing of the earth itself in his bones. And he combined it also with the simplicity of the Russian peasant that he acquired when he went with her to Russia. And singing, the earth became. He could feel that. What a shift from. In his late teens, in 2021, becoming such a dandy, and to let himself open to the natural world so widely, so fully, and let that shift. What love of man and woman or love for anything felt like was the freedom in that, and then even what that could mean for politics. And that gave him, a trust in life that I sense in him, in his words, in his poetry. Life comes toward him to meet and be met. It rings in his lines and it reaches me. And standing here, 100 and what, almost 120.

[Anita Barrows]

Yeah.

[Joanna Macy]

When we cannot be sure or even have the trust that complex life forms will endure beyond the next few decades, we're seeing a huge shattering of life itself. And yet, having been with Ryoka, his trust in life is still with me. And so I trust being with life, even though life, the web of life, might crumble. But then I'm still with it. I'll be with it anyway, even in the crumbling. The song is so deep in him. Sam.

[Krista Tippett]

After a short break, more with Joanna Macy, Anita Barrows and Reiner Maria Rilke. I'm Krista Tippett, and this is on Being Today. As a new rendering of Rainer Maria Rilke's letters to a young poet is released in a world in which his voice and vision feel as resonant as ever before. We are delving into that work with the translators. Joanna Macy is a philosopher of ecology and Buddhist teacher. Anita Barrows is a psychologist and poet. They are the closest of friends and former guests on this show. They've previously created splendid translations of three other books of Rilke's writing. Rilke sent his 10 prophetic letters about life and love to a young lovesick military cadet and would be poet between 1903 and 1908. So let's talk about solitude for Rilke, which was also so defining, so permeated his poetry, his life, his writing. It's so interesting to be speaking about solitude right now in the post 2020 world where civilizationally we went through almost the global wealthough with huge variation in terms of the experience, but of social isolation. Right. And I wonder, I'm curious about this world that we move into. Beyond that, at least you know, the parts of the world that are emerging from the worst of the pandemic. Do people start to reckon or work with or play with solitude in a new way? And what would Rilke have to say to that?

[Joanna Macy]

Well, I'm so struck by how members even of my own family, my own children, my own grandchildren, how the pandemic and the lockdowns and the care of has resulted for so many of them, of more time out of doors in the natural world, in direct contact, even if it's when it's their backyard or walking in the park and giving them a habit of this that they do not want to give up, and that the solitude becomes as it was for Rilke, not being by yourself, but by being in with, surrounded by and of the living, natural world that you're surrounded by the rustle and touch and reach and murmur of the natural world.

[Anita Barrows]

Yeah, yeah. And I think that was really something Joanna and I discussed throughout the process of doing this translation, because there are moments in the letters where Rilke seems to idealize solitude at the cost of community, at the cost of some belonging to the collective. And we were at moments irritated by

[Krista Tippett]

that because he also seems to emphasize it at the cost of probably being a good partner to the wife.

[Anita Barrows]

Oh, my God. Yes. Right.

[Krista Tippett]

Go on.

[Anita Barrows]

Right, yeah, yeah. No, you know, we kind of got fed off with it.

[Joanna Macy]

Yeah. We worried about if the young cadet were to take him seriously. You have to be. If you're forbidden to write poetry, you're forbidden to write, then you're not. You must be ready to die for your.

[Anita Barrows]

Right, right, right.

[Krista Tippett]

You know, here this is. And I'm going to read a little bit from. This is page 56. This is from letter seven. You know, I have to say, this is a passage that was so important to me in my twenties and really life giving. I mean, this is to me a robust definition of solitude that is about. Yeah, about making and defending that home within oneself. So he says, don't let your solitude obscure the presence of something within it that wants to emerge. Precisely. This presence will help your solitude expand. People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy, but it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult, as it is true for everything alive, everything in nature grows and defends itself in its own way and against all opposition, straining from within and at any price to become distinctively itself. It is good to be solitary because solitude is difficult. And that a thing is difficult must be even more of a reason for us to undertake it. And then he says to love is good too, for love is difficult for one person to care for another. That is perhaps the most difficult thing required of us, the utmost and final test. The work for which all other work is but a preparation. With our whole being, with all the strength we have gathered, we must learn to love. This learning is ever a committed and enduring process. So he's always, even as he is defending solitude so fiercely, and as you say, sometimes extremely, it always moves back and forth with the notion of loving.

[Anita Barrows]

Yes, yes, exactly. And he really emphasizes the need to love from that place of solitude, that love is not about merging, but it's about being oneself fully. And from that place of Fullness.

[Joanna Macy]

Yes. I love that.

[Anita Barrows]

Yes. Yes. Yeah.

[Joanna Macy]

Right here he says, for love is not about merging. It's a noble calling for the individual to ripen, to differentiate, to become a world in oneself in response to another. I love that.

[Anita Barrows]

Yes.

[Krista Tippett]

It's so interesting. I remember being so moved by that and it being so helpful to me in those young years when I was, you know, tempted. I mean, you know, because he's really saying to Franz Kappos, to his young correspondent, like, become yourself before you join with another human being. But I say also, that language, after my marriage ended, after my divorce, I read it again and realized how wise it was. Right. I mean, it's incredible wisdom.

[Anita Barrows]

Yes, I know. I felt the same after my divorce. And I thought, all right, you know, the love I have for my children, the love I have for my friends, that love also needs to come from that place of wholeness.

[Krista Tippett]

Joanna, I'm curious about that phrase for you and that notion.

[Joanna Macy]

Just what I was sitting here was remembering because our first conversation was shortly after my husband died after a marriage of 56 years. And I remember about a year before we married, I'd been talking away, talking away as he was driving, and then he just looked at me and he said, what a world you've got inside you. And then I knew that it was my own world and he could tell it. He didn't want to own it. He didn't want it to be explained, but he was so glad it was there. All of that was in his voice. And that stayed with me throughout all those five and a half decades of world in myself and being a stranger to each other, to some extent, we always affirmed that. And Rilke helps us there.

[Krista Tippett]

Yes. And in your memoir, Joanna, you wrote about your long marriage and it was an adventure. Right. And it had hard parts in it had parts in which that the fact of being strangers was defining.

[Joanna Macy]

Yeah.

[Krista Tippett]

And yet you kept finding your way back to each other.

[Joanna Macy]

That's right. That's right. It was always interesting. Always interesting. Yeah. Never finished. Never finished.

[Krista Tippett]

I'm Krista Tippett, and this is on Being Today, delving into Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet with Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows. They've just released a fresh new translation of that work.

[Joanna Macy]

Well, speaking of growing and seeing with expectations and not knowing, did you catch the part in these when he talks about, you haven't lost God? Because, you know, the cadet Franz Cappas was a complainer. You could tell that. And so he complained that he'd lost God. And so, because he believed in God as a child, and now he didn't anymore. And then he even complained about that. And so, remember? And he has this great idea. He says, just think where. Where do I have that?

[Anita Barrows]

Page 51.

[Joanna Macy]

And just. It tickles me.

[Krista Tippett]

Do you want to read? Would you like to read?

[Joanna Macy]

Yeah. He says, do you think that anyone who really has him, God, could lose him like a little stone? Don't you think that one who holds him, God, could only be lost by Him? Why not think rather that he is the one who is coming, moving toward us from all eternity, the final fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? What stops you from projecting God's birth into times to come and from living your life like a painful and beautiful day in the story of an immense pregnancy? Don't you see how everything that happens is ever again a new beginning? And couldn't it be his beginning? For to begin in itself is already so beautiful. If God is the fulfillment, must not what is lesser come before him so that he can emerge from fullness and overflow? Must he not come last in order to include everything in himself? And what meaning could we find if God, for whom we yearn, belongs to the past?

[Krista Tippett]

And then that next sentence, as bees gather honey, so do we reap the sweetness from everything and build God?

[Anita Barrows]

Yes. Yes.

[Krista Tippett]

So, Joanna, talk to me. About what? Tell me, what's in that for you? Just. Just.

[Joanna Macy]

Oh, so much. So much. It's inside me. I'm 92 now. I am in this 10th decade of my life when I follow with rapt attention what is happening with the climate catastrophe, with the mass extinctions of our siblings in the creation of this world. I feel that there is within me a sense of. That's read through Rilke, the translations, and also very much through the work that I have been blessed enough to do called the work that reconnects and that starts the spiral journey that it is with gratitude, so much gratitude that what's in it is that we are never abandoned. There is something for us to behold and be part of and to be there. The great moment is there for us to be present to this incredible moment, we've got to realize we will realize that we belong to each other. That's coming forward now. How could we not harvest that understanding in this moment?

[Krista Tippett]

And you know, Joanna, if somebody had, you know, let's say, just tuned in in the last 10 minutes and listened to you speak about God, they would not guess that you are an eminent Buddhist teacher, right? What does that language of God you know what, what does that mean for you? How do we talk about what that is and how that itself has been evolving?

[Joanna Macy]

Because God has become a word for everything. So we reach for something that includes everything. I'm looking at in his letter that he wrote. He wrote an amazing letter Rilke did from Sweden. And he starts out saying, I've been thinking, he's not responding so much to the cadet, but he's speaking about if you could take in there's something going to happen. It is enormous. It is huge. We must accept our reality in all its immensity. So you need God language for that if you're in the West. And then of course, I was born into a theistic, a Christian tradition, so it's in. And I come from a long line of teachers, so it's in my bones. We must accept our reality in all its immensity. Everything, even the unheard of, must be possible within it. This is, in the end, the only courage required of us. The courage to meet what is strangest and most awesome.

[Krista Tippett]

Yeah. I'm curious, you know, you've talked about this as a time in which we are faced with the great unraveling or the great turning, or perhaps both of those at the same time. Yeah, yeah. Just with this conversation holding us with Rilke by our side. What do you see right now?

[Joanna Macy]

Yeah, well, it seems clear that we who are alive now are here for something and witnessing something for our planet that has not happened at any time before. And so we who are alive now and who are called to, who feel called, those of us who feel called to love our world, to love our world has been at the core of every faith tradition to be grateful for it. To teach ourselves how to see beauty, how to treasure it, how to celebrate, how if it must disappear, if there's dying, how to be grateful. Every funeral, every memorial service is one where you give thanks for the beauty of that life or the quality of what. And so there's needs, some of his feel. I know I do. To what looks like it must disappear to say thanks, you are beautiful. Thank you, mountains. Thank you, rivers. And we're learning. How do you say goodbye to what is sacred and holy? And that goodbye has got to be in deep thanksgiving for having been here, for being part of it. I kind of sound like I'm crying. And I do cry, but I cry from gladness, you know, I'm so glad to recognize each other, look in each other's face, see how beautiful we are. It's not too late to see that we don't want to die not knowing how beautiful this is.

[Krista Tippett]

You know, when I think about Rilke and the ways he brings together solitude and love, I feel like you also have always brought together what I would think of as synonyms or companions to those like interior life and aliveness. Right. I've heard you talk about the voice within, and that if people can hear the voice within, they hear that the voice within wants to live. And when people can share that voice within, they fall in love with the world. They fall in love with each other. They fall in love all over again with life. And, Nita, you have spoken about your calling as a psychologist and a teacher, and also as a translator and writer, as standing at the intersection of the sacred, the daily, and a holding of the pain of the world. So I just kind of want asked you the question I asked Joanna a minute ago, kind of, what do you see looking out right now and again with Rilke as our friend, standing alongside us at that intersection?

[Anita Barrows]

I think about the passage that I referred to before, from the 9th Duino Elegy, where Rilke really speaks about what he sees as our mission as human beings, perhaps we are here to say. And then he names things about the world. So for me, I actually just had a book of poems published called Testimony, which is 20 long poems. And each of the poems speaks about some of the suffering of the world. You know, I speak about a prisoner. I speak about a child in Syria. I speak about a checkpoint in the west bank, occupied Palestine, speaks about the suffering of the world. And then I move in other sections of the poems to the beauty of the world. And for me, that intersection of suffering and beauty, gratitude, as Joanna says, feels like my mission in poetry. And to state that, to name that, to be here, to name those things, feels essential to me. And I see Rilke as my friend in that. This conversation is so wonderful because it's really bringing me back to the origins of my reading. Rilke, who really was the first serious poet whose work I read when I was first feeling my own vocation as a poet, that he was so engaged with this as our mission. Perhaps we are here to say, and if you have the passage, Joanna, yes, I have it.

[Joanna Macy]

And I remember when we translated that together, this is the ending of the ninth Duino elegy. An elegy is an incantation or poem at the end, a funeral. Earth, isn't this what you want to arise in us invisible? Is it not your dream to enter us so holy there's nothing left outside us to see what, if not transformation is your deepest purpose? Earth, my love, I want that too. Believe me, no more of your springtimes are needed to win me over. Even one flower is more than enough. Before I was named, I belonged to you. I seek no other law than yours, and know I can trust the death you will bring. See, I live on what childhood and future are equally present. Sheer abundance of being floods my heart. Oh, thank you, Rilke.

[Anita Barrows]

Yes, thank you, Rilke.

[Joanna Macy]

Thank you.

[Krista Tippett]

Thank you for accompanying us.

[Joanna Macy]

Thank you for being with us, Sam.

[Krista Tippett]

Joanna Macy was the root teacher of a project called the work that Reconnects. Our previous episode with her is called A Wild Love for the World that is also the title of a lovely book of homage to her published in 2020. Anita Barrows was part of an On Being episode on the Soul in Depression, and both of those shows include readings from Rilke's poetry that they have translated together so brilliantly. Rilke's Book of Hours, Love Poems to God, also in Praise of Mortality and A Year with Rilke. Anita Barrow's most recent poetry collection is Testimony. She is Institute professor of Psychology at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California, and also maintains a private practice and Anita and Joanna's Letters to a Young Poet, a new translation and commentary, was published in June 2021. On Being is an independent nonprofit production of the On Being project. Our fundamental funding partners include the Fetzer Institute, helping to build the spiritual foundation for a loving World. Find [e-mail] Kaliopeia foundation dedicated to reconnecting ecology, culture, and spirituality, supporting organizations and initiatives that uphold a sacred relationship with life on Earth. Learn [e-mail] and the Osprey Foundation, a catalyst for empowered, healthy, and fulfilled lives.