Joanna Macy

Dear People,

This month, once again, our annual intensive in the Work That Reconnects took place at Land of Medicine Buddha . That Tibetan retreat center among California's coastal redwoods is both unassuming and magical: simple quarters, clean as a pin, and huge intricately-painted prayer wheels, long wooden porches and gilded Buddhas smiling into the oak trees. It held forty of us in its serene and generous arms as we looked at ourselves and our world, and what this planet-time is asking of us.

Fran Macy loved these intensives and this was the first without him. My family wondered how I would fare without him at my side. But he was not absent--I felt him in the forms and structures we'd created together, and in the parts of the land he loved, not to mention a special place by the creek he claimed on his last Medicine Walk. It was sort of like encountering him. "Oh there you are, hello again."