We Are The Great Turning

This bonus episode will support you to take the main insights from Episode 2, “The Three Stories of Our Time,” deeper into your life.

In Episode 2, we talked about the three stories of our time: Business as Usual, the Great Unraveling, and the Great Turning. All three stories are true, and we can choose to give ourselves to the Great Turning—to building a more just and life-sustaining society.

We need inspiring visions for the kind of world we want to live in that can motivate us, move us to action, and so that we know what it looks like to succeed. So, in this bonus episode, we’re going to envision, in detail, what the world might be like if the Great Turning really were the predominant story of our time.

All you need is a quiet place where you can sit and close your eyes. We hope you’ll do this exercise with someone else, so that you can talk together about your experience after you finish. It might also help to have something to write with and on.

We recommend starting a podcast club with friends or family to do these practices together. Links and assets to help prompt reflection and build community can be found with every episode on WeAreTheGreatTurning.com.

As Joanna Macy approaches the end of a long life dedicated to healing our imperiled planet, she begins the conversation with Jessica Serrante, her student and dear friend, “standing afresh with what it’s like to live on Earth at this moment.” As we look into the face of the climate crisis, injustice, and war, difficult feelings arise; all are welcomed.

You are invited to join them at Joanna’s kitchen table, and invited into a deeper sense of your belonging and love for our world.

In this episode:

• How to connect with the great possibilities that still exist for us even in these precarious times Joanna reflects on her awakening of environmental consciousness
• Jess reflects on how meeting Joanna changed her life
• Love, laughter, heartbreak, and the Work That Reconnects
• Bonus Exercise: “Open Sentences”—a practice for partners

We recommend starting a podcast club with friends or family to do these practices together. Links and assets to help prompt reflection and build community can be found with every episode on WeAreTheGreatTurning.com.

What’s really going on in the world right now? “Business as Usual”—a comforting narrative in which industrial growth and progress overcomes all? “The Great Unraveling” —a planet careening toward inevitable destruction? Joanna‘s work introduces a third story, “The Great Turning”—a paradigm shift on an epic scale, the creation of a just and life-sustaining society. The stakes are high, the outcome uncertain. This conversation invites you to devote yourself to the Great Turning even as you grasp the truth in all three stories.

In this episode:

• Three outlooks on these times: Business as Usual, the Great Unraveling, and the Great Turning
• What’s behind all three—how they affect us in conscious and unconscious ways
• What the Great Turning means, and how to devote yourself to it
• Bonus Exercise: Envisioning the Great Turning

We recommend starting a podcast club with friends or family to do these practices together. Links and assets to help prompt reflection and build community can be found with every episode on WeAreTheGreatTurning.com.

Jess and Joanna explore the third phase of the spiral: Seeing with New Eyes. In this part of the spiral, the fog of our pain begins to lift off, and what comes in its place is a feeling of greater connection and belonging. Jess and Joanna talk about Deep Time, a way of understanding ourselves as a part of a long lineage of human and planetary history, and how our imaginations are an essential tool for “plugging back in” to the great web of life we’re a part of.

In this episode:

• Discovering ways to truly feel our interconnection with all life, and how that profound reconnection transforms us
• Deep Time—slowing down and discovering a broader sense of ourselves in the world
• “Plugging in” to our part in the web of life to fuel our own work for the Great Turning
• Bonus Exercise: The Seventh Generation—connecting with those who came before and those who will come after us

We recommend starting a podcast club with friends or family to do these practices together. Links and assets to help prompt reflection and build community can be found with every episode on WeAreTheGreatTurning.com.

Since we’ve just completed the release of our 10-part series, We Are the Great Turning, we wanted to introduce you to another podcast with a spirit similar to ours: Outrage + Optimism.

The episode we’re going to play for you is called “Our Story of Nature: From Rupture to Reconnection.” It’s the first in a miniseries that shines a light on our relationship to the rest of nature. Remembering our place in the web of life is an essential part of building the Great Turning.

Be sure to subscribe to their podcast, and give them a follow on social media @outrageoptimism.

Now that this season of We Are the Great Turning is over, naturally, the question that’s emerging is ... “What’s next?” As we consider whether to do a second season, we’d love to hear more about what you got from the first. What impact has it had in your life, and what might you love to hear from us next? Send us an email or a voice note at [email protected] or send Jess a DM on Instagram @jess_serrante.