Quote from Coming Back to Life

Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work that Reconnects

by Joanna Macy & Molly Brown

New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, British Columbia, Canada, 2014.  340 pages

"This is a guidebook. It maps ways into our innate vitality and determination to take part in the self-healing of our world. It presents a form of group work that has grown steadily since the 1970s, helping hundreds of thousands of men and women around the globe find solidarity and courage to act, despite rapidly worsening social and ecological conditions. 

This work can be done alone and has reached countless individual lives. It is most effectively done in groups, for its methods are interactive and their power synergistic. Workshops can vary in length from one day to a full lunar cycle; but even in briefer time frames, such as in classrooms or churches, the practices can yield remarkable openings to the truth of our common condition. They can bring us into fresh relationship with our world, and not only arouse our passion to protect life, but also steady us in a mutual belonging more real than our fears and even hopes.

I know that the Work That Reconnects belongs to us all; that makes me all the more grateful for the ways that events and preoccupations of my own life, as mother, scholar, activist, provided soil for its roots to grow and spread." (p. xxiii)

"Zen Master Thich Nhat Hahn was asked, 'What do we most need to do to save our world?' His questioners probably expected him to identify the best strategies to pursue, but Thich Nhat Hanh's answer was this: 'What we most need to do is to hear within ourselves the sounds of the Earth crying.' " (p. 106)
-- quote submitted by Matt M.


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