Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy

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Macy and her co-author provide a boost of encouragement to everyone worried about seemingly hopeless environmental and social crises. Practical as well as inspirational, the book includes numerous exercises to strengthen those qualities that will best serve us as we work toward a more life-sustaining world. Macy has been giving workshops on these ideas for many years, testing and refining her methods, and the book reflects the depth of that process. What resources, inner and outer, will you need to acquire? What might you need to learn, develop or obtain?

Two threads that help us stand tall and not shrink away from the immensity of what’s happening to our world.

Scan your recent memories and identify something that’s happened in the last twenty four hours that you’re pleased about.

In the Buddhist tradition, bodhichitta is seen as something very precious, something to treasure and protect. If the Earth could speak to us, what would it say? We can take a step toward finding out by imagining the Earth can write through us. A lot of us are used to thinking three or six or 12 months ahead with something like holidays,” says Sharp. “I would encourage people not to give up on their longer-term dreams because we will get there… but, maybe don’t put specific dates on it.” Experiencing gratitude is a learnable skill that improves with practice. It isn’t dependent on things going well or on receiving favours from others. It’s about getting better at spotting what’s already there. Ecological intelligence involves thinking in terms of deep time a temporal context that includes our whole story. We need to do this now because given our technologies, our actions have consequences extending millions, even billions, of years.The Great Turning: emergence of new and creative human responses, it is about the epochal transition from an industrial society committed to economic growth to a life-sustaining society committed to the healing and recovery of our world.