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Grace and the Great Turning


by Joanna Macy

 

When you act on behalf
  of something greater than yourself,
  you begin
    to feel it acting through you
with a power that is greater than your own.

This is grace.

Today, as we take risks
  for the sake of something greater
  than our separate, individual lives,
  we are feeling graced
  by other beings and by Earth itself.

Those with whom and on whose behalf we act
  give us strength
    and eloquence
      and staying power
       we didn't know we had.

We just need to practice knowing that
  and remembering that we are sustained
    by each other
      in the web of life.
Our true power comes as a gift, like grace,
  because in truth it is sustained by others.

If we practice drawing on the wisdom
  and beauty
    and strengths
      of our fellow humans
      and our fellow species
we can go into any situation
  and trust
    that the courage and intelligence required
      will be supplied.

 

-- Joanna Macy

 

(Edited into verse by Tom Atlee
from an interview in YES! magazine
http://www.futurenet.org/13newstories/macy.html
and approved as a poem by Joanna Macy.)