Honoring Joanna Macy. Finding Meaning Beyond the Social Media Noise
A few months back we engaged a lovely social media consultant hoping to make peace with our mixed feelings - call it what it is, angst- around our ‘presence’ in the online world. On the one hand we love the madly talented creators, makers, gardeners, farmers, musicians we have ‘discovered’ all over the world through social media. There are hopeful and truly exciting things happening in unexpected places. And we certainly appreciate social forums that enable us to tout our food and drink programs, crow about our beautiful weddings, host collaborative events that foster connection. But we’re conflicted (and it seems, we’re all being told, addicted?) that an insatiable search for stories, beauty, delight, has devolved into empathy killer thrills. The tsunami of truly dreadful things happening in the world that SM bombardes us with non-stop is increasingly challenging the way we feel about social media.
With few exceptions almost everything coming into our feeds uninvited seemingly to offer a’connected life’ of ‘upgraded pleasures’ is little more than a sales pitch. The notion we can scroll for pleasure or discovery when every click to ‘engage’ has this imperative at its core makes it near impossible to ‘engage’ online in a meaningful way.
That line between ‘want to share’ and ‘need to share’ has always been a hard one for us - hence the need for a SM guru. Alongside using instagram and the blog to reach an audience who might want to come drink or dine or celebrate a precious moment in their lives with us - we are a business after all - we’d also like to use social media to communicate in a genuine way to tell the challenging, yet hopeful things that drive our days in Healdsburg and farm life on the ridge in Philo.
When I read that that a beloved mentor, Joanna Macy, had gone into hospice at home and would soon be leaving the world, I posted the images you see above. They are part of a series I’ve been playing around with thinking about “The Sacred Ordinary,” a Macy canon with many threads that ran through Joanna’s life fueled by her “wild love of the world.” Her “feel how your breathing makes more space around you” is one of the best mantras you’ll ever use to crack open the door to seeing the world whole - breathing into it - ‘living the questions’ as Rilke originally framed it, bathed in each moment. “Those of us who are alive now and feel called to love our world, to be grateful for it,” Joanna wrote, “to teach ourselves how to see beauty, how to treasure it, how to celebrate, how if it must disappear, if there’s dying, how to be grateful,” has by now flowered in so many cultlivated gardens, and as wild grass in so many fields.
Not surprisingly, there was little ‘engagement’ with the reel and I was more than fine with that - a numbers game cannot be our expectation if we wish to control our own narrative, revel in its uniqueness, celebrate nuance, peek into what makes our endeavors - that would include barndiva - meaningful. We posted those few images simply to acknowledge her life and imminent passing - she died July 19th - not to drive traffic. To speak to her last journey on earth with the hope of stirring curiosity in her life’s work. To offer, as we do here in our small way, connections that are helping us navigate the world we wish to build together. This would have delighted her.
Joanna Macy was many things: a Buddist scholar, a gimlet eyed environmental activist, a lifelong teacher who created interactive workshops through the foundation she helped build around “The Work that Reconnects.” She helped millions embrace the grief and fear we are exeriencing in the face of environmental and climate catastrophe with a belief that this struggle is endemic to life, and, crucially, that it can and should be born and worn with honor. Of all her many accomplishments, her inspired translations of the poetry and writings of Ranier Maria Rilke - both Book of Hours and Letter to a Young Poet with her lifelong friend Anita Barrows has changed so many lives, including my own, for the better.
Like Mary Oliver, Joanna Macy had the gift of infusing the pathos of language with the vibrancy of hope, born from a deep respect for the natural world. Give a listen to any one of the several conversations she had with the incomprable Krista Tippett in On Being, or Joanna and Anita reciting Rilke poems on Emergence Magazine Podcast. Prepare to be amazed, inspired, soothed.
Eulogies will keep coming for her but I doubt any will touch me as profoundly as Rebecca Solnits “In Honor of Joanna Macy, 1929-2025, which she published in her fierce and essential Ghost hosted newsletter “Meditations in an Emergency.” Solnit was wandering the great forests of British Columbia when she heard the news about Joanna’s death; she opens this prescient, beautiful essay with a description of Nurse Logs, the fallen decaying logs ‘the trees from which trees are grown.” As it happened, Solnit’s piece arrived in my inbox after days of wandering through the broken forests that surround the farm - a practice I have for over 40 years as a way of trying to come to terms with their wounded grandeur, parse what role they are supposed to play in my life. Our commitment to manage our heritage orchards has always been a clear directive to honor the legacy of care which preceded us; our floral program is inspired by sheer passion alongside a desire to curate an experience at barndiva with beauty at it’s core. But the trees in the forest on our upper ridge have always presented a conundrum. Like most of the forests in Anderson Valley- in Northern California - they have been relentlessly harvested for profit for over a century, yet here they still are, haunted yet tenacious. Solnit’s soilquoty on nurse logs provided a fresh way of seeing them.
In the piece Solnit quotes Macy : “It is good to realize that falling apart is not such a bad thing. Indeed, it is as essential to transformation as the cracking of outgrown shells. Anxieties and doubts can be healthy and creative, not only for the person, but for the society, because they permit new and original approaches to reality.”
Our social media consultant didn’t berate us for our Macy post, though it no doubt confirmed the weakness in our very laid back social media presence that is certainly not helping us ‘grow’ the business, which is what she was engaged to help us do. Her advice, when it eventually came, was not a surprise: “ Incredible content! 20 years hosting extrarodinary weddings in the center of Healdsburg, a restaurant ride that has included numerous wine and food awards, a Michelin star, real community engagement …all the pieces are here!” before concluding, “sporatic posting, not enough ‘call to actions,’ not enough visual ‘consistency.” She gave us some tools, but at the heart of her advice was the Social Media mantra you can’t escape: post all the time if you seek any traction, any commerce, any significant engagement.”
Maybe. We did come up with the three ‘frames’ you see above in which to clarify future content so folks can see at first glance which hat we’re wearing at any given moment - the better to make a decision to come to dine, or book a wedding, join a community forum, or check out what we are growing and harvesting in Philo.
Perhaps, to make the most of them, social media platforms can be viewed as compost staging areas, where- if we choose wisely- organic matter will break down into the nutrients from which we can grow original approaches to what ails us, what tempts us, what in the end allows us to land on an evolving definition of what it really means to truly engage.
