Soulcraft Musings

In Honor of Joanna Macy

Part III – A Stone In The Bridge

Friday, August 8, 2025

This is the third part of a multi-part Musing (one per week).

In contrast to her vision of the Wheel, Joanna’s second soul encounter, nine years after the first and two years after meeting the Dalai Lama, was of the sort that reveals mythopoetic identity. She was thirty-seven and still living in India, in Dalhousie. She had recently begun a meditation practice under the guidance of a Buddhist elder, and during her first weeklong retreat of intensive practice, she was experiencing the disorienting yet exhilarating sensation of no solid “I” that she could hold on to:

This was scary; it was like the everlasting turning of the ether wheel. With no solid place to stand, to call my “own,” I felt almost seasick. But it was also exhilarating, like skiing a steep slope, when you throw your weight away from the mountain. [22]

This quote, above, is of great interest to me, as it reveals that her memory of her first soul encounter helped create the conditions for her second, which occurred during this week of meditation practice. In her own words:

To my inner eye appeared a bridge, slightly arching, made of stone. I could see the separate rocks of which it was built, and I wanted to be one of them. Just one, that was enough, if only I could be part of that bridge between the thought-worlds of East and West, connecting the insights of the Buddha Dharma with the modern Western mind. What my role might be — at the podium of a college classroom? at a desk in a library tower? — was less clear to me than the conviction possessing me now: I would be a stone in the building of that bridge. [23]

The Stone in the Bridge became a core soul image for Joanna, a bridge she might become part of and to which she might contribute in acts of service. At the time of this vision, she was not able to identify the nature of her delivery system — a professor? a librarian? — but she had no doubt she would become a stone in that bridge.

During our 2016 conversation, she told me:

I remember it was stone, and I just wanted to be one stone in a stone bridge between East and West. And I think that in my mind it was about bringing Buddhism to the Western mind.. . .But as I think about it, I see that it is a two-way bridge, and that my role has been — and my appetite has been — to bring Western thought into Buddhism, particularly by using one other body of thought that is basically, fundamentally, thoroughly nonlinear — mutual causality. I brought that through systems theory, and that has been extremely useful for me in unpacking the beauty of and relevance of the Dharma in our time. And it has for others, as well, who’ve read the more scholarly of my books, Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory, which is the intellectual grounding of all the work I do.

Comparing her experience of her two soul encounters, Joanna told me that the image of the Bridge “had a sense of mission” while her vision of the Wheel “felt far more esoteric and elusive of easy meaning.” In my terms, I would say the Stone in the Bridge revealed a core image of her mythopoetic identity, her unique ecological niche. In contrast, the Great Turning Wheel vision was more a direct shifting of her psyche, a sinking of the roots of her Ego into the mysterious depths of Soul. In particular, it imprinted on her psyche a universal and archetypal dynamic — the dance between opposites — that would later blossom at the heart of her soul work, and without which her soul work might not have been possible.

There are a few last things to note about Joanna’s soul encounters. She was not, either time, seeking or expecting any kind of numinous revelation of her individual destiny. And she was not using any consciousness-shifting practices commonly associated with soul-revealing visions. In the contemporary world, it’s not uncommon for visionary moments, as rare as they are, to occur without warning or purposeful preparation — when the conditions are right. We might suspect the right conditions for Joanna included that she was in the Cocoon stage during both experiences, that she was adequately resourced psychologically, and that she was in a nonordinary state both times.

Excerpted from The Journey of Soul Initiation (New World Library, 2021).

To read previous musings click here.

References

22. Macy, Widening Circles, 105.

23. Ibid., 106.