As one seasonal year closes and springtime brings in the beginning of a new one, we pause at the threshold together. I often see in imagery who we can be for our community in these times.

As I look back, I see School for the Great Turning has existed as a kind of psychic wellspring. A place where people who care deeply about the world can gather, drink deeply, and remember why they do what they do.

In times like these, when the work of healing, justice, and care can feel relentless, this school is a place to rest your hands, steady yourself, and feel the ever-present strength of others who are walking alongside you.

The elders who lit the path and offered compass, the colleagues who hold their own torches as we continue the courageous work of fighting for the humanity of our world and the future of our planet.

We imagine this community as a hearth and a source: a place to warm up, to listen, to learn, and to be replenished before stepping back into the world for another round of service.

As we reflect on the year behind us and look toward the one ahead, we offer ourselves up for courage, clarity, and connection, so that each of us can return to our lives and work a little (or a lot) more resourced, more whole, and more alive to what is possible.

Here are some of the things we did together in the last year, and our vision for the year ahead.

Throughout the year, we gathered online for:

• Essential Joanna Macy, Tending the Bones, On Purpose, and our Widening Circles Book Group in honor of Joanna Macy
• 6-month Work That Reconnects Facilitator Training
• Work that Reconnects Community of Practice sessions
• Somatic Practice & Support Groups led by guest facilitators like Leilani Navar, Alexandre Jodun, and Morgan Vanderpool
• Music as Medicine Song Circles with Shireen "Riyo" Amini, KJ Song, Kazimea Sokil, and Lydia Violet

Check Our Our Amazing Teachers and Facilitators! (WOW)

In-Person Immersions:

• Tending the Bones: Ancestral Cultural Remembrance Retreat with Leah Song and Lydia Violet
• Work That Reconnects Immersions in Boston, Belgium, Ireland, and Berkeley.
• Work That Reconnects Immersion for Sudanese women in the UK.
• A Wild Love for the World Evening Celebration in honor of Joanna Macy
• Singing the Bones West Coast Concert and Song Circle Tour
• Sing Praise with KJ Song and Music As Medicine Sings with Lydia.
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We want to pause and offer our heartfelt gratitude to everyone who donated to the School for the Great Turning scholarship fund this year.

Your generosity directly supports people who feel called to this work and might not otherwise be able to participate. Because of you, more voices, bodies, and lineages are welcomed into spaces of learning, resilience, and collective care. Thank you for helping make this work more accessible and for standing with us in tending the Great Turning together. If you’d like to make a 2026 donation, click here.

In Memoriam: Honoring Friends We’ve Lost

Manchán Magan.

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This year also brought the passing of our irreplaceable and beloved teacher, Manchán. To call Manchán inspiring is a profound understatement. Each time he joined our Tending the Bones course to teach about folkloric revival, mythic presence, and the fierce beauty of Irish culture, we were led, inevitably, into both tears and laughter.

One of the things I loved most about Manchán was that he was not an academic scholar in the conventional sense, though his knowledge was vast. He was an in-the-world scholar. He went where the knowledge lived, traveling to the communities he sought to understand, producing films to document what might otherwise be lost, sitting with storytellers, and offering himself again and again in service to living culture.

May his legacy be as bountiful and generous as his spirit.

Joanna Macy.

There are no words strong enough to honor what this luminous woman has given us. We always knew her transition would come, as Joanna herself often reminded us, quoting her Buddhist teachers: “Death is certain; time of death is uncertain.”

But one thing is beyond question: Joanna Macy LIVED.

She gave of herself again and again, with fierce generosity and unwavering love for the world. Her life stands as a living invitation to all of us who hope to leave this world well used.

Joanna Macy taught me how to stay.

Not how to stay comfortable or certain, but how to stay present in a world that is breaking and becoming at the same time. She taught me how to remain with grief with a straight spine, how to let love widen rather than harden in the face of loss, and how to trust that our pain for the world is not a flaw, but a sign of our radical belonging to it.

Joanna’s life was a revolution. Through her scholarship, her activism, her fierce tenderness, and her unwavering faith in our collective future, she offered generations of people a way to meet this planetary moment without turning away. She helped us understand that systems change and inner change are not separate tasks; that courage is a renewable resource when shared; and that hope is not something we have, but something we are.

She trusted people. Not because she was naïve about suffering or power, but because she believed deeply in our capacity to remember who we are when we come together. Again and again, she invited us into the long view: the Great Turning not as a single event, but as a living process we participate in with every choice to show up, speak honestly, grieve openly, and act with care.

Her teachings continue to live in circles of people sitting together in truth, in tears shed without shame, in movements that remember their souls, and in the countless small acts of courage carried out by ordinary people who refuse to give up on life. For so many of us, Joanna became a kind of inner compass. Steady, spacious, and rooted in love for this beautiful, imperiled Earth.

I carry her voice with me still. In the open, wide, all-embracing love of life and anyone who wants to give to our world. In the spiral she trusted. In the quiet confidence she, time and time again, worked to instill in me and all of us.

Thank you, Joanna, for your life. For your clarity. For your patience. For your refusal to turn away.

May we continue the work with the same devotion you modelled, together, for the sake of life.

Thank you many times over. We are here to continue your legacy.

If you would like to contribute to our collective memory of Joanna, visit Honoring Joanna and offer your remarks.