This is a blog post that goes back nearly ten years. I’m revisiting here on the cusp of 2025 and adding some additional thoughts.
The Great Turning is a beautiful way to describe the historical moment we find ourselves in. I first came across the phrase in the writing of Joanna Macy, who described it as the transition from the “industrial growth society” to a “life-sustaining society” (see Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World). The phrase continues to inspire me as I work to replace the belief in separateness with the lived experience of interbeing.
Macy outlines three dimensions of the Great Turning:
- Holding actions. These are the political, legislative, and legal actions that slow the destruction.
2. Analysis of structural causes and the creation of alternative institutions. These are the practical and creative responses that undermine life-denying systems by offering life-affirming alternatives. Local, organic food; alternative currencies; and intentional communities are some examples.
3. Shift in perceptions of reality, both cognitively and spiritually. This is the work of cultivating the life-affirming values and beliefs that are the necessary bedrock of the Great Turning. In my view this boils down to expanding the sense of self and healing the illusion of separateness through lived and integrated experience. It includes the full range of spiritual, earth-based, and body-based practices.
It’s clearer than ever to me now, in 2024, that these dimensions are inseparable. It’s perceptions of reality—narratives and worldviews—that create our structural reality. And it’s in the full complexity and messiness of life where we have the opportunities to shift our perceptions. And as always, it boils down to healing the illusion of separateness and that boils down to prioritizing relationships. Our lives, our future, all of it dependent on and is nourished by relationships.
Thomas Berry is another pioneering thinker worth mentioning here. He liked to think of the Great Turning as “the Great Work.”
“History is governed by those overarching movements that give shape and meaning to life by relating the human venture to the larger destinies of the universe. Creating such a movement might be called the Great Work of a people.”
For Berry, the Great Work was nothing less than the creation of an entirely new evolutionary epoch in the Earth’s history. He maintained that industrial civilization has ended the biological flourishing that characterized the 65 million years of the Cenozoic Era. If we are to survive and continue the dance of evolution we must bring about what Berry called the Ecozoic Era, a period in which humans have restored their relationship to the Earth and actively engage in restoring the Earth (see his much loved books: The Dream of the Earth and The Great Work).
There is no guarantee that we’ll get there. There are many choices to be made and there is certainly no quick fix. We’ll either live our way into it or we won’t. Either way, bringing the love is more important than ever.