For example, her life combined an intensely focused scholarship (her translations of Rainer Marie Rilke’s poetry), with a devotion to the sacred through Buddhism and an impassioned love of the world. She combined a lifetime of anti-nuclear and peace-making activism with a dedication to human and ecological healing. As she aged, she integrated the stillness of her elder wisdom with the exuberance of a small child, being continually elated and awed by the beauty and mystery of this world. She showed me that it was possible to live guided from the wisdom of my body and intuition, and by my heart, without sacrificing my pattern-seeking intellect and passion for healing. That it was possible to weave together a life from all the facets of myself that I valued most.

Joanna had a refined quality of relational intelligence that honored our storytelling minds and natures, and our true interdependence with all of life. While I’ve heard her called the Great Lady of Deep Ecology, in my view she evolved that realm from one that often considered humans to be a blight on the planet to embracing our full and flawed humanity.

She wrote and taught widely about “The Great Turning”, recognizing early the breakdown of human civilization that was necessary to reinvent, envision and midwife a new world. With her profound relational intelligence, she identified essential phases we’d need to move through consciously to become resilient. Joanna taught me and us about the telescopic nature of time and narratives, inviting us to become inhabitants of the future, to interview each other about how we survived this time and made it through, to better envision our successful passage.

In The Work That Reconnects, she helped us to notice how our deficit-oriented culture biased us toward the negatives, to express the truth through our emotions, and then to imagine more fully the futures we yearn for, to be better able to co-create them.

Joanna and Bioneers had a mutual love affair, and she was an important presence and keynote speaker at the Bioneers Conference, returning multiple times as the years passed, to share wisdom and inspiration with the community. From the Bioneers stage, Joanna offered a simple set of four phrases that have become, over the years, a core part of the ethos of Bioneers as an organization: “It’s all alive. It’s all connected. It’s all intelligent. It’s all relatives.” A recording of Joanna speaking that poem opens every episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature radio shows and podcasts, one of her many gifts that endure. Her voice is the prelude to deeply inspiring stories profiling thousands of the world’s most passionate activists and leaders working to heal people and planet.

As she was dying, in hospice for several weeks, her love for life, and her peace with death illustrated how to die well. Attended by two women she adored, who posted daily and generously on her Caring Bridge site, her hospice was shared with thousands of us, who hung on every word and image. When her bed was surrounded by family and grandchildren, they sang to her while she waved her arms joyously, conducting them. Surrounding her in her bedroom were stuffed animals and other toys, amidst Buddhist deities and candles. It’s been said that her last words were, “wow, wow, wow!”

I was in Berkeley after Joanna died and attended her wake. She was laid to rest swathed in a gloriously colored kimono, with rose petals strewn all over her body. Her face bore a peaceful, beatific grin, and she looked like an angel. In her backyard, food was offered and music was played. Everyone was wide eyed, seeming to share in the liminal experience of joy and loss, in that combination of apparent opposites that she embraced throughout her life.

I feel honored to carry the seeds of Joanna’s flourishing garden deep in the rich soil of my being, and to know that so many of us will carry her work, her vision and her deep love forward through the fog. Together, we will embody the joy, the commitment, the purposefulness and the love that Joanna so completely lived to inform the resilience needed to navigate the Great Turning.

— Nina Simons