Karina Lutz’s life has been a net thrown wide to gather experience, ever since haiku translator Harry Behn gave her the classic maxim: “write from experience” as a child. She worked making food, clothing, and shelter; and reporting, editing and publishing; and in social services and teaching, all while writing and volunteering for social justice. She’s always been particularly wedded to the peace movement, after following her mother gathering signatures to stop the Vietnam War, while her naval reserve officer father slowly converted to come out against the war. Professionally she worked as an environmental activist, advocating for sustainable energy and a stable climate, and helped launch one of the first nonprofit green power companies. With the environment al community in the watershed of Narragansett Bay, she secured passage of sustainable energy legislation, thwarted a proposed megaport, and restored wetlands. Yet she failed to stop the climate crisis, as we used to say, “before it is too late, when you can feel it.”
Towards the end of her career, she and friends co-created an intentional community, Listening Tree Cooperative, which demonstrated low-carbon living, social permaculture, ecological restoration, and regenerative farming, while sharing affordable housing and farmland.
Karina’s poems are widely published. Her books are Post-Catholic Midrashim and Preliminary Visions. She was the first poetry editor of Deep Times: A Journal of the Work That Reconnects. And she’s written a play, a novella, and a novel. She’s performed the epic poem “Encircling Earth” in dozens of venues, from sustainable living festivals to Quaker meeting houses. She’s also walked the walk: doing a peace pilgrimage around New England during the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Her two children have two children; her four sisters are a sisterhood of contenders; her friends light up the sky. She loves to dance with all of them.
A note on the Great Turning
‘The Great Turning’ is one possibility of this moment in global cultural history–as profound as the agricultural revolution, as drastic as the industrial revolution, and faster than any social change of its magnitude to date. The term the Great Turning was used by one of her first environmental ethics professors, Craig Schindler; Yes! Magazine publisher and post-capitalist/post-globalism visionary David Korten; deep ecology mentor Joanna Macy; and others. It is the “blessed unrest” of many leaderless movements converging. It is the subtle and gross shifting of our consciousness and ways of life towards sustainability and justice. It is seeing and rejoicing in and acting from our deep interconnection, what Thích Nhất Hạnh called “interbeing.” To re-narrate this time in terms of the Great Turning is one of the prime teachings of The Work That Reconnects. In service to that, Karina was poetry editor for Deep Times: A Journal of the Work That Reconnects for most of the past decade. She dedicates her poetry here to the Great Turning movements and all their members.
Poetry for the Great Turning, (c) by Karina Lutz
Individual poems on this blog are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except poems copyrighted in her books and “I am raining.” “I am raining,” is a song lyric, (c) 1986 by Karina Lutz and Todd Winkler.
Karina requests users let her know about when and where you use or quote her poems. You can do so through the contact page.