The Beauty Impulse
No matter what’s knocked us down or how long we’ve been there, we can not only survive but thrive. Flattened by grief—ecological, social, personal—we can still be pierced by beauty, wonder, and delight. These gifts [...]
The Resilience of Green
I am sitting on a fold-up chair at the top of the asphalt driveway which brings us halfway up the mountain to where our house sits. The house was built in 1987, and the driveway [...]
Radical Joy Revealed Must Take a Short Break
Today I write with the heartbreaking news that my beloved husband, Andy Gardner, is close to death. He was diagnosed with liver cancer a week ago and has been declining steadily ever since. I will [...]
“Grabbing” Beauty?
In my book, Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth's Broken Places, I write about “grabbing” beauty: “The way to survive, I’m convinced, is to keep zealously grabbing and giving as [...]
A Lesson from Yarn in Hard Times
I heard something a couple of days ago that struck me as a great lesson for how to find and make beauty in hard times. The woman who offered this piece of wisdom is a [...]
Why Not Just Skip to the Joy?
Every now and then someone complains that Radical Joy for Hard Times focuses too much on grief. Nature is full of beauty and wonder, they say. Why do we have to talk so much about [...]
Climate Change Communication Class—Eckerd College
Skaket Beach, Orleans Massachusetts. This beach is one of my favorite places on the Cape to watch the sunset. The bay you see in the picture is becoming more and more of a wounded place. [...]
Radical Joy for Hard Times: Healing ourselves as we try to heal the world around us
Although I like to think that taking my Climate Change Communication class is a rewarding journey, I know that can also be emotionally taxing. We spend the entire semester talking about climate change, obviously, so [...]
Recreating beauty in a wounded national park
The south-east of Australia lost much of its wild places over the (southern) summer of 2019/20. Uncontainable bush fires ran through from August 2019 to early February 2020. People died, houses were lost and forest [...]
Concert for a Very Green Audience
After closing for several months because of the coronavirus, Barcelona's Gran Teatre del Liceu finally reopened on June 22 with UceLi string quartet playing Puccini’s “Crisantemi”. The audience of 2,292 was very attentive. All were [...]