“Left a bottle of water in the mailbox”
August 14, 2019“On a really hot day, left a bottle of water in the mailbox for the mail carrier.” That was the message left by a woman on the ServiceSpace website in the section called “Stories of Kindness fromRead More »
This Is Not Myself
August 7, 2019The first time I made beauty for a hurt place was in the Utah Canyonlands. I was hiking along a narrow canyon, following the wash that had cut through the fox-red rock, when I came uponRead More »
Warrior Woman for the Missing
July 31, 2019This week’s story comes from a woman called Thyme Eternity, who lives in British Columbia. Her heartbreak over the ongoing crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls took a newly personal turn twoRead More »
The Moment the South Breeze Blew
July 24, 2019It was a sweltering summer afternoon. My husband had had a recent accident and was in a lot of pain, and I was worried about him. To make matters worse, I was scheduled to leaveRead More »
What Is the New Story?
July 10, 2019When we’re honest with ourselves, we recognize that we as inhabitants of the Earth are entering a time of enormous change. It is a time of loss, to be sure, with species becoming extinct andRead More »
The Border Wall That’s Beautiful
July 3, 2019Ever since he ran for office, Donald Trump has been boasting that he would build a wall between Mexico and the United States strong enough to keep immigrants away. According to Trump, those who areRead More »
“All We Do Matters”
June 26, 2019“All we do matters,” wrote Judy Todd of NatureConnect NW after the Global Earth Exchange she and friends held for the Sandy River near Portland, Oregon last Saturday. And as people around the world showed atRead More »
Why Beauty Might Save Your Life
June 19, 2019Some people challenge members of our Radical Joy for Hard Times community about our way of responding to local and global environmental challenges. They say, “What good does making beauty do?” They say, “Why aren’tRead More »
10 Ways You Can’t Do It Wrong
June 12, 2019As people around the world get ready to participate in the Global Earth Exchange on June 22, we like to remind everyone that this event is all about reconnecting people with place. It’s about takingRead More »
Baseline Creep in Cancun
June 5, 2019Sasha Daucus of Doniphan, Missouri engages in the RadJoy Practice wherever she goes. Here is a story she sent us just yesterday from a beach near Cancun, Mexico. Last week I was teaching an AvatarRead More »
Ceremony for the Land We Thought We Knew
May 29, 2019Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, has been offering programs in creative expression, healing and health, and mind-body-spirit practices for more than forty years. Thousands of people have had life-changing experiences on those grounds, bothRead More »
The Way It Works on You (Too)
May 22, 2019Radical Joy for Hard Times does not claim that we can heal the Earth. We can, however, heal the relationship between ourselves and the Earth, most especially the places where we live and that weRead More »
Crying Posts Wail as They Bear Witness: Radical Joy Revealed
May 21, 2019“The indigenous Australian people relate to the world in a way that has had a powerful effect on me,” writes artist Dennis Summers. Inspired in part by this living, collaborative relationship between the Aboriginal peopleRead More »
Lessons from Skeleton Woman: Radical Joy Revealed
May 21, 2019When people go to wounded places and make gifts of beauty for them, they often tell us how surprised they were by what happened. They had gone with feelings of reluctance, sure that they wouldRead More »
May 8, 2019
As part of the RadJoy Practice and the Global Earth Exchange, we take time to get to know the wounded place as it is now —  not as we remember it, not as we wishRead More »
Of Eros and of Dust: Radical Joy Revealed
April 24, 2019Defenseless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, BeleagueredRead More »
How very loud a wounded place speaks: Radical Joy Revealed
April 17, 2019The following excerpt is from our very first Global Earth Exchange in 2009. The writer, Meredith Little of Big Pine, California, chose as her wounded place the Owens Valley, a once fertile riparian area whoseRead More »
A Walk Through Ragged Beauty
March 27, 2019You never know where you’ll find beauty amidst ugliness and waste — and you never know when the act of making beauty there can bring extraordinary gifts.  This personal story by Harriet Sams of Yorkshire, EnglandRead More »
This Place Is Wounded
March 22, 2019Right now, Christchurch, New Zealand is a wounded place. After a racist gunman killed fifty people there last week and wounded many others, the city and country that pride themselves on providing a safe homeRead More »
Artist Brings Beauty to Burned Houses
March 18, 2019On the last day of 2018, California artist Shane Grammer got the idea of painting a mural of a woman’s face on the burned wall of one of the nearly 14,000 homes that were destroyedRead More »
For Whom Do the Birds Sing?
March 11, 2019Sometimes it is during the hardest and most challenging circumstances of our lives that we are most deeply surprised and touched by beauty. During the Israeli bombardment of Beirut in 1982, the Palestinian poet MahmoudRead More »
Shadow Places
March 7, 2019Carl Jung defined the Shadow as a part of the human personality that we are ashamed or embarrassed about. Because it represents the opposite of our conscious, chosen attitude about ourselves, we try to push itRead More »
Reteach a Thing Its Loveliness
February 27, 2019Reteach a thing its loveliness — that’s what we do when we practice RadJoy. And it’s what poet Galway Kinnell offers in this poem about an old sow. St. Francis and the Sow by Galway KinnellRead More »
Partners in Gift Giving: 3,000 Miles Apart
February 19, 2019Those who practice RadJoy know the power going to a hurt place they love and giving it some attention and beauty. But what would it be like to give a gift of beauty to aRead More »
It Takes Guts to Do This!
February 13, 2019Recently, an active member of the RadJoy network who lives in England expressed discouragement that so many of the people she tries to talk to about our practice of finding and making beauty for hurtRead More »
Music the Color of Architecture
February 6, 2019An old building with a sad past captivated the imagination of 16-year-old Anna Schuleit-Haber and wouldn’t let go. The former state hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts, not far from the boarding school she attended, had closed aRead More »
Ancient Environmentalism
January 30, 2019The American landscape painter Thomas Cole, born in 1801, has been called an “environmentalist before there was environmentalism.” Cole, who was born in England, loved the wild, vast beauty of the United States, and heRead More »
The Pain and Grace of Solastalgia
January 16, 2019Getting in touch with their own solastalgia, the pain of losing a loved place, suddenly gave Australian farmers a deeper compassion for the suffering of Aboriginal people who lost their land.
Braiding the River
January 9, 2019In 2013, when the Polish government proposed to control flooding of the Bialka River in southern Poland by digging steeper banks and building concrete containment walls, Cecylia Malik decided that protesting and writing letters and petitionsRead More »
Please help RadJoy launch these wonderful plans in 2019!
December 27, 2018Dear Members of the RadJoy Community, Thank you for creating the global community of Radical Joy for Hard Times! Because of the gifts of beauty you’ve made for all kinds of wounded places and yourRead More »
Music Brings Calm to Shelter Dogs
December 18, 2018Animal control officer and musician Chad Olds sings to dogs awaiting adoption at an animal shelter. Chad Olds is an animal control officer in Vance County, North Carolina, but earlier in his career, he wasRead More »
Children Make Mother Earth Feel Better
November 21, 2018Children from Canberra Quaker Regional Meeting, Canberra, ACT, Australia, painting stones that they then gave as gifts to places they felt needed some love and beauty. Photo by Wilma Davidson. Children are deeply connected toRead More »
Honoring the Creatures Who Are No More
November 14, 2018Camilla Schofield placing sticks in the North Sea in memory of angel sharks killed by trawl fishing, Remembrance Day for Lost Species. Photo courtesy of Camilla Schonfield. This year, Radical Joy for Hard Times isRead More »
When Death Brings Gifts of Life
November 7, 2018Kevin McKowen with his sister Amanda after playing ice hockey, a passion for both of them. Photo courtesy of Maryanne McKowen When Kevin McKowen lost his life after being hit by a car, his family madeRead More »
From a Site without Meaning to Sacred Ground
October 31, 2018Beauty made from natural and plastic materials at a mall. 2010 Global Earth Exchange, Charlottesville, Virginia. Photo by Mary Janet Fowler At a time when this living planet and the geopolitical world we all inhabitRead More »
Just Facing the Wound Is the First Act of Beauty
October 24, 2018Ashes from a community destroyed by the Santa Rosa fire in 2017. Photo by Gabrielle Lurie, San Francisco Chronicle Her home was destroyed when the Santa Rosa wildfire roared through her neighborhood in western California.Read More »
Wings for a Spring… and a Man
October 17, 2018Molly Brown, Trebbe Johnson, their RadJoy Bird, and a meditating man at the spring on Mt. Shasta When we make a gift to a place, whether it’s aural, visual, prayerful, or musical, we are onlyRead More »
Early Morning Earth Exchange
October 10, 2018The RadJoy Bird created by Harriet Sams and friends during their early morning RadJoy Practice, North Yorkshire, England. Photo by Harriet Sams Meeting at 8am to undertake an Earth Exchange was always going to beRead More »
One Earth, One Humanity, One Future: Conscious Elders Network
October 3, 2018Members of Conscious Elders Network–determined to make waves into the future. Photo courtesy of Conscious Elders Network This year, Radical Joy for Hard Times is honored to partner with nine pioneering organizations whose work inspiresRead More »
Tools for Recycling in the Heart
September 26, 2018Trebbe Johnson at her 2018 Global Earth Exchange for a brownfield under restoration, Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. Photo by Andrew Gardner Yesterday, September 25, was the publication day of Trebbe Johnson’s new book, Radical Joy for HardRead More »
RadJoy Beauty for a Place with a Heavy History
September 19, 2018Tom deBree (center), Sasha Daucus (right), and participants in their RadJoy Practice near Rocky Flats, Colorado. Nuclear weapons were produced at this site for 40 years. On Monday, August 12, Sasha Daucus and Tom deBreeRead More »
OVEC: Defending the Mountains and Their People
September 12, 2018Members of OVEC participating in the Climate March, Huntington, West Virginia This year, Radical Joy for Hard Times is honored to partner with nine pioneering organizations whose work inspires and complements our own. Beginning thisRead More »
Bananas Become Art Become Food
September 5, 2018The Hindu elephant god, Ganesh, made of bananas Ganesha is the Hindu god who orchestrates between form and formlessness. He is the omnipresent energy out of which  all things manifest and into which they will ultimatelyRead More »
Sorrow: Elemental Richness
August 29, 2018Vincent Van Gogh, Landscape in Stormy Weather, 1885. Van Gogh Museum Radical Joy for Hard Times strives to face the sorrow of broken places honestly and, by resting there–in sorrow and in the place–find beautyRead More »
Getting the Heart Ready for the Hard Times
August 22, 2018In this summer of 2018, torrential rains swamp the northeastern states of America, and fires rage in the west. Heat scorches Europe, and the rainy season in Bali has lasted for almost a year. FewRead More »
At Play in a Broken Place
August 15, 2018Palestinian children playing in rubble caused by an Israeli bomb. Photo by Mahmud Hams There are many ways to get reacquainted with–and even fall back in love with–a wounded place: vigil, music, art, prayer. AndRead More »
Gold in a Hole in a Street in Fargo
August 8, 2018“We dedicate this yellow-gold magic encapsulated in the bundle of yarn to unsung heroes–plants that grow in cracks in cement.” People Binding the Earth in Fargo, ND by Maya Gelfman and Roie Avidan. Photo by MindRead More »
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