Radical Joy Revealed is a collection of posts from our Newsletter
The Earth is Witness
May 6, 2020During his long meditation under the bodhi tree, the Buddha was repeatedly taunted by Mara, the non-human energy of the Tempter. Calmly he resisted and ultimately he attained Enlightenment. Mara querulously demanded that he produce …
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The Cover That Says So Much
April 28, 2020This cover of The New Yorker says so much about how the coronavirus is affecting people. It tells a story that would take many words to tell and would not be nearly as poignant. Here …
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Can an act of beauty make a difference?
April 21, 2020Radical Joy for Hard Times doesn’t claim that we can heal wounded places; that’s way beyond our capability as humans. We can, however, heal the relationship between our places and ourselves. Yet every now and …
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Serious Healing, Funny Healing
April 15, 2020Serious Healing Among the most widely shared memes of the past few weeks have been the ones that celebrate the return of nature during the assault of the corona virus. Many of these stories are …
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Happiness?
April 8, 2020In the Greek myth of Sisyphus, Zeus condemns a man who reveals one of the god’s secrets to spend eternity rolling a boulder to the top of a mountain, only to see it tumble back …
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Beauty for Neighbors in Hard Times
April 1, 2020To cheer up her neighbors isolated in their homes by the coronavirus, eleven-year-old Merry decided to offer a violin solo outside her home in County Durham on the moors of northern England. Unable to resist the …
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Not Finding but Being Open to Joy
March 25, 2020Someone asked me the other day how to find joy in these hard times of the coronavirus. And I had to say that experiencing joy in such times is less the result of “finding” it …
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Finding and Making Beauty in Quarantine
March 18, 2020By now you may have seen them. But these are the kinds of videos you can watch again and again to be reminded that, during the hardest of times, people find a way to be …
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Radical Joy in Coronavirus Hard Times
March 11, 2020As the world goes crazy about the coronavirus—and even crazier about succumbing the panic of the coronavirus—it’s time to look both outward at the effect the disease is having on the Earth and inward to …
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Ballerina on the Streets
March 4, 2020What could be more magical? You’re a young child, shooting baskets or playing in front of your house with your friends, when all of a sudden a beautiful ballerina in a tutu appears and begins …
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On Lying Beauty
February 26, 2020The Practice of RadJoy entails going to damaged places and finding and making beauty there. We take a bold, honest look at what’s before us, open up to difficult feelings of outrage and grief… and …
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Wounding and Beauty on the Jordanian-Palestinian Border
February 19, 2020Earlier this month I was part of an extraordinary international delegation of spiritual leaders, musicians, diplomats, and environmental and peace activists traveling through Jordan, Palestine, and Israel. The trip was organized by Unity Earth, EcoPeace …
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She addresses the cedar…
February 12, 2020One simple and meaningful way to find and make beauty for a place—and actually to do both at the same time—is to praise it. Praising a clearcut forest, a littered beach, a raccoon killed by a …
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Buddhist Scholar: Seek Happiness in Hard Times
February 5, 2020According to Buddhist author and psychologist Jack Kornfield, happiness is not a feeling or a series of pleasures, it is “a deep sense of well-being and an appreciation for life itself, with all of its …
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Ceremony Replaces Shyness
January 29, 2020It’s not uncommon that people feel a little bit shy and awkward when they do their first—or even their second or third—Global Earth Exchange. There is little precedent, after all, for going out to a …
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Australia’s Burnt Land Absorbs and Greens
January 22, 2020Since massive wildfires began burning in eastern Australia in September, 24 people have been killed, thousands of homes have vanished in flames, and almost 25 million acres have burned. It is estimated that a billion …
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When Young People Mourn Lost Nature
January 15, 2020Elizabeth’s childhood home in New England was near a woodland. She loved spending time there. The woods were her playground, her refuge, her friend, her spiritual home. She knew those trees and stones, birds and …
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The ravens on your shoulder will whisper in your ear
January 8, 2020Ernest Lowe, poet, gardener, activist, and member of our Radical Joy for Hard Times community, who lives in Wisconsin, wrote this beautiful reflection on our Facebook page last July. It seems particularly apt at this …
Read more »Be on the Lookout… for the Hard Times That Need You
January 1, 2020Every Thursday afternoon, Iranian people go to visit the graves of their loved ones. In this film, which is just under two minutes long, an elderly couple recites poetry to each other as they drive …
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I Choose to Get Involved
December 26, 2019When I make a gift to a place, whether it’s aural, visual, prayerful, or musical, I am only the first artist. Wind, waves, rain, sun, animals, traffic, or other humans will take over where I …
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Radical Beauty for Holiday Hard Times
December 18, 2019Many people get sad during the holiday season. All that rampant, excessive holiday promo about love and family, cheer and gift-giving makes us feel that the whole world is imbued with generosity and kindness, whereas …
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Empty Bus Seats Honor Rosa Parks
December 11, 2019On December 1, 1955, a black seamstress named Rosa Parks got on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama and refused to move when the bus driver told her to give up her seat to a white …
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SEWING THE STORIES OF GRIEF AND TRAUMA
December 4, 2019The fabric art above was made by a young woman who was 16 years old when she was abducted, raped, beaten, and held captive in Congo. She became pregnant and gave birth. Because the parents of …
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How Acts of Beauty Filled New York After September 11
November 25, 2019The idea of making an anonymous act of beauty for a place came to me when I offered a ceremony for New Yorkers two months after the September 11 attacks. The event, called Attending the …
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The Gift Decoupled
November 13, 2019The French anthropologist and sociologist Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) was the first westerner to write about gift-giving as an essential aspect of culture, more widespread and more universal than any other. Mauss saw gift-giving as a …
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The Wound Is Part of the Wholeness
November 6, 2019Sasha Daucus has been an active member of Radical Joy for Hard Times since 2012 and has hosted Global Earth Exchanges every year since then. For the 2017 GEx she rallied people in her hometown of …
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Introducing Flower Flash!
October 23, 2019For about three years floral designer Lewis Miller has been recycling flowers as a way to jolt busy, always preoccupied New Yorkers into a moment of delighted awareness of their surroundings. He and his team …
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The Image of the Grain in the Granite
October 16, 2019Carmel Point Robinson Jeffers (1887-1961) The extraordinary patience of things! This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses — How beautiful when we first beheld it, Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with …
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GIFT OF THE MAGPIE
October 14, 2019This blog usually features stories about finding and making beauty in the hurt places of the Earth. But sometimes the hurt places are in us humans-and nature, both spoiled and splendid, can offer gifts of …
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One Young Woman Responds to California Fires—And Earth in Crisis
October 10, 2019Much of California is in flames as I write today. Residents are in a state of high anxiety and the trauma of having lived through other fires so recently. Homes and businesses are burning, and …
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A More Permanent Gift of Beauty
October 2, 2019Usually, the kind of beauty or art that we make in Radical Joy for Hard Times practices is ephemeral, spontaneous, and not meant to last. We create it out of materials we find at a …
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Giving Voice to Heart
September 29, 2019When we approach a damaged place for the first time, we often feel anxious. We worry that our grief about what has happened to this river, this wetland, this old neighborhood will be so overwhelming …
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Those Who Protect Wild Places
September 29, 2019Guides of wilderness rites of passage programs can’t just take people into beautiful, pristine forests, deserts, and mountains whenever and wherever they want to. They have to deal with permits, applications, and regulations from such …
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Don’t Live Separately. Don’t Despair.
September 29, 2019In his book, Rust Belt Arcana, Matt Stansberry boldly interweaves the Major Arcana of the Tarot into an exploration of the lives and habits of such denizens of northern Ohio as fireflies, possums, puffball mushrooms, box …
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“You Are Not Alone”
September 29, 2019In this video, author and advocate of sacred economics Charles Eisenstein talks about the distress that he and so many of us feel as we watch thousands of acres of Brazilian rain forest burn. And …
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Helping Kids Play After Disaster
September 4, 2019After an environmental disaster, when people are focused on filling out FEMA forms, trying to find clothes and medicine, organizing a place to stay, and even coping with such formerly mundane matters as wishing to …
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Memorial for a Glacier
August 21, 2019On August 18, Iceland held a ceremony to officially mark the passing of a glacier. In 1901 Okjökull glacier spanned 24 square miles. By 2005 it had almost disappeared, and in 2014 it lost its …
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“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 from …
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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 upon …
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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 two …
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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 leave …
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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 and …
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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 are …
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“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 at …
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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’t …
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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 taking …
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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 Avatar …
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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, both …
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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 we …
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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 people …
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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 would …
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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, Beleaguered …
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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 whose …
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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, England …
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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 home …
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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 destroyed …
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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 Mahmoud …
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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 it …
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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 Kinnell …
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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 a …
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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 hurt …
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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 a …
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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 he …
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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.
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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 petitions …
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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 your …
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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 was …
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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 to …
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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 is …
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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 made …
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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 inhabit …
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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. …
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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 only …
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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 be …
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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 inspires …
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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 Hard …
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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 deBree …
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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 this …
Read 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 ultimately …
Read 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 beauty …
Read 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. Few …
Read 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. And …
Read 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 Mind …
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Radical Joy Revealed is a weekly message of inspiration about finding and making beauty in wounded places.