Radical Joy Revealed is a collection of posts from our Newsletter
A New Coat for a Venerable Tree
May 12, 2021A beautiful 140-year-old hemlock at the artist Frederic Church’s estate and museum, Olana, in Hudson, New York, died a few months ago of natural causes. Jean Shin, a sculptor who specializes in using cast-off objects …
Read more »
The Beauty of Wounded Places
May 5, 2021When we say a place is wounded, we mean it can no longer do what it once did. It is disabled. It’s a force of life that has fallen on hard times and is struggling …
Read more »
If Mother Earth Isn’t Feeling So Well
April 14, 2021“If Mother Earth isn’t feeling well, you can cheer her up by doing something nice for her,” said Annie Hess, whose son Elan started participating in the Global Earth Exchange when he was eight years …
Read more »
Gifts for the Givers
April 12, 2021When you go to a wounded place to do a Global Earth Exchange, you may have a certain idea of what’s going to happen there. You show up, share stories or, if you’re alone, simply …
Read more »
The Ceremony of Saying Goodbye
April 7, 2021For RadJoy’s annual Global Earth Exchange (this year June 12; see below), people usually go to places that have already been hurt by human or natural acts. But there are so many ways to observe …
Read more »
Why “Guerrilla” Beauty?
March 31, 2021The Spanish word guerrilla refers to warlike actions undertaken by small, independent groups of combatants in conflict with a large institutionalized military force. In a non-warlike context, guerrilla has come to refer to actions undertaken by small bands of …
Read more »
If a River Exists…
March 24, 2021In recent years important lawsuits in Ecuador, Bolivia, India, New Zealand, and a few U.S. states have acknowledged that certain places are so valuable to their ecosystem that they have an inherent right to exist …
Read more »
Try This at Home
March 17, 2021Here’s a simple exercise to hone your skills at finding and making beauty for a wounded place. Go outside and find an ordinary, nondescript, even boring patch of ground no larger than five feet square. …
Read more »