Rediscovering wounded places through attention and gifts of beauty is an act of radical survival.
There are hurt places all over the Earth and in all our lives. Your hurt place might be a field from your childhood that got plowed and paved to make a housing development. It might be a city street corner where an act of violence occurred. Or a desert canyon opened for mining.
It’s so easy to turn our backs on those places! It’s as if it was they who have abandoned us. But just as we can’t be whole, healthy individuals unless we’re willing to examine and transform the shadowy places in our lives, so we can’t create a healthy, sustainable Earth until we give back to shadowed, wounded places, recognizing that all places, like all people, have inherent beauty and value.
We reconnect with hurt places to discover that:
- it is entirely appropriate to mourn the loss of a loved place or species
- love of place unites people in a community more than differences divide them
- we are capable of boldly facing situations we don’t really want to confront
- we can always find and make beauty, no matter what’s going on in our life
There are so many wounded places on Earth! There’s one near you, and it’s calling you. Visit it on June 12, the Global Earth Exchange.
Radical Joy for Hard Times insists: When you share your sorrow and your gratitude for places that have fallen on hard times, the place regains meaning and beauty—and so do you.
Image Credit:
- Crow Pic Bali Books 29 Version 2: Trebbe Johnson
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