To 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 fun, her little brother Calouen, three, decided to join in. I love the way Merry responds to his jubilant interruption.
In Danville, Vermont, people respecting the guidelines of social distancing found a way to honor a beloved neighbor with the only kind of funeral possible. They drove slowly past his house with their headlights on.
Across Europe people are emerging just far enough outside their front doors to engage in some heartfelt coordinated applause for the health care workers who daily put their own well-being at risk to help others through this crisis.
There are so many ways to share gratitude, art, compassion, and kindness during this extremely hard time. Like the Practice of RadJoy, when we apply it to wounded places, these ways are free, accessible to all, completely adaptable to individual circumstances, and profoundly important to the givers and the recipients alike.
Let us all make it our mission to create beauty every day, and with particular mindfulness during this pandemic… and to take beauty into ourselves with all our being when it comes our way.
Trebbe is the author of The World Is a Waiting Lover and 101 Ways to Make Guerrilla Beauty. Her new book, Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty, will be published in Fall 2018 by North Atlantic Books. Her articles about people’s emotional and spiritual relationship with nature have appeared in Orion, Sierra, Ecopsychology, The Ecologist, The Nation, Harper’s and other magazines. She lives with her husband, Andrew Gardner, in rural northeastern Pennsylvania, a region currently under exploitation by natural gas companies.
Image Credit:
- Merry Violin: Harriet Sams
MORE RADICAL JOY REVEALED
A New Coat for a Venerable Tree
A 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 [...]
The Beauty of Wounded Places
When 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 [...]
If Mother Earth Isn’t Feeling So Well
“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 [...]