Beauty 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 are sorely challenged in many ways, Radical Joy for Hard Times offers a way to transform our relationship with and our perception of damaged places:
From: A waste thing you want to avoid
To: A living biocommunity you want to visit and get reacquainted with
From: A place that’s been rampantly taken from
To: A place you can now give back to
From: A site without meaning
To: Sacred ground you replenish with respect and awe
From: Something ugly, an eyesore
To: A field of potential beauty that you yourself bring forth
From: A strange place you must learn to forget
To: A loved place you relearn to remember and spend time with
To visit, experience, and make a simple gift of beauty for a hurt place is to refuse to capitulate to ugliness, despair, and powerlessness. It is to bring beauty to the world.
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.
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Radical Joy Revealed is a weekly message of inspiration about finding and making beauty in wounded places.