Have you ever been to a sacred site? What do you think of when you consider that term? Paha Sapa, the land that is the center of the universe for the Lakota people? Stonehenge? Uluru in Australia?

Author Andrew Blackwell encountered a sacred site in what seemed at first an unlikely place.

For his book, Visit Sunny Chernobyl, Blackwell visited some of the most polluted places in the world, including the Ukrainian site of worst nuclear disaster in history, the tarsands of Canada, and the great Pacific garbage patch. In India he makes his way to the Najafgarh, a rivulet that flows through New Delhi, where it is confined to a channel that eventually empties into the Yamuna River. It is the Indian capital’s most polluted water body, for it receives a constant influx of untreated sewage from the populous surrounding areas. Blackwell stares at all the wilted, snagged, washed up offerings that people have made there. So much attention and so much reference for a scummy canal filled with sewage!

“And why not?” Blackwell asks himself and us. “Underneath the stink and the noise, the rationale unfolded. This was a tributary of the Yamuna. Are you not to venerate it merely because it smells? Why not worship it, suspended solids and all? What could be more sacred than a river that springs from inside your neighbor’s belly?”

What are the sacred places we ourselves might be ignoring simply because we have not paused long enough to look below the surface?

—Trebbe Johnson

Note: Radical Joy Revealed will be taking a summer break in August and will be back September 7.