Today’s Radical Joy Revealed focuses solely on the remarkable photo above. It was taken by Jessica Hess, one of the participants in Attending the Earth, a course I taught recently at OneSpiritInterfaith Seminary in New York. Between each meeting of the class people went to a wounded place near them, each time with a different focus.

The place Jessica chose was the old Bethlehem Steel factory in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, now revamped as a center for arts and recreation. On one of her visits, she discovered this tree, growing improbably out of a large horizontal pipe among tall rusted stacks. She took this photograph of it and the following week returned and found a way to get closer to it, both physically and through the remarkable duologues she was having with it.

What does this tree say to you? Does it speak of daring? A determination to thrive under unlikely conditions? Foolhardiness when future planning is not part of the choice one makes about where to root? Inaccessibility? Majesty?

This photograph of a tree growing in such an unlikely place invites us to stop and listen more closely to all the beings of the natural world.