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Introducing....
the Radical Joy for Hard Times
Council of Advisors
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Dear Radical Joy for Hard Times Council of Advisors and Board of Directors,
It is with enormous delight and honor that I introduce you council members to one another.
Our newly formed Council of Advisors is composed of six people, each of whom is doing pioneering work on behalf of the Earth and her people that dovetails with and has inspired the work of Radical Joy for Hard Times. We, the members of the Board of Directors (unofficially known as the "Band") feel privileged to have you as our guides.
Following are photos and bios of each of our six Council of Advisors members. In a week or so, they will appear on the Radical Joy for Hard Times website. Advisors, you may read the bios of our Band members by clicking on the People page of our website.
We
look forward to working with you in creative, compassionate, and
surprising ways to find and make beauty in the wounded places of the
Earth.
Yours along the path,
Trebbe
and the Radical Joy for Hard Times Band of Directors
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Daniel Dancer
Although
I have never met Daniel Dancer in person, we have been long-distance allies
since 2001, when I was searching for a clearcut forest near an old-growth
forest, where I could take a small group for a week-long vigil. Someone suggested I
contact Daniel, and he told me about a remote forest he loved and had photographed on Victoria
Island, British Columbia. I found the place, fell in love with it,and offered a predecessor of Radical Joy for Hard Times, Attending the Earth,
there the following year.
Daniel is a visionary conceptual artist whose
work focuses on beauty and destruction in the natural world. While traveling in
South America in the 1980s he became fascinated the famous Nazca Lines of
Peru, ancient images that can only be comprehended from the air. He began
exploring how these works could be meaningful in a contemporary context, and he now works with schools and communities worldwide to create images composed of
the people themselves, which he then photographs from on high. Recently he worked with groups to
create a portrait of Barack Obama in Chicago for Inauguration Day and a
windmill in Holland for 350, the international day of climate action.
Daniel's
books include Shards and Circles: Artistic Adventures in Spirit and Ecology and Desperate Prayers: A Quest for Sense in a Senseless Time, in which he documents twelve years of creating "eco-sculptures" with found materials in
endangered eco-systems. As a photographer, he has shown his images of beauty in the
midst of devastation in numerous galleries and publications worldwide,
including the Sierra Club book, Clearcut,
depicting the destruction of forests in North America. Working with communities from Alaska to Australia to create
art of and on the Earth, Daniel has documented his work in various ways. An Exhibits USA tour called Sacred
Ground-Sacred Sky: An Eco-Experience became their second most requested show in its five-year
tour across the country. Daniel is also a singer-songwriter; his music is
featured on his first CD, Wild is the Way, recorded with his band, Skysight.
The founder of Rowena Wilds, a 200-acre, eco-community
near Hood River, Oregon, he lives in an Earth-sheltered home built of recycled
and Earth-friendly materials. Daniel is the father of
two and the partner of Jade Sherer, a vision quest guide, ceremonialist, and
leader of White Eagle Memorial Preserve, a provider of natural burials.
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Susan Griffin
Susan Griffin is an acclaimed poet, essayist, playwright and
screenwriter. Born in Los Angeles in 1943 in the midst of World War II and the holocaust, she was profoundly shaped by these violent events and has explored them in her work ever since. Another major influence on her development was the landscape of her childhood, the
High Sierras and the coast of the Pacific Ocean.
Known for her innovative
style, Susan probes the links between the destruction of nature, the urge toward
violence, racism, and the belittling of women, tracing these themes-and the
denial of them-in both private and public life. Her book Woman and Nature is an extended prose-poem. A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War blends history and memoir, as does her most recent book, Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy: The Autobiography of an American Citizen, which investigates the state of mind that engenders and
sustains democracy. When I read A Chorus of Stones in 1992, I was stunned by the way Susan was able to fix
her gaze on instances of suffering, atrocity, and mystical curiosity bent to
violence, and not only to describe them in luminous prose, but to probe deep
below the surfaces to search for motives. (We have never met, although we had
the same New York literary agent for several years, which at the time made me
feel like Susan was a kind of literary as well as philosophical sister!) A
Chorus of Stones was a finalist for both
the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Award and was named a NY
Times Notable Book of the Year.
Susan's play Voices, which won an Emmy in 1975, has been performed throughout
the world. In 2000 Utne Reader chose her as one of a hundred important visionaries for the new millennium. She
co-authored the script for the Academy Award-nominated film, Berkeley in the Sixties and is currently writing a script
depicting the life of a courtesan. Canto,
her play in poetry about the massacres of villagers in El Salvador, is being set
to music by Glenn Kotche, and she is co-editing an anthology, Transforming
Terror: Remembering the Soul of the World,
to be published in 2011. In 2009 she was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Susan lectures widely in the United States and abroad and teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies and
Pacifica Graduate School, as well as privately at her home in Berkeley.
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 Larry Hobbs
Larry Hobbs is a scientist with a well-developed sense
of play and a passionate love for the natural world. He has been involved in
marine mammal research and in teaching natural history for more than
thirty-five years. As a young man, he studied with Gregory Bateson, the
visionary social anthropologist, cyberneticist, linguist, and student of the
social life of dolphins. Early on, as a whale biologist with the U.S. National
Marine Mammal Laboratory, he worked on attaching radio transmitters to and
tracking whales, manatees, otters, and other sea animals. He leads an annual
expedition to the Sea of Cortes to watch the gray whale migration, an event he
hasn't missed in thirty-four years. He has also worked with polar bears, which
he claims are "a lot easier to catch than whales when you're trying to put
transmitters on them."
After he completed his M.A. in psychology 1984, Larry
worked as a family therapist, specializing in schizophrenia and drug and
alcohol addiction. For twenty years he was an adjunct faculty member in the
B.A. completion program at Antioch Seattle, where he taught science as a field
course. Larry also trained with the School of Lost Borders [see Meredith Little
below] and leads vision quests to guide people to a deeper connection with nature. I met Larry in 2002 at a gathering of international wilderness guides
in Titisee, Germany. Within about one minute of our first conversation I was
telling him about the program I had recently led in a clearcut forest in
British Columbia, and he exclaimed, "I take 4H groups to clearcut forests!" At
that moment we decided to collaborate on a program. The rite of passage program
that Larry initiated and developed for the Washington State 4-H Challenge Program is still ongoing, and he continues to lead teen groups and train adult
leaders.
An entertaining speaker, he leads natural history tours for various
universities, the Smithsonian Institution, and other organizations, and he has
been leading eco-tours to Antarctica for the past ten years. He studies and
writes about sustainability, researches river dolphins in Southeast Asia, and
investigates and writes about the behavior and characteristics of complex systems and how they can be sustained. In 2008 he was the recipient of the
prestigious Horace Mann Award, presented to individuals who have won victories
for humanity. The award was presented to Larry because "his life's work
exemplifies the spirit of Antioch and demonstrates a deeply caring ethic that
challenges one to rise above self-imposed limitations and become a contributing
member of our world community." He lives in a yurt on Bainbridge Island,
Washington.
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Meredith Little
Meredith and her husband Steven
Foster brought the modern wilderness rites of passage movement into being. As
co-founders of Rites of Passage, Inc. in 1976 and The School of Lost Borders in
1981, Meredith and Steven introduced pioneering new methods and dynamics of
modern pan-cultural passage rites in the wilderness and created innovative practices of
"field eco-therapy." They trained thousands of guides from southern California
to South Africa, and these guides, in turn, have trained thousands more. The
essence of their work has been captured in articles, chapters of books, an
award-winning documentary film, Lost Borders, and their own books, including The Book of the Vision Quest, The Roaring of the Sacred River, and The Four Shields: The Initiatory Seasons of Human Nature.
I met Meredith in 1995, when I took a Lost Borders training with her and
Steven in eastern California, and since that time, she has been both a mentor
and a dear friend. Since Steven's death from a genetic lung disease in 2003, Meredith
continues both nationally and internationally to guide and train others. Along with Dr. Scott Eberle, she founded a new branch of Lost Borders
entitled "The Practice of Living and Dying," to
break the taboos and silence that pervade the subject of death and to help
restore dying to its natural place in the cycle of life. This work was engendered in part by the conscious process of dying that Meredith and Steven and, later Steven's doctor, Scott, sustained during the years of Steven's illness. An
introvert who has devoted her life to bringing others out of their own self-prescribed limitations to participate more fully and authentically in life, Meredith is extraordinary listener. She puts her whole being into the mission of listening,
taking in the story and the presence of each person who sits with her and
reflecting back not only what she hears but a deep understanding as well. Meredith is currently director of The Practice of Living and Dying, Lost Borders International, and Lost Borders Press. She lives in Big Pine, California.
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David Powless
David Powless was the first person I
asked to be on the Radical Joy for Hard Times Council of Advisors, since it was
my meeting with him in 1987 that planted an important seed for this work. At
the time, I was living in New York and writing multimedia shows. I read about
David's work in a magazine and shortly thereafter collaborated with some
colleagues to produce a presentation about his work. During one of our
interviews he described his exhilaration in 1977 when he learned that he was to
be the first Native American ever to receive a National Science Foundation
Grant, in his case to research and develop a method of recycling steel waste.
Jubilant, David raced to the top of a large pile of steel waste and shouted, "I
will conquer you!" Immediately he knew that this was the wrong approach. "I
realized that the steel waste was an orphan," he said. "My job was to bring
this orphan back into the cycle of life." The notion of regarding
environmental waste as an orphan struck me as very profound and eventually was
one of the major elements that led to the founding of Radical Joy for Hard
Times.
A member of the Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin, David is dedicated both to
sustaining tribal traditions and to encouraging Indian people, particularly
young people, to become successful and productive professionally. He began his
career as a football player, drafted first to the National Football League by
the New York Giants and later playing with the Washington Redskins. Among the
business ventures he has founded or led are ORTEK, an Oneida-run environmental
laboratory in Green Bay; Arctic Slope Regional Corporation (ASRC), Anchorage,
Alaska, where he served as vice president; and Bear Paw, an insurance agency
for tribal governments and organizations that he founded with his college
football teammate, Dick Butkus. Currently David is manager of special projects
at Amerind, a non-profit self-funded risk pool owned by 430 tribes providing
insurance for homes and property owned by tribes or tribal members.
Among his
awards and honors are the Small Business Administration's National Innovation
Advocate of the Year Award, presented in the White House Rose Garden in 1981;
Motorola, Inc.'s recognition award for helping to create a Native American,
Tribally Owned Business Conference in Motorola's Schamburg Illinois Center in
1997; and induction into the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame in Niagara Falls,
NY in 2008. He is on the board of directors of the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development. For many years he has taught tribal members a process he calls
Rainbow Way Visioning Meditation, which bridges science, meditation and Indian
Traditional Teachings. He married and the father of a son and daughter. He
lives in New Mexico.
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Lily Yeh
 Lily Yeh is an internationally celebrated artist whose pioneering work
has brought inner and outer beauty to communities throughout the world.
A
native of Kueizhou, China, Lily studied traditional Chinese painting in Taiwan
before immigrating to the United States in 1963 to attend art school in
Philadelphia. She began to question how her personal vision of art might be
adapted so it was bigger than a canvas and more participatory. In 1968 she
founded the non-profit organization, Village of Arts and Humanities, in North
Philadelphia, launching a national model of community-building through the
arts. Over a period of several years she and her colleagues from the community
transformed a neglected, rundown neighborhood into a place of visionary splendor.
In 2004, Lily founded Barefoot Artists, Inc., to bring the
transformative power of art to impoverished communities around the globe, while
fostering community empowerment, improving the physical environment, promoting
economic development, and preserving indigenous art and culture. In 2005 she
embarked on the Rwanda Healing Project, which Terry Tempest
Williams describes in her new book, Beauty in Broken Places. One hundred female-headed families from the Survivors Village in
Cyanzarwe District and dozens of workers and volunteers from the nearby city of
Gisenyi worked together to create a Genocide Memorial Park to honor victims of
the 1994 Rwandan genocide. "Making art in stark environments like these
generates a positive and powerful energy, the likes of which I have not
experienced anywhere else," Lily told a reporter.
Another recent transformation
occurred with The Dandelion School Transformation Project,
created by and for the children of a school located in a heavily polluted
industrial area on the outskirts of Beijing. Dandelion School, whose motto means Let
the heaven and earth be filled with love, serves
more than six hundred students who come from poor migrant working families from
twenty-four provinces. I personally have been almost as inspired by Lily's
unique methodology for creative collaboration and project management as I have by
her indomitable spirit, her humility, her love of people, and her creative
vision. For all these reasons she seemed like a perfect fit for Radical Joy for
Hard Times. Lily's work has won many prestigious awards, including five
honorary doctoral degrees from prominent universities in the United States. Her
work has impacted people and places in China, Columbia, Ecuador, Ghana, Italy,
Ivory Coast, Kenya, the Republic of Georgia, Rwanda, Taiwan and the United States.
She received a standing ovation after her talk at the 2009 Bioneers Conference.
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Radical Joy for Hard Times envisions a planet where
people and wounded places are reconciled through acceptance, love, and acts of
beauty, so no part of the Earth is orphaned from the cycle of life. For more information visit our website or contact Trebbe by email or phone: 570 727 4272.
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