In celebration of his 29^th birthday, Noah Crowe planted himself in the ground and then gave his place in the Earth-Womb to a tree.

Inspired in part by the twentieth century German artist, Joseph Beuys, who insisted that art, the environment, and the human community are inextricably linked, Noah, an artist and filmmaker from Ojai, CA, decided to make a ritual that would connect his own birth with the life-giving force of the Earth.

Because Noah is an advocate of making beauty in wounded places, the place he chose for his event was a desolate patch of land by the freeway off-ramp. An industrial building stood on one side of this littered waste area and a vacant lot on the other.

The preparation took days. He bought a native California oak tree that was as close in height to his own 6'2" as he could find. He collected 13½ gallons of water, the equivalent to that in his own body, and carted it out to the site of the ceremony. He dug the hole that he would later climb into. And, like Beuys, whose "7,000 Oaks" tree-planting project paired each growing, changing tree with a column of unchanging stone, Noah also carted a large rock to the area.

At 4:47 on the afternoon of April 14, the exact time of his birth, Noah undressed and lowered himself into the hole, which his friend then filled with soil. Below the waist, he was rooted in the earth, while the upper part of his body, branchlike, was in the air.

Although his intention was to stay in the hole until morning, when his friend arrived at 1:00 AM to check on him, Noah was shivering with cold and knew it was time to emerge.

He then planted the tree and watered it with the 13½ gallons of water.

In this way a man remembered his roots and re-experienced his connection with the living Earth that gave birth to all creatures, and a tree now beautifies an abandoned place.

Jung called it synchronicity, those occasions when outer events respond to and then inform and transform an inner condition. Here is a loop of lessons that synchronicity invited me into the other day.

Upset and worried about a dear friend, D, who has just been diagnosed with breast cancer, I make an appointment for an overdue mammogram.

It's a beautiful spring day when I arrive for the test, but I'm deeply engrossed in my personal anxiety.

In the waiting room of the small community hospital, I am annoyed at the long wait and panicked about the upcoming test. I realize that, although I am very courageous about some things, I am a complete scaredy cat about pain and illness.

A nurse comes in, pushing a woman in a wheelchair. The patient is slender, in her late 50s, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. Her leg is in a cast. I'm reading my novel when I begin to tune in to their conversation. The woman says her son died last year at 32 of a brain tumor so rare that only twenty people a year get it. The nurse asks softly if she has other children. She did have two, says the woman. But in 2001 her 28-year-old son died of an aneurysm. Just recently her daughter was found to have a hole in her heart. As I listen I am amazed how this woman can be sitting here, obviously in some kind of medical trouble herself, not only surviving, but speaking of such tragedies, and without self-pity. The nurse murmurs sympathetically, and then silence falls between them.

A few minutes later the woman in the wheelchair looks out the glass front door of the hospital and remarks how pretty the tulips in the little garden are.

All the way home I think about this woman's ability to endure and still notice the tulips.

I recognize that I have to confront my fear of illness.

The next day, I arrive early at the home of another friend, R, who is going to help me with some work. I park on her street under a flowering cherry tree and tune the radio to "New Dimensions" on NPR. The guest is a woman named Jan Frazier, who is talking about the fear she used to experience whenever she went for a mammogram. Then she discovered how to let go of fear. Instead of projecting the worst and trying to resolve it, she says, you surrender to the uncertainty and say to yourself, "I don't know."

I try this about my own mammogram and my friend D's breast cancer and feel the fear evaporate into a kind of spacious curiosity. I practice this over and over as I look up into the cherry blossoms.

Then R comes home and after we discuss our work, she shows me a poem she just wrote, a song of praise to her breasts.

I ask R for a copy of her poem and send it to D.

Take a look at the Radical Joy for Hard Times map on our website. The green "pins" indicate where people will be holding Global Earth Exchanges on June 19. On this day people will gather together at wounded places all over the world to share stories about their connection with the place, spend time "listening to the land", and make beauty there.

Join us and let's cover that world map with green pins! If you are among the first 100 people to sign up to do an Earth Exchange, you receive free a Radical Joy for Hard Times flag, one of our beautiful new T-shirts, and other support materials, and you become part of the worldwide network of people who are pioneering a brand new form of environmental activism based on love, community, and creativity.

Best of all, you bring attention to a wounded place or species you love.

Help us meet our goal of  100 Earth Exchanges taking place all over the world on June 19!

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Healing the Green Blues Retreat

If you love the natural world, sorrow for the many ecological challenges the planet faces, and want a new way to respond to them, then mark your calendar for October 22-24, 2010. On that weekend Radical Joy for Hard Times will hold our first retreat, Soothing the Green Blues, at Seven Oaks Center, near Charlottesville, VA. We already have a fantastic guest speaker lined up. More information to come soon.

Creating a sustainable, thriving future on Earth depends on opening our hearts to the natural world in its brokenness as well as its splendor.

Sita Sings the Blues is an extraordinary animated feature film by Nina Paley, which takes a kaleidoscopic, witty, visually magical look at an ancient story from the Hindu Ramayana. Sita, devoted wife of Rama, is abducted by his wicked brother Laksmana. Although she remains loyal to her husband in body and heart, she ends up as women in ancient literature often do: trashed and shafted. How she endures... and gets divine revenge... is the tragic-cosmic journey Paley has created.

The myth is interwoven with  the filmmaker's real-life heartbreak story, elaborations on Sita's emotional turmoil expressed through the songs of the 1920s jazz singer Annette Hanshaw, and (my personal favorite) commentary by three Indonesian shadow puppets with Indian accents, who discuss the story like participants in a modern book group with lines like, "I felt like, you know, he always had this element of doubt, like, She might not be pure." Paley has made the film available for free on YouTube.

We all live with two inner forces that influence many of our decisions each day. One calls us forth into the mystery that beckons us to expand more fully and authentically into the world. The other holds us back and urges (often excessive) caution. This popular workshop, based on my book, focuses on the first voice, that of the archetypal Beloved, a figure that shows up in the myths of many cultures, the poems of mystics, and in our dreams as the symbol of wholeness. Brought to conscious awareness, the Path of the Lover can bring us joy, passion, and fulfillment.
 

• Connect with the archetypal Beloved in you, that knows how to say YES to what you love
• Discover how your past loves (including those that didn't work out) were essential in opening you up to a bigger capacity to love
• Learn to recognize the inner voice of the "loyal soldier" that wants to hold you back from following your heart
• See how fascination and allurement have led you onto important paths all your life
  

July 30-August 2: Seattle (contact Ruth Dow Rogers)

November 12-14: Schloss Glarisegg, Lake Constance, Switzerland (contact Silvia Figel)

November 19-21: Eschwege Institute, Eschwege, Germany

Endless Mountains Vision Quest

August 9-13

This four-day program, held in a secluded 400-acre nature preserve, is specially designed for those who seek a meaningful rite of passage in a beautiful, yet accessible place. You explore many of the same processes and practices as in the longer vision quest, but with a focus on reading Nature's lessons and discovering how they apply to your own path in life. For the twenty-four-hour solo you may choose from among diverse ecological niches: glacial pond, meadow, wetlands, stream, or forest. Minimal backpacking. $605

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