Treme Brass Band dedicates a number to Gulf Coast Rising. Voodoo Festival, New Orleans. Photo by Kyle Petrozza

Saturday, October 30, was Gulf Coast Rising, when many people from Grand Isle, LA to Destin, FL made all kinds of beauty for areas of the Gulf of Mexico hurt by the BP oil spill.

They built a labyrinth out of birdseed on the beach at Grand Isle, a long, narrow island south of New Orleans that was hit hard by the oil. An artist made a painting of a pelican trying to raise its oil-soaked wings. Three groups of musicians dedicated songs at the annual musical festival, Voodoo Experience, to Gulf Coast Rising, while fans in the audience raised their arms in the air as a gesture of their determination to prevail over hard times.

In Navarre Beach, Florida, a group got together to make a gigantic sand sculpture, perhaps the largest ever built on the shores of the Emerald Coast. People braved the crowds at the Halloween parade in the French Quarter of New Orleans to reflect on the ways we live on Earth. In Alabama, a group of friends gathered around a colorful gypsy wagon to play their flutes and drums together. People talked, prayed, sang, and reached out to one another.

We had support from an amazing variety of people and organizations. To name but a few: the pioneering organizations Green Light New Orleans, Concordia, Blue Ocean Institute, and Gulf Restoration Network; musicians Paul Sanchez, Flow Tribe, and Treme Brass Band; photographers Matthew D. White, Kyle Petrozza, and Michael O'Donovan; Unitarian-Universalist, Methodist, and Jewish congregations; and numerous individuals who said to one another and to us: here is a way of dealing with an environmental catastrophe that feels right, for it is not about blame or judging, but about reconnecting people and the land they love.

Those who participated in Gulf Coast Rising and who contributed to the event with money, time, energy, photography, T-shirt donations, music, and contacts affirmed a principle of Radical Joy for Hard Times, the organization that sponsored the event: when the land hurts, people hurt too--and when we give back simple acts of beauty, we empower ourselves and heal the places we love.

Visit the Radical Joy for Hard Times website to see the photos that have come in so far of Gulf Coast Rising.

We will be working during the next six months to produce a follow-up event to Gulf Coast Rising. It will take place on April 20 to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the oil spill and to honor Earth Day. Stay tuned for details.

Margaret Saizan

For me personally one of the great delights of creating Gulf Coast Rising was working with Margaret Saizan.

Shortly after I got the idea for the project I described it to a woman I had met a few years earlier at a Beloved workshop in Florida, and she suggested  I contact Margaret, who lives in Baton Rouge. After a couple of phone conversations, I knew instinctively that we would work well together and hired her to be the publicist for Gulf Coast Rising.

Soon we were emailing each other 15-20 times a day. I would get up early in the morning and check my email, and there would be messages from Margaret that came in at midnight, 3:00 AM, 5:00 AM. When did she sleep? By phone and internet we kept each other informed of every twist and turn in the project, each of us working on many fronts at once: finding funders, organizing, inviting participants, coming up with ideas to get people involved, spreading the word, looking for support and testimonials from leaders in various fields. For me, a solitary introvert who typically spends many hours a day alone (and likes it that way), working collaboratively with Margaret was exhilarating.

Margaret is one of those rare beings, a visionary who can think strategically, an idea person with the ability to figure out how to manifest her ideas. For five years she has been writing an award-winning blog, Beyond Katrina, about the effects of that devastating hurricane. She also represents the New Orleans photographer, Matthew D. White, a truly gifted artist who actually makes you perceive more about a place through his photos than is actually there. She was instrumental in getting a permanent labyrinth placed in a city park in Baton Rouge.

When I flew down to Louisiana last weekend for Gulf Coast Rising, I also discovered that she knows everybody, and those she doesn't know she easily befriends. The receptionist in the art gallery, the Brazilian restaurant owner, the teenage boys on the beach, the mayor of Baton Rouge, the nature writer in the bookstore... within minutes, Margaret got to know them and had told them about our project and invited them to participate.

Fortunately for me, she is energized by our collaboration, the contacts we made, the support that Gulf Coast Rising elicited, and the possibilities for further work to bring beauty to the Gulf. She will be heading up Gulf Coast Rising Phase 2, to take place next April 20, the first anniversary of the BP oil spill and Earth Day.

Radical Joy for Hard Times, New Bedford Whaling Museum, Connecting for Change

October 22-24 was Connecting for Change: Bioneers by the Bay, held in New Bedford, MA, an annual gathering of environmental, industry and social justice innovators who have demonstrated visionary and practical models for restoring the Earth and its inhabitants. Sponsored by the Marion Institute, a non-profit organization that incubates exceptional projects, the event is timed to coincide with the original Bioneers gathering that takes place each October in San Rafael, CA.

I've been to other events claiming to promote change, but I have never participated in anything like this, where every conversation was likely to turn into a laboratory for making connections, ideas, actions, and new visions. You'd be standing behind someone in the buffet line, chatting with the person next to you in a workshop, or browsing the tables in the exhibition area, and you'd soon discover that you had something vitally important in common with the other person.

Each morning the program began in the elegant old Zeiterion Theatre in downtown New Bedford, with several keynote speakers. These included the shrimper and Gulf activist Diane Wilson; Antwi Akon, a dynamic educator determined to boost education, ecology, and economy in poor neighborhoods of color; and Greg Mortenson, the author of the best-selling Three Cups of Tea, about the author's work creating schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Afternoons were devoted to a wide variety of workshops. Music, art, and book signings were going on all the time, and exhibitors displayed their works and visions in sunny, windproof tents set up in the middle of the street.

What I found most inspiring of all about Connecting for Change was the participation of young people. Rudy Cabrera sang original rap songs that included lyrics about respect for women. A young college student in a workshop I attended spoke passionately (and with solid plans) about his determination to end coal-burning in Massachusetts. In my own workshop, Radical Joy for Hard Times, a teacher from Sant Bani School in New Hampshire attended with several of her high school students. When I asked the group how they viewed the prospects for meaningful change on the planet, one soft-spoken yet confident young woman from the school declared that it was the task of her generation to realize the problems, the task of the next generation to start implementing the solutions, and the task of the following generation to assure that the change was ongoing. This wisdom and the ability to look realistically and bravely into the future I found astonishing and moving.

The photo shown here is from my workshop, which took place in the New Bedford Whaling Museum. The workshop included a discussion of places and species we love and are worried about, a meditation for confronting ecological grief without losing ourselves in it, and a sharing of ideas for bringing beauty to wounded nature. Finally we made this Act of Beauty: a human snowflake arrayed beneath the skeletons of three whales suspended from the ceiling of the museum.