When we landed at the Algiers airport on January 15 after our annual Sahara camel caravan and vision quest, I headed, as usual, straight for the newsstand to catch up on what had been going on in the world while we were deep in the desert. The papers were full of news about a popular uprising that had been launched in Tunisia on Algeria's northeast border.  

As the weeks went on, that fervor for freedom spread to Libya, Egypt, Bahrain... and the U.S. When public school teachers in Wisconsin protested a bill that would drastically cut their collective bargaining rights, supporters in Cairo and around the world had pizzas delivered to them.  

On September 17 a group of citizens moved into a tiny concrete park called Liberty Plaza in New York's Wall Street area (the park was renamed in 2001 for John Zucotti, a real estate developer). In November, I paid a couple of visits to Occupy Wall Street, in support and because Benny Zable was there. Benny is a gifted street artist whom I had met in 2009 in Melbourne, Australia at the Parliament of the World's Religions, when he stood all day, as he did now, in a gas mask and black cloak calling attention to the gloomy realities of a planet under threat.  

On a chilly November morning, as the tents flapped in the wind, Benny talked excitedly of OWS as part of a global movement. "The Arab Spring activists showed the world that people-power really can turn around a situation in a country," he said. Before I left, I donated my own book, The World Is a Waiting Lover, to the well-stocked OWS library.

Above: Benny Zable at Occupy Wall Street  

In 300 BC Seleukos Nikator, one of Alexander the Great's commanding generals, built a city, Zeugma, at a bend of the Euphrates River in what is now southern Turkey. When the region came under Roman rule, wealthy merchants began building luxurious villas on the riverbanks. The decorating "must have" of the time was a courtyard containing a shallow pool with an elaborately detailed mosaic depicting a scene from classical mythology.  

Seventeen centuries later, as a massive dam project in the Euphrates threatened to flood the ancient city, archeologists---racing not just against time but against looters---made haste to excavate as many of the mosaics as they could. For several years, the mosaics were on display at the quaint but cramped archeological museum in the nearby city of Gaziantep, but in September of this year, Gaziantep's new Zeugma Mosaic Museum opened its doors.  

My husband and I spent a few days in Gaziantep in October, and we found this museum to be one of the most wonderful we had ever visited, since the architecture, lighting, and the placement of the pieces all stem from consideration of how best to feature the art. Slightly elevated walkways enable you to walk around the mosaics and look at them from all sides. Balconies permit an even higher perspective.  

The intimate and exploratory sense you have in the museum is inadvertently enhanced by the descriptions of each piece, translated from Turkish to English by someone who was clearly not a native English speaker, but who loved her or his work. The descriptions are a mix of history impartially told, some indignation over the ravages of looters and dammers, and an irrepressible passion for the art. For example: "In this mosaic, Aphrodite appears between two tutors within the framework representing natural life; as if she is trying to say: Do not waste your time in the circumstances of life but try to find the love."

For many years I sought a way to acknowledge the wounded places of the Earth, grieve for them, and give something back to them. Even after the idea of Radical Joy for Hard Times took form, I kept asking: Is it true? Can one really find beauty and joy in all kinds of damaged places? How would I myself react to ecological hard times? After all, spending a week in a clearcut forest in Canada is a lot different from living among brownfields or by a nuclear power plant.  

As it turns out, the wounded places have come to my own neighborhood. Around the time I founded Radical Joy for Hard Times, gas drilling began in the hills and farmlands of northeastern Pennsylvania. Hydrofracking, a process of blasting open the shale a mile deep in the Earth with toxic chemicals and massive amounts of water, has polluted wells and soil, destroyed roads, left families feeling sick, betrayed, and hopeless, and exacerbated alcoholism, domestic violence, and depression. My husband and I refused an offer to lease our five and a half acres, but the effects of the gas drilling operations have been deeply troubling on many levels. We considered moving, even though we didn't want to abandon the place we love.  

There have been a few small Earth Exchanges on affected lands, but in the last few days I have had a sense that a larger form of partnership and activism is possible. Recently I had a conversation with a woman who lives in the hardest hit of all Pennsylvania's gas-drilled areas. It's premature to share details, but I can say that she and her colleagues are working with local people on storytelling projects and other creative ways to help those affected by the drilling to confront the trauma they're suffering. We talked about a regional Global Earth Exchange in June. Like my husband and me, these activists plan to stay here, to be with this wounded place and the people who love it, facing the sorrow, working together, empowering ourselves and others, making beauty and, yes, finding joy.