Radical Joy Revealed
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May 14, 2014

Radical Joy Revealed is a weekly message of inspiration about finding and making beauty in wounded places. We hope you'll enjoy these doorways into places that are both familiar and surprising, and we welcome your suggestions, stories, and photos. Click here to subscribe.

 A Gift for a Sick Friend
Drumming for the Gulf
Rusty, Mike, and Cynthia drumming for the Gulf, Navarre Beach, Florida, Global Earth Exchange 2010. Photo by Mike Beck

When you give a gift to a place you have no idea how far it will reach, how it will be received, who will notice, whom it will touch.

 

For the first Global Earth Exchange in June 2010 Mike Beck, Rusty Gasparian, and Cynthia Galante made their way before dawn to Navarre Beach on the Florida Panhandle, where the first globs of BP oil were just beginning to float up onto the white crystalline beaches. Each person had brought a drum, and as the sun rose, they drummed in the new day in an endangered place.

 

Later Mike wrote: "While we were finishing drumming and getting ready to find flotsam and jetsam for our act of beauty, [a middle-aged couple walked by]. The man asked, 'Does your band practice early mornings at the beach often?'

Cynthia just looked at him smiling and said, 'Oh no, we're not a band! We just came to be with a sick friend.' There was a momentary pause, a silence with only the gently cresting waves falling on the shore before the man said in a kindly voice, 'Thank you for doing this.' "

 

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Join the World in Making Beauty
for the Earth

Join people around the world for the 5th annual Global Earth Exchange on Saturday, June 21. Visit a wounded place you care about, get to know the place as it is now, share your stories, and make a bird of materials the place offers you.
Radical Joy for Hard Times is a global community dedicated to finding and making beauty in wounded places. Reconnecting with these places, sharing our stories of loss and despair, and making acts of beauty there, we transform the land, reconnect people and the places that nourish them, and empower ourselves to make a difference in the way we live on Earth.
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