Radical Joy Revealed

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July 23, 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.

The Other Kind of Beauty

Water appears below the thinning ice of a glacier in Greenland. Photo by Joe Raedle, Getty Images

Often, when we go to a wounded place, we are startled to discover something beautiful emerging from waste and destruction. That sight or that sound reminds us of the resilience of life pushing on, determined to thrive.

Sometimes, though, we discover a different kind of beauty in a place that's fallen on hard times: a kind of paradoxical beauty in the wound itself. Then we are taken aback by our own reaction: How can what I know to be a problem appear so beautiful?

Such is the case with this thinning sheet of ice in Greenland. Blue and white, translucent, fragile, endangered, gorgeous. All we can do is hold the opposites within us and know them both to be true.

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Radical Joy Revealed.

See How the World Made Beauty
for the Earth

On June 21 people around the world went to wounded places, shared their stories of what the places mean to them, spent time getting to know the places as they are now, and made a simple act of beauty there. To see the photos of the 5th annual Global Earth Exchange, visit our website. To read the stories click on the little "pins" on our world map.

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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