Radical Joy Revealed
February 4, 2015
g

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.


How Beauty Leads to Love    

Dry lake Earth Exchange
Earth Exchange at a lake bed in drought, Tamera, Colos, Portugal.
Photo by Carsten Dolcini

   

Psychologist James Hillman believed that the modern tendency to repress beauty, both in our environments and in our conversation, has had a direct impact on the ecological plundering of the world. Contrary to much popular thinking, Hillman wrote in an essay, "The Practice of Beauty," what is repressed today is not plain speaking about injustices and abuses like misogyny, violence, and child abuse, but conversations about beauty.

 

"That the world is loveless results directly from the repression of beauty, its beauty and our sensitivity to beauty. For love to return to the world, beauty must first return, else we love the world only as a moral duty: Clean it up, preserve its nature, exploit it less. If love depends on beauty, then beauty comes first, a priority that accords with pagan philosophy rather than Christian. Beauty before love also accords with the all-too-human experience of being driven to love by the allure of beauty."  

 

Allow yourself to consider the beauty of the world and you may next have to allow yourself to fall in love with it. Fall in love with it all over again, as you did when you were a child and your immediate world was an enchanting mystery that offered limitless marvelous things to explore--and then see what happens.

 

 

To discover other stories of inspiring people, stories, photos, and ideas, subscribe to Radical Joy Revealed.
 
Make Beauty
for a Place You Love

On June 20 people around the world will go to wounded places to share their stories of what the places mean to them, spend time getting to know the places as they are now, and make a simple act of beauty there: a bird created out of materials found on site. Join the world in making beauty for the Earth for the 6th annual Global Earth Exchange.

To see the photos of the 2014 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.
� 2014 Radical Joy for Hard Times | | [email protected] |