Radical Joy Revealed
February 18, 2015
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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.


Releasing a Place from Imprisonment   

Art in a trashed place
Making a sculpture of trash at an abandoned industrial site,
Los Angeles, 2009

In 2009, in the very early days of Radical Joy for Hard Times, four friends experimented with our invitation to go to a wounded place by visiting an abandoned industrial lot near Los Angeles, spending quiet time getting to know it, and then making a sculpture of trash they found there. One member of the group, Lucy Hinton, of London, later wrote about how the experience had transformed the place in a subtle but direct way:

It was as if the place had been dead before, and now it was alive. When it was time to go, none of us wanted to leave. When we first stepped onto the land, we felt like sheepish intruders--would we get into trouble, or cause suspicion or discomfort to confused onlookers for breaking out of social expectations? But by the time we left we felt relaxed, at home, and more like pioneers who had begun the process of breaking an invisible barrier that until now held this wounded place in some kind of soulless imprisonment. We dreamed of returning and helping to breaking up the baked hard top soil so that seeds could emerge through the surface crust and the birds and color might return once more.

Transform a wounded place you know about by paying it a visit and making some beauty for it! Then let us know what happens.

 

 

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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] |