Radical Joy Revealed
May 6, 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.


Now Transmitting Beauty

Alicia Viguer Seguí, whose grandfather was a republican in the Spanish Civil War, and Trebbe Johnson with their RadJoy Bird for the energy pylon at Ananta Sacred Space. Photo by Charlotte Phillips

Ananta Sacred Space in Gandesa, Spain is the visionary project of Charlotte "Elfin Flower" Phillips who moved from her native England to Spain and began to create a place that would be ecologically self-sustaining, beautiful, a site for workshops, and a refuge for pilgrims walking the Camino de Santiago path. She was appalled recently when two enormous energy pylons were erected on hills that face each other across the sloping valley where corncob buildings, yurts, and gardens lie in integral patterns.

 

 

Members of the Radical Joy for Hard Times program, the Secret Life of Places, held at Ananta April 17-19, had come to focus on the ways that traumatic events in places affect the people who live there. This they explored not only at Ananta and at Corbera d'Ebre, site of the last and bloodiest battle of the Spanish Civil War, but as it relates to their own lands, which included Spain, the U.S., Ireland, and Northern Ireland. They also felt inspired to make beauty at the pylons.

 

Three members of the group headed up the hill toward the northern pylon, three to the south. The group at the northern pylon sang to the land and the pylons, placed a large standing stone in the center, wove sticks and flowers into the crisscrossed metal struts of the structure, and placed stones and flowers on the concrete supports. The southern group made a ring of sticks and stones around their pylon, and they, too, decorated it with flowers, pinecones, and leaves. Finally they made a RadJoy Bird in the center.

 

It would be a stretch to say that these two behemoths are welcome now at Ananta. But at least they have been transformed into balanced--and beautiful--parts of the landscape.

 

 

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  Make Beauty!
Pass It  On!

On Saturday, June 20 RadJoy's annual Global Earth Exchange soars to a whole new dimension.

Besides making visiting and making the RadJoy bird at a wounded place you love, you can you'll have the opportunity to "link" your RadJoy Bird with two others: one that sends beauty and wholeness to your place, another to whom you'll send these gifts!


For more information and to register visit our website.
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 | | trebbe@radicaljoyforhardtimes.org |