Participants in the Radical Joy for Hard Times Grief's Mirror workshop with the RadJoy Pony they made for Blue Cloud Farm.

When Christi Strickland discovered Blue Cloud Farm, an equine therapy ranch in Longmont, Colorado, she thought it would be the perfect place for her and Trebbe Johnson to hold their Grief's Mirror workshop, a three-day journey in which participants would confront recent loss and explore ways of transforming it.

When they arrived to begin the workshop on June 5, they learned that the farm, too, had experienced recent sorrows. A man who had grown up on that land and was shoeing horses just two days before his death, had died of cancer. And days earlier a beloved horse, Ridges, had badly broken his leg and had to be put down.

During the weekend workshop, participants worked with council, art, and time spent at a riverbank devastated in the flood of 2013. Like all Radical Joy for Hard Times events, the program ended with the making of a gift of beauty for the place.

At many of our events, like the Global Earth Exchange, that act of beauty is a RadJoy Bird (our symbol) made of materials found on site. On this occasion it seemed fitting to make a RadJoy Pony for the farm. When Christi sent this photo to Kaia Livingstone, head of the Equine Facilitated Psychotherapy program at Blue Cloud Farm, Kaia wrote back with further synchronistic news. It seems that "back in the day," the ranch owners buried all their horses by the lake in that meadow (laws now prohibit that) and that somewhere not far from this whimsical pony is a tombstone honoring the horses who lived and ran there.