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 Practice of Radical Joy for Hard Times

The Knitting Nannas, a group of elder activists fighting fracking in Australia, with the art they made for The Ground Beneath Our Hearts September 12 Photo courtesy of the Knitting Nannas.

For some of our readers, Radical Joy for Hard Times probably means the annual Global Earth Exchange, the day each June when people all over the world go to wounded places and gift them with a bird made of materials the place itself provides. For others, RadJoy is this weekly message of inspiration you're reading. For still others it's a style some artists use to call attention to unfortunate events in original ways.

But at its core Radical Joy for Hard Times is a practice for anyone on any day.

We begin this practice by looking for places that are wounded. When we encounter them, we pause rather than rushing past. We open our hearts to feelings of loss, guilt, fear. We look for beauty. And, miraculously, we find it: a bird singing in a burned forest, cherry blossoms flowering in a town flattened by hurricane. We still feel sad, but in the midst of that emotion something new arises: a sense of amazement. Finally, we make a simple gift of beauty for the place, using no materials other than those surrounding us: our voice, our dancing body, the leaves and sticks and litter on the ground.

It is with this act that we ourselves are gifted. We experience empowerment, joy, and a surge of certainty that we are part of the whole resilient, enduring, beautiful world.

Try practicing radical joy for hard times yourself this week.

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Radical Joy Revealed.

Radical Joy for Hard Times is a global community of people dedicated to finding and making beauty in wounded places. Reconnecting with these places, sharing our stories of loss, 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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