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.

Wendell Berry on the Revival of Home

When the place you love is damaged or destroyed, you may feel that the relationship you had with it has died as well. Very often, however, that relationship has merely changed. At Radical Joy for Hard Times we believe that an important part of keeping the bond between person and place strong and flexible is telling personal stories about the places we care about, especially those that are suffering hard times. Sharing stories, impressions, and emotions about places reconnects us and can empower us to give new attention and beauty to what's been hurt. Moreover, suggests poet, essayist, and farmer Wendell Berry, telling stories is important to the survival of the entire community.

"When a community loses its memory, its members no longer know each other. How can they know each other if they have forgotten or have never learned each other's stories? If they do not know each other's stories, how can they know whether or not to trust each other? People who do not trust each other do not help each other, and moreover they fear each other. And this is our predicament now. [To revive communities] would have to be done not from the outside by the instruction of visiting experts, but from the inside by the ancient rule of neighborliness, by the love of precious things, and by the wish to be at home."

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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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