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.

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Playing in Place

Palestinian children play in the rubble of houses destroyed during the 50-day war between Israel and Hamas in 2014. Photo by APF

Have you noticed that children can play anywhere? That any object that comes into their hands can become a toy? When I was writing about an issue involving Navajo and Hopi lands, I once watched a little Navajo girl absorbed in an imaginary game with a pencil eraser and a spoon, while I talked with her grandmother. The photo above is so poignant because it shows Palestinian children having fun in the new playground that has opened up in their neighborhood... as the result of a bomb.

In a sense, play is part of what sometimes occurs when we visit a wounded place in the attentive, exploratory way we call an Earth Exchange.

It doesn't begin this way. We often start out with a lot of trepidation. Sitting with a river that has been polluted, a mountain whose top has been flattened, a desert gobbled up for housing: we feel grief, anger. We may want nothing so much as to get away as fast as possible.

But if we stick around and look around, we discover how the place attempts to thrive, how beauty emerges in startling ways, how we (as adults, just as when we were children) can become absorbed in playful explorations of where we are.

Try it!

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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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