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.

How Water Talks

Group and RadJoy bird for polluted waters

Participants at the "Speaking Out Loud to the Water" Global Earth Exchange, Westminster, CO, 2015. Photo courtesy of Christi Strickland

Can a forest or stream communicate with you? Maybe you imagine that an old-growth forest or clear mountain stream might "communicate" more wisely than a place that's been clear-cut or polluted.

At the Global Earth Exchange, people who visit a wounded place enter into dialogue with what's around them simply by paying attention to the ways in which their own impressions and emotions respond to the place.

The waters at Standley Lake and Woman Creek Reservoir in Westminster, Colorado have been polluted by runoff from nuclear waste at the chemical weapons site, Rocky Flats. Here's how those waters "spoke" to the participants at last year's Global Earth Exchange, hosted by Christi Strickland and Tom deBree:

Water has given so much, and so we give back with words, movement, homeopathic blessings.
We are speaking out loud of comfort and flow.
What radioactivity rests in your sands?
Flags of caution, flags that remind us "care."
Dear birds and plants, we are sorry, and thank you for holding and carrying the wounds of this atomic world.
Thank you, and we experience your wholeness and remember that our own wounds are part of our wholeness.
Fear comes up, we step forward and step back.
We are on the way!

Christi concludes: "As we pulled away from our site, our RadJoy bird awaiting the next visitors, in our rear view mirror we saw the cove and shore fill with geese."

Learn more about this year's Global Earth Exchange on June 18.

To discover other stories of inspiring people, stories, photos, and ideas, subscribe to

Radical Joy Revealed.

It's time once again for the
Global EarthExchange, the day when people all over the world make simple gifts of beauty for the places they love
that have fallen on hard times.

Saturday, June 18--worldwide!

For information

and to register, click here

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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