Radical Joy Revealed
April 27, 2016
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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. 

Glasswinged butterfly
South American glasswinged butterfly (Greta oto). Photo by Eddy Van 3000 /Flickr
We are confronted every day by the unconfrontable. We're asked to inform ourselves about situations that seem too awful to consider, let alone absorb. The sense that we are powerless unless we can do something large and important and permanent sometimes keeps us from doing anything at all.
 
It's hard enough to open ourselves to tragedies happening in other cities, other continents. How do we face assaults on our own communities, in the wild places we love, on animals and plants driven to extinction?
 
Radical Joy for Hard Times says: Go there! Take in what you notice about the place, the situation. Share how you feel about it. Let the place tell you something about itself that you never noticed before. Then, gathering into yourself all you've experienced, make a gift for the place out of whatever twigs, stones, trash, sand, flowers, or anything else the place itself offers.
 
What this practice is all about is, quite simply, being present with what is!
 
It's tempting to avoid the experience--the experiment--of being present with what we imagine will be painful. What if it's so bad we sink forever into despair? Yet when we dare to try it, something quite different happens. We feel emboldened, because we've faced something we had previously wished to avoid. We feel empowered because we've turned waste into beauty. We feel healed ourselves because we have reached out to offer a healing act to another. We have been present! We are more present even now!
To discover other stories of inspiring people, stories, photos, and ideas, subscribe to
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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We love sending you Radical Joy Revealed each week and sharing inspiring stories and ideas that make a difference to people struggling to find meaning, beauty, and community in challenged places We're committed to offering this newsletter at no charge to you, our readers. Currently, our organization is experiencing a severe financial crisis. We welcome any contribution you can offer. Thank you for supporting RadJoy!
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