It Is an Inner Practice As Well: Radical Joy Revealed

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.

It Is an Inner Practice as Well

Sandy Long and Krista Gromalski at the ceremony they did for a damaged place on their land, Global Earth Exchange 2016. Photo by Sandy Long

Radical Joy for Hard Times is a practice for mending our relationship with wounded places on the land and in our communities. Yet those who have made beauty for the Earth through our Earth Exchanges often realize that the RadJoy practice is easily expandable into a path for coping with wounded places in ourselves as well.

This practice, like an Earth Exchange for a place, must begin with a willingness to face what is making us suffer. We do not run from but turn to our raw feelings of grief, rage, despair. We do not lose ourselves in agony, however. Far from it. Instead, we find that, emptied of fear, projection, and angst about what might be, we are now wide open to the moment. In this refreshing space of honesty and receptivity, we become newly attentive to surprising outbursts of beauty and generosity all around us--in nature, in our friends and family, and in stories we hear of in other places.

The practice, though, is only half complete! We do not stop once we have received these gifts of beauty. Now we must extend ourselves to give beauty outward. This is not beauty-for-credit. It's guerrilla-style beauty: anonymous, spontaneous, stealthy, and ephemeral. We stretch beyond our personal experience of suffering and reach across the space of separation to give something to the other, whether that other is a person or a wetland or a great cause. And in that gift of beauty we know joy.

The pattern is simple: Grieve. Open. Receive. Give. Receive.

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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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Each week Radical Joy Revealed comes to you free of charge with inspiring stories and suggestions for living with endangered places in creative, life-affirming ways. It takes thought, imagination, and a sense of timing to uncover and write the stories, choose just the right images to accompany them, and prepare them for distribution, and we could use your financial help. Please show your support of Radical Joy Revealed by making a tax-deductible donation to our non-profit organization.

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