When You Can't Help Liking the Wrong Thing: 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.

When You Can't Help Liking
the Wrong Thing

Bottlenose dolphins swimming in the Gulf of Mexico, six years after the BP oil spill. Photo courtesy of NOAA

What do you do when you're standing on the shore of a bay that was recently polluted by an oil spill, and suddenly you see a pod of dolphins leaping and diving not far away? Are you thrilled to be in the presence of such apparently jubilant animals... or do you grieve because their habitat is so compromised?

Are you being irresponsible when you relish being outside on a beautiful, mild afternoon... but it's February and you know that climate change is wreaking havoc on the seasons?

The Radical Joy for Hard Times practice of finding and making beauty in wounded places means you don't have to choose. You do not have to judge yourself for delighting in beauty or joy that touches you in the midst of what you know very well is a problem. Nor do you have to justify your pleasure by denying or downplaying the gravity of the situation.

The ability both to face hard times and bring beauty into them entails making room in your life for both, knowing that both are the reality of the moment, in the world and in yourself.

Practice balancing grief and joy as if each is a smooth, round stone you can hold in your palms.

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Radical Joy Revealed.

"Happiness is conditional. Joy is not." Join RadJoy founder Trebbe Johnson for a

Radical Joy for Hard Times weekend workshop at Rowe Center in western Massachusetts April 14-16. Learn how radical joy begins with a willingness to face your suffering and open up to the moment in a refreshing space of honesty and receptivity. You'll become newly attentive to surprising outbursts of beauty and generosity--in nature, in your friends and family, and in the stories of others. You'll learn, too, that once you've received these gifts of beauty, you must extend yourself beyond your experience of suffering to give beauty outward--and in that giving is joy.

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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