Surviving Hurricane Brain: 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.

The Florida Keys home of Charlotte Regennas, after Hurricane Irma.

Surviving Hurricane Brain

Charlotte Regennas's house was almost completely destroyed when Hurricane Irma slammed into the Florida Keys last month.

It was surreal, Charlotte said, to encounter her home and neighborhood when she first returned after waiting out the storm at the inland home of a friend. The condition of the outer landscape mirrored her fractured inner state. "Everything was distorted, disfigured, broken, made useless. The physical effects become internalized. There's a sense of personal disorganization, lack of purpose, confusion, distraction, loss of pride. We call it Hurricane Brain." Hardest of all for Charotte was the loss of what she calls "green life." "The buildings will be rebuilt in one or two years, but the trees take decades to reach their majesty."

And yet, already, people are doing what they can to salvage scraps of meaning and beauty. They pick through the debris that used to be their homes and retrieve objects that the hurricane bypassed. Suddenly these objects are rare treasures. "Someday I will do that," Charlotte said, "find something pretty to look at through the mountains of trash seen through any window."

How is she getting by in this hard time? "I embraced uncertainty. I gathered information, took swift action, maintained consciousness, released resistance, and moved through with passionate determination, forging a pathway."

Already, she says, there are signs of life to guide her. "I've been back home a week, and there are tiny buds on the trees. It's coming back already. What you thought was dead turns out not to be. That eases my pain a little bit, seeing those buds. We're in a budding stage here."

If you would like to help Charlotte raise $10,000 to start rebuilding her house, here is a GoFundMe campaign started by a friend of hers.

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Upcoming Events from Radical Joy for Hard Times:

October 14
Raise a Glass to the Catskills
Join New Yorkers in raising a glass of pure NYC water to the people and rivers upstate who steward the reservoirs.

October 21, 2:45 PM

Leading with Nature's Guidance

Bioneers Conference, San Rafael, CA

A workshop with Polly Howells and Trebbe Johnson, at the annual groundbreaking national conference, about how to ask for guidance from the natural world and absorb the answers you get.

November 17-19

Gift for Broken Places

Rowe Center, Rowe, MA

Trebbe Johnson's workshop on how spending time in and making beauty for wounded places can bring clarity, compassion, and healing for our own inner wounds as well.

It's easy to make beauty anywhere! Here's how!

New from Radical Joy for Hard Times founder
Trebbe Johnson: a book filled with ideas for creating simple, imaginative, collaborative gifts of beauty for hurt places in nature and in your community!

To order 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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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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