How Soon Can You Make Beauty in Moore?

Since the very beginning of RadJoy, we have asked ourselves how we might respond to situations like the horrendous tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma yesterday. These are real emergencies that take lives, change lives, displace people, completely upend life as it's known. 

We came to realize that you can't ask people to look for and make beauty at a place too soon. First they simply have to get their bearings, find out if their loved ones are okay, if their home still stands. They need days, perhaps weeks to figure out what to do next. You can't possibly say, "Go make something beautiful at the site of your shattered home" when everything a family owned is gone.

What is important in the beginning, however, what is essential at that raw and terrible time, is simply giving to others with as much generosity and compassion as possible and, at the same time, to receive generosity and compassion when it is offered. Such acts, given and received, are immensely touching under drastic, tragic circumstances. I find I continue to be moved by the kindness with which a policeman broke the news to me that my beloved brother had died. Kindness helps people survive. In New York, after Superstorm Sandy, restaurant owners and grocers put free food on the street, and neighbors with electricity made it possible for those without to recharge their phones and computers.

After a while (but perhaps sooner than we even think possible!) we can start going out of our way to find and make beauty through larger gestures, more creative, more all-encompassing actions. The pilgrimage that the people in Joplin made through the path of the tornado there on the one-year anniversary, for instance, the tree they painted, the way they changed the name of the school from jOPlin to hOPe. In Tuscaloosa, after the tornado there in 2010, a group called Beauty Amid Destruction created an art exhibition along the path of the storm.

Radical Joy pierces most poignantly during very Hard Times. And no matter how much we are hurt, we can give it and receive it, just a little, sometimes a lot.

Photo above of Moore, Oklahoma after the tornado of May 20, 2013 by Steve Gooch, AP, Huffington Post

A fable about dust and pearls

Old Persian legends tell of Majnun, a crazy-in-love young man whose life is wholly devoted to searching for his beloved Layla, from whom he has long been separated. Majnun wanders the desert, his clothes ragged, his hair matted and filthy. He becomes so completely exiled from the niceties of human society that his only companions are wild animals. People shun him and laugh at him, even though many recognize that his dedication to love actually brings him closer to the divine.

One day, a man noted for his piety comes upon Majnun sifting through dirt in the middle of the road. “You claim such devotion to your beloved,” the holy man scoffs. “How can you grovel here, searching for such a pearl as she in the midst of all this rubbish?”

“Ah,” Majnun explains, “I seek Layla everywhere, so that one day I may find her somewhere.”

The story of Majnun’s undying, active love for Layla gives us a model for our own relationship to the places we have loved and lost and from which we often feel a painful exile. We can choose not only not to avoid these broken places but to actually seek them out. And, once there, we can search for the pearls.

The pearl, the essence of glory and beauty and love, can be anywhere—so we look everywhere. In this way we remember that all parts of the Earth, like all people, are essential parts of the beauty of the whole. Searching for what we love, even in a garbage heap, we cannot help but recognize that even what has been used up and tossed out is valuable, since our hands and hearts must sort through it to come upon what is precious.

May you find the pearls in a wounded place you love on the Global Earth Exchange this year, Saturday, June 22.

And, in the search, may you find pearls in yourself as well.

A cry of grief for the Earth—made 4,000 years ago

This is surely the earliest of all expressions of grief for a wounded place... a segment of the Epic of Gilgamesh (carved on stone more than four thousand years ago) in which the goddess Ishtar weeps for Earth after the great flood.

All of humanity was turned to clay,

The ground was like a great, flat roof.
I opened the window and light fell on my face.
I crouched, sitting, and wept.
My tears flowed over my cheeks.

(Photo above shows the part of the tablet that describes the flood.)

Bird singing at the bottom of a lake

The beautiful photo above, by Simon du Vinage, is of South Lake at Tamera, southern Portugal, where a group of us from about fifteen different countries did an Earth Exchange last summer. Tamera is a community, "a healing biotope", a living experiment in sustainable permaculture, an educational center, and a remarkable place where people truly work to match their practices to their ethics. They've created several lakes in the past few years with remarkable results... springs bubbling up from dry, cracked ground; animals and birds coming to visit; plentiful plant growth. But after this particular lake was dug, the rains of 2011 did not come, and the land was dry.

This photo, by Carsten Dolcini, shows our Earth Exchange last August. We are standing on the bottom of the lake! Everyone put a stone into the center of the circle, naming as they did so a place they loved that they are concerned about. We spent some time exploring the land, discovering such amazing things as frogs inhabiting the puddle in the background and the velvetiness of the cracked earth beneath our feet. Then we made a big bird out of stone.

You can imagine that a bird made simultaneously by forty people would look a bit odd. Some people thought it was too disproportioned, pudgy, and that we should redo it. No, said others, it's perfect! One woman added that it had to be plump so it can float under the water!

So now it is doing so! The rains came last fall, and the bird is singing under the water. My friend Silke Paulick, coordinator of the ecological team at Tamera, also writes that South Lake has become more of a community gathering place since our ceremony.

Moors, Love, Magic, Beauty, Tears

The wonderful Schumacher College in Devon, England has just reduced the price of my five-day course there May 13-17 from £795 to £550! This is a fantastic opportunity! The offer's only good until April 8!!

Please join me there!

The course is called "Finding Beauty and Power in Wounded Places: Earth Activism for Our Times." In it we'll explore—with some discussion and lecture, but mostly through time spent in nature—the deep relationship between people and places. The health of the land affects our own health. Our sense of powerlessness, grief, betrayal when places we love are damaged seeps into our general well being. By awakening to this relationship and attending to the land in simple, transformative, creative, even wild and joyful ways, we dramatically shift the way we live on Earth and how we live with all the parts of our deep selves.

We still need a few more people to enroll in this course for it to go, so please do join me there and if you can't make it, pass this along to someone you know who'd be interested.

Words from Lily Yeh

Last November, the fabulous ORION magazine did a webinar in conjunction with my article, "Gaze Even Here."

Joining me for the hour-long discussion were the internationally acclaimed Chinese-American artist and activist Lily Yeh and Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht. Lily has worked with people in Rwanda, a Palestinian refugee camp, China, Haiti and other broken places to create large-scale public art projects. Glenn coined the word “solastalgia,” widely recognized as the first descriptive term to define and validate “the pain one feels when the place where one lives and that one loves is under assault.” The webinar was hosted by Erik Hoffner of Orion.

Lily has been a keynote speaker at Bioneers and other places, and she speaks with such passion, conviction, and experience that she can rouse you to action and make you fall in love with your world in just a sentence or two. During the podcast, fortunately, we got to hear lots of her gorgeous sentences. For instance: 

“We can enter into the depth of what it means to be human, the human capacity to destroy—and then we have the power to imagine, to create, and then to take action, and this action can lead to change. What gives me hope is that though each individual is very small, we can be defiant in dark circumstances and dare to create beauty in these broken places. It’s like making a fire in the dark night of winter. It gives us hope and warmth and beckons to other people.”

Approximately two hundred people from around the world tuned in for the live discussion. The podcast is available through Orion or iTunes  (see item #10).

RadJoy blog is back

Greetings! This blog has been on vacation for about nine months, and I'm happy to bring it back with some noticeable changes.

As a person who has had a literary bent all my life, I tend to write blogs as I do essays and books. They are longish, grammatically correct, with a beginning, middle, and end, and lyrically phrased. Not surprisingly, with such regulations, my self-imposed assignment to create these blogs became a chore. 

Now, in keeping with the way social media—indeed just about all media—works these days, I have determined write more frequently, less literarily, and more pithily! 

At least on the blog. No such guarantee with my essays, articles, and my next book!

I am looking forward to the switch and hope you'll find what's here of interest and inspiration.

Fawn: 55 / Wounded Earth 3

I don't know why I should be surprised. Even though the uprising in Cairo last year was largely waged via Facebook (see Wael Ghonim's powerful book Revolution 2.0), in America we have not yet reached the boiling point. I know this. I work at tamping down my pessimism about the state of the Earth and my grief for what is happening to wild nature and loved communities, because I know people don't like to read about upsetting things.

Still, I was surprised. On May 28 I posted a comment on my Facebook page comparing wounded veterans who have served in foreign wars with wounded places that have been used up and abandoned. Three people "liked" it and no one commented. 

The next day, May 29, I posted a photograph of a fawn my husband had discovered sleeping under an apple tree in our orchard. Result:

Like: 43

Comment: 12

Fawns are nicer to look at than the damaged Earth.

I'm surprised. But I am disheartened. I founded Radical Joy for Hard Times because I believe we can't truly change the way we live on Earth until we're willing to encounter what's in our midst and damaged... and that we still love... and in the process find beauty, meaning, community, and even joy.

We can indeed experience beauty and innocence. Not instead of facing the broken places in our midst, but through the act of facing them, facing our grief and rage over what's happened to them, and offering attention and creativity. 

The Earth, Too, Is a Veteran

On this Memorial Day, 2012, it seems appropriate to consider how the Earth, too, has served in many battles.

In 1987, when I was living in New York, writing scripts and producing soundtracks for multimedia productions, I read an article in Winds of Change magazine about an Oneida Indian engineer, David Powless, who had received a National Science Foundation grant to research and develop a process for recycling hazardous steel waste. 

With funding from IBM, a few colleagues  and I made a short video about David that was later shown to international IBM employees at a conference in Palm Beach. The video explored his work, both as an engineer and as a member of the Turtle Clan of the Oneida Tribe dedicated to fostering the traditional ways of his people. While I was interviewing him for the production, he told me story of how he had come into relation with the steel waste.

When he learned that he had received the grant, David said, he drove out to an enormous mound of steel waste and scrambled to the top with two buckets that he had brought along to collect samples of the waste that he would analyze. Triumphantly, he declared to the black pile of waste, "I'm going to conquer you!" 

But by the time he had trekked back down the hill with two his buckets full, he knew that this approach was all wrong. "I realized that the waste was an orphan," he said. "It had been lost from the circle of life. My job was to bring it back to the circle of life."

I was deeply moved by this story. It seemed to me to offer a new perspective on ecological crisis: a way of not only dealing with, but actually loving parts of the earth that were, by most standards, unlovable, and even unlivable.

When I founded Radical Joy for Hard Times in the spring of 2009, I called David, whom I had not seen or spoken with in more than twenty years, and told  him how his words had inspired me. Then, when the RadJoy board of directors of the new organization and I started thinking about a Council of Advisors, experts in several fields who would offer us their expertise and support, of course we invited David. He consented.

  

Recently, David Powless reflected on how the Earth's wounded places have something in common with soldiers. “These places are like veterans," he said. "They’ve given a lot. You may not agree with the war, but you have to honor the warriors.”

So, as we honor the warriors who have fought, showed bravery, and died in so many wars, let us also honor the Earth, who has also served us so well.

Photo above: Omaha Beach Memorial, Normandy, France

Why Turn Toward a Breaking World?

"Why should we turn toward a breaking world or spend time with wounded and damaged places?" asks Dianne Monroe in her article, "Learning to Love a Wounded World," currently featured on the website Speaking Truth to Power. "Why open ourselves to pain, sorrow, despair and plethora of other difficult feelings? Isn’t it better – or at least more pleasant – to look at the good side of things?"

She tackles this question by interviewing me about Radical Joy for Hard Times and Jade Scherer and Annie Bloom, who created a program called "Turning Toward a Breaking World." Both have as their missions an honest and heartfelt admission of grief about the ailing and death of the natural world and the resulting font of compassion and action that results when we stop hiding from what we know all too well is lingering within. Monroe discusses the "relentlessly positive" attitude that people in our society believe they must foster and names some of the reasons that we as a culture are so loath even to acknowledge that all is not well with Planet Earth. She also describes the two Global Earth Exchanges she led at the headwaters of the San Antonio River in 2010 and 2011, the first of which took place as the southern states all along the Gulf were being slicked with oil from the BP well, which at the time had not been capped.

Exploring ways to confront what is wrong without being overwhelmed by it, Monroe concludes: "This is the first gift of our pain – of our willingness to turn toward a breaking world, learning to love and offer beauty to a wounded place – to show us our interconnectedness with the Earth."



Photo above: Cyntha Ben d'Aigle offering flowers to Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, after the BP oil spill













 

Funeral for the Gulf of Mexico

An article in the most recent issue of The Nation sets to rest once and for all any notion that all is well in the Gulf of Mexico two years after the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. 

"BP's Toxic Legacy" by Antonia Juhasz opens with the story of Nicole and William Maurer and their two daughters, aged six and nine. When the explosion on the Deep Water Horizon wiped out William's fishing business, he got a temporary job working on BP's clean-up operation, which operated under the outrageously euphemistic name of Vessels of Opportunity. The first signs that this was hazardous work came when William experienced vomiting and diarrhea. Later he started bleeding from his ears and nose and coughing heavily. Now the entire family, including the children, is plagued with health problems. They don't have money to go to a doctor and can't afford to move.

The BP spill released 210 gallons of crude oil into the Gulf. Two million gallons of toxic dispersant were then pumped into the water in an effort to break up the oil. Although a class action lawsuit against BP, Transocean, Halliburton, and other companies involved in the spill is underway, many of the people harmed will either be excluded from any settlement or will not be eligible if (or when) their health deteriorates further.

Radical Joy for Hard Times was founded on the premise that when the places we love are damaged, people hurt too. The Gulf of Mexico is a place that has been hurt in every conceivable way—socially, economically, environmentally, physically, and psychologically. 

That BP, which ignored workers' concerns about the safety and reliability of equipment and deliberately took shortcuts in drilling the well that exploded, may end up escaping financial liability is an injustice and a tragedy. 

On February 29 Gulf Coast activists held a New Orleans jazz-style funeral for the Gulf of Mexico. People dressed up as skeletons or oil-soaked birds. They carried a life-size doll rag in a coffin. They bore signs reading "BP KILLS" and "DEAD PELICAN SANDWICHES—$11 MILLION EACH. (To read about the Funeral for the Gulf and see photos by James Robichaux see the NOLA Post.)

The procession started at BP headquarters and ended at the courthouse where the trial is currently underway. Combining beauty, theatre, spectacle, and the emotional spirit of an entire region, the mock funeral embodied both the despair of Gulf Coast residents and their ineradicable sense of community and creativity.

On Saturday, June 23, people all over the world will be going to wounded places and making acts of beauty there for the Radical Joy for Hard Times third annual Global Earth Exchange.

The people and land of the Gulf of Mexico are in desperate need of beauty. If you know someone who lives on the Gulf will you beg them, please, to join this day of attention and beauty and to honor the Gulf of Mexico?

Photo above by James Robichaux.


 

The Simple Beauty of an Earth "Exchange"

The signature event of Radical Joy for Hard Times is a simple, personal act called an Earth Exchange.

We call our events Earth "Exchanges" because they are opportunities for us to make an exchange with these places we love and where we live. We go both to receive and to give.

We receive by reflecting on what these places mean to us and what they have given, both in the past and now. In exchange we offer back a simple act of beauty as a symbol of our gratitude and our affirmation that all places are valued parts of the whole Earth.

People do Earth Exchanges formally or informally, spontaneously or after weeks of planning, alone or with a friend or in the company of a whole group. They happen throughout the year and in all kinds of places.

June 23 is our third annual Global Earth Exchange, when people all over the world will be going to clear-cut forests, polluted rivers, oceans where dolphins are threatened, lands pierced by mining and drilling, and other wounded places. They will:

• tell their stories of what the place means to them
• spend time getting to know the place as it is now
• make a simple act of beauty

Please join us by visiting a place you love, rediscovering it, and giving it some beauty and attention. It's free, and we will post the photo of your event on our website after June 23. It's easy to join on our Earth Exchange Network (and you can always change the details of your event later).

Even Rubble Is a Playground

In the photo above, Palestinian children have forayed into and area of their neighborhood that has been destroyed by an Israeli  bombing, and they have discovered that, out of the rubble, they can make a seesaw big enough for several of them to ride at once. (Hopefully the older kids will give the littlest one a chance!)

For children, anyplace can be a playground. Whether the scene of destruction was caused by war, tornado, hurricane, or poverty, all the world is fertile ground for exploration, fascination, and play. As we get older, we tend to see damaged places as so deplorable, so full of memories cut in half that we do not want to see them or even consider them. We fear we will break ourselves if we encounter them fully. Often we simply assume that there is absolutely nothing to be discovered there that can offer beauty or delight.

Radical Joy for Hard Times believes that both mourning and play are appropriate in wounded places. 

The first step of the Earth Exchange, our signature event, which any individual or community can create, is simply to go to a wounded place. Just finding the willingness to face a damaged place with openness and curiosity usually turns out to be far harder than  actually stepping onto that once whole, now broken land. Once there we tell stories about what the place has meant to us, both before and after it was damaged. We spend perhaps 20 or 30 minutes getting to know the place as it is now, looking for what calls our attention, what holds fascination. Finally, we give back an act of  beauty, usually a bird made out of found materials. 

Through this approach, we bring to wounded places both our honest feelings about what has happened and our willingness to be in healing relationship to the place in the future. We bring curiosity, the sense that there is a surprise to be had, something wondrous to be discovered, even under the most tragic of circumstances. And we bring our own spirit of creativity, the willingness to make something beautiful out of waste and destruction.

In this way do light and dark, play and mourning, beauty and destruction balance each other.

An Act of Sound Beauty for a Noisy Place

The Radical Joy for Hard Times Band (aka board) of Directors held our annual meeting this past weekend, April 19-22. Besides reviewing what happened during the past year and planning what we want to do in the months and years ahead, we took time, as we always do, to do an Earth Exchange.

The Earth Exchange is the signature event of Radical Joy for Hard Times. It's called an "Exchange" because people and the Earth both give and receive from one another. It consists of four steps:

1.    Go with friends (or alone) to a wounded place

2.    Sit a while and tell your stories of what the place means to you

3.    Spend time getting to know it as it is now

4.    Make some beauty out of found materials

This year our destination was Potomac Overlook Park, a small park in Alexandria, Virginia. Our intention was to spend some time at the Potomac itself, endangered, like just about every river in the world today, by chemicals of many kinds. However, as often happens when you go into the natural world with a spirit of curiosity and no fixed agenda, something else occurred to us instead.

We discovered that the park was right under the flight path of planes coming into and leaving Dulles Airport, one of Washington, DC’s major airports. Because noise seemed to be the dominant feature of the place, we decided to focus our Earth Exchange on noise pollution.

So we sat together in silence for about twenty minutes, reflecting on what we could hear (surprisingly, that included birds and breeze), what we couldn’t hear, how we were responding, and how noise affected our own lives. After we had shared our impressions and thoughts, the group spontaneously launched into a little percussive music, as you can hear in the video above. 

Left to right above are: Munro Sickafoose, Rachel Light, Christi Strickland, Joanna Burgess, Barbara Bitondo, and Tim Wolcott.

 

11,541 Empy Red Chairs

Thousands of Bosnians walked, lingered, held each other, and wept as they processed along half a mile of blood-red chairs stretching through the center of the city of Sarajevo. Many people lay flowers on the empty chairs. Some chairs were occupied by teddy bears or other toys, placed there in memory of children who had been killed. On a stage in front of the chairs a small orchestra and choir performed songs, many composed during the siege.

The 11, 541 chairs symbolized the number of people who were killed during the siege of Sarajevo that began twenty years ago, on April 7, 1991, and lasted three years and eight months, the longest siege in modern history. During that time, Serb gunners barraged the city from the surrounding hills, while the primarily Muslim citizens lived under constant threat. The war killed more than 100,00 people altogether, made two million homeless, and reopened old ethnic and cultural wounds between Muslims, Serbs, and Croats. 

There are few ways to find beauty and make beauty under such horrendous circumstances. Acts of compassion and generosity and small natural gifts, such as hearing birds singing resolutely at dawn after a night of bombardment, are among them. A participatory memorial such as that of these red chairs, this music, does not assuage grief—in fact, it may even pierce the heart all over again—but it can transform it. Acknowledging together the grief, the lingering shock and sense of vulnerability unites people. Their common history and the extent of their suffering unfolds before them like a long, long block of empty chairs. Words are unnecessary; presence says all that needs to be said. And music, including music that was written out of the experience of war itself, testifies to the creative spirit that will not be quenched, despite the circumstances. 

11,541 people are missing. The empty places marked by 11,541 chairs both honor their lives and attest to the grief of those who loved them.

Wendy Steele will join others in creating beauty for Sarajevo and its people (and indomitable pigeons) in Pigeon Square on Saturday, June 23 for the third annual Global Earth Exchange sponsored by Radical Joy for Hard Times.