RadJoy has a new website!

Radical Joy for Hard Times has a new website! Thank you to our genius webmaster and designer, Munro Sickafoose, of Diamondheart Studio, for his imaginative vision and meticulous attention to detail.

We're especially excited about our new Earth Exchange Network, an interactive space on the site where you can post your personal info and news about the places you love and worry about... upload photos, videos, and stories... and sign up for the 2012 Global Earth Exchange on June 23.

Have a look and let us know what you think!

Wooed by the Not-Beautiful

The following is from Mike Beck, Navarre, Florida. He took the photo above during a week spent with three others at Carmanah Valley, part of the vast clear-cut area of Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

The wounded places of the earth are great teachers, releasing us from the predicament of choices. They also have the ability to ruthlessly strip away your perfectly unfounded bias for ephemeral beauty and rip the words “ugly,” “unsightly” and “unattractive” right out of your mouth.

My first experience with attending to a wounded place was one of sadness at the grotesqueness of a clear-cut old-growth forest, followed almost immediately by free-floating anger, without adequate tools to catch it and ground it in reality. A perfectly reasonable response for a person without access at the time to what Mary Oliver calls the “heart’s little mind.” Four short days later, with the stump-studded hills and debris-strewn fields disappearing in the review mirror, I was surprised at the tug to go back: “Don’t leave, not yet, just a little longer.” 

Where had the grotesque gone and why were the barren hillsides passing from view unfathomably, wonderfully and perfectly—“not beautiful?” The only explanation I still find satisfactory is that someone had come while I was sitting quietly in the clear-cut one of those days and staring at an eagle-head shaped stump and that “someone” had rearranged all the environmental furniture in my head, graciously taking away my sense of quilt at not being able to do something big to save the natural world. 

An unfortunate side effect of that hooligan’s shenanigans is that now, I’m forever being wooed by the “not beautiful.” 

Nipun Mehta's Gift Economy

One day Nipun Mehta and his friends were sitting around talking about pranks. What is a prank composed of? “It’s challenging, it’s creative, it’s collaborative,” Nipun reflected in an interview with Richard Whittaker in Parabola Magazine. “We went through a whole list of motivations for what, at the end of the day, is essentially destructive. So we said, how about we reframe this? We leave all these motivations in, but we make pranks constructive. What if you just blew somebody away with kindness?”

That was the beginning of a remarkable organization called Charity Focus, “an experiment in the joy of giving.” Charity Focus, which recently changed its name to Service Space, depends entirely on the work of volunteers. It does no fund-raising, but relies upon the generosity of people who are moved to help. Services include website design, collaborations with other organizations, daily emails containing positive and inspiring messages, and weekly stories about people who have taken an unusual approach to some problem or seen a delightful possibility where most would see business as usual.

One surprising result of what Mehta calls the “gift economy” is an upsurge of honesty in the way bills are paid in Indonesian cafés. In the past, widespread corruption meant that customers, especially young people, would walk out of the café without paying for their meal. Now “honesty cafés” invite customers to determine what the meal and the service were worth and to pay that. Some of the cafés don’t even have cashiers, just boxes in which people can deposit their payments.

The gift economy starts with single, selfless acts, says Nipun Mehta. “I’m going to support you just because you’re a fellow human being and someone else comes and supports me in the same way.” In the long run an attitude like that results in “generosity entrepreneurs.”

Repercussions

The steps of an Earth Exchange are simple to describe:

1: Go to a wounded place

2: Sit a while and tell your stories

3: Spend time on the land and find beauty in surprising ways

4: Make a simple act of beauty

However, since we encourage each community to enact these steps in ways that reflect their own place and people, the events themselves and the ripple effects are very different. Steve Brown, an active member of a conservancy group dedicated to protecting Red Lily Pond in Craigville, Massachusetts, recently described a couple of interesting ramifications that their 2011 Global Earth Exchange had for both people and the pond. 

One of the participants at the event, Avis Strong Parke, is an artist. After the Global Earth Exchange, she was inspired to invite other local artists to join her every Tuesday morning at 10:00 to paint the pond. For several weeks a group that ranged in size from nearly twenty to about eight regulars set up their easels at different sites around the pond and created a variety of water colors, acrylics, and oil paints. At the conservancy’s annual dinner and auction, one of these works sold for $900, and in total the group raised thousands of dollars more than they ever had before. (The painting above is by Avis Strong Parke.)

 

The second surprise came about from an unexpected source. A man who was known to be vocal about his conservative political leanings arrived at the pond for the June 18 event, but immediately made it clear that he didn’t like the word “radical.” Steve suggested he read the Radical Joy for Hard Times manifesto that was taped to a card table on the dock and that explores our philosophy that damaged places are worthy of attention and beauty. A few minutes later, the man returned to Steve. “Well, I believe those things,” he said. “That’s right up my alley.” He ended up staying for the day’s celebration.

A few weeks later, when the development corporation that owns a condominium at one end of the pond put forth a proposal to construct a giant illuminated dock over the water, Steve and other activists were present in force at a State Commission hearing to discuss the plan. They were surprised when the conservative neighbor walked in the door, especially since he did not usually get involved in local issues. The man stood before the commission and announced, “I’m a Republican and I don’t believe in regulations, but this pond is too valuable to destroy.”

All kinds of people love the beautiful places that  they live amidst. And often we have more in common than we might suppose.

What Do We Do Then?

You know very well how many dedicated people are working hard to save the Earth. They're fighting Congress to protect the deserts, enforce clean air standards, make corporations disclose the toxic chemicals used to blast deep into gas-rich shale. Talented, passionate people are writing books about climate change and polluted seas, rivers, soils, and air. They take children on hikes and offer to adults wilderness trips in pristine places so people will remember how much the natural world means to them.

And still the forests are being cut, the oceans are being clogged with oil and scarred with plastic. Still mountaintops are being exploded and wetlands filled in.  Still wilderness is plowed up to make housing developments and malls. Still poor communities of color are the ones slated for the most toxic projects of incinerators and mineral extraction.

Still, people who are proud to be environmentalists tell themselves they need the latest iPhone and iPad and have to dye their hair and use beauty products to make themselves young. and going on vacations to eco-paradises like the Gallapagos.

Still babies are being born, here, there, and everywhere, and when they grow up they too will want a place of their own and they will believe that they need the newest gadgets to survive. And how will they survive?

It is not going to get better. The places we love are going to continue to disappear.

Then what? Will all the work of the environmental educators and litigators and preservers be for naught? Does their success depend solely on staving off the inevitable?

Or does real ecological activism come from a new kind of realism? Not just realizing the world is changing and "we're to blame," but the realism of being with and attending to the places in our midst that are a part of us still, no matter what has happened to them?

Radical Joy for Hard Times says: When the places we love are damaged, we humans hurt too. And tempting as it is to ignore both damaged places and our own difficult feelings of loss and grief, it is by encountering these places and feelings with openness, compassion, and curiosity that we blaze the way forward. It is by telling the stories of our relationship with the place and above all making beauty there until we fall in love with the place all over again... that we become citizens of the future of Earth, not just surviving, but loving where we live and empowered to live with it with wild, bold creativity and community.

"Wounded Places on Earth Are Like Wounded Places in People"

“We have physically created wounded places on the Earth, and that is exacerbated by us ignoring them. Becoming whole in ourselves and in the way we approach existence is the beginning of healthy, dynamic systems. It’s exactly a parallel to our own inner psyche. The parts we cut out and don’t want to look at are the ones that cause us the most trouble. And if we look at them and pay attention to them, they shift.”

This comment by Kinde Nebeker (standing in the center in the photo above, at her 2011 Global Earth Exchange in Salt Lake City) of Salt Lake City zeroes in on one of the subtle but vitally important aspects of the practice and the path that is Radical Joy for Hard Times Earth Exchanges: that actually going to wounded places strengthens the bond between person and place, brings new life to the place, and empowers people to act with more energy and more compassion on behalf of what they love.

We all wish, naturally, not to be uncomfortable. Hence we avoid the things that we fear will make us sad or angry or embarrassed or guilty—or any of a host of other emotions we’d rather avoid. Avoidance, of course, doesn’t make the shunned thing vanish. It only makes it grow and fester there in the dark where we try to hide it. It grows bigger. It pops out of its hiding place when we least expect it, causing problems and making us even more determined to keep it hidden.

When we decide, once and for all, to take a look at what’s wriggling there down unseen, we’re often surprised to see how mild it is. How, instead of sinking us in despair, the attention we give it actually liberates us. Dealing consciously with what we discover enables us to bring to the problem new understanding, peace of mind, and creative solutions.

As Kinde observes, the same is true about wounded places. When people go to polluted rivers, eroded hills, farms torn up for gas drilling, or abandoned industrial sites like the one Kinde and her friends honored in the 2011 Global Earth Exchange, they discover that, far from depressing them, the encounter fills them with a sense of community, creativity, empowerment, and even joy.

Tree of Life Blooms in Palestinian Refugee Camp

Photo by Teresa Yeh

Lily Yeh founded Barefoot Artists in 2003 to bring the transformative power of art to people whose communities have been buried in poverty, dilapidation, and despair. In the past twenty-five years she has worked with people all over the world, from her native China to Kenya, Ecuador, Italy, and Rwanda, to North Philadelphia, where she lives today and where Barefoot Artists was founded. At Radical Joy for Hard Times we are honored to have Lily Yeh on our Council of Advisors.

Recently Lily received an invitation from Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, a leader of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, to come to Balata, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, located near the city of Nablus. Balata is currently home to 23,000 people, all living in an area of less than one square mile. There are only two schools, the unemployment rate is very high, and the young people are homesick and without hope.

Lily worked with volunteer artists, members of the Balata Women’s Center, students at the Balata Girls’ School, and local participants to create art that would reflect their deep pain, their intense longing to return to their homeland, and their hope for peace between Palestinians and Israelis. This mural they made is called “The Palestinian Tree of Life.” It depicts an old and rugged olive tree filled with blooms and upholding the sacred Dome of the Rock. Doves, symbol everywhere of peace, fly through a starry sky. Amidst the cramped streets the mural is a sign of creativity, resilience, and yes, even joy.