Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth's Broken Places

Beginning with the David Powless quote, "The waste is an orphan from the circle of life," Trebbe Johnson offers us the gifts of perspective and a salve for the overwhelm we experience between the relentless forces that deplete our planet and the forces that demand our tireless activism to try to save it. Drawing on her own direct experience in the wilderness, her tireless research across disciplines, and the experiences of others who have, in fact, found meaning and made beauty in earth's broken places, Trebbe invites us to face our sadness and sense of loss, to get to know and shift our relationship with the damaged and the desolate, and to learn to both see and make beauty -- for ourselves, the planet and for beauty itself, whether or not our efforts produce tangible results. I highly recommend this book.

This is an exquisite, heart-felt book! In achingly beautiful prose, Trebbe writes that she has come to feel that one has an important choice to make in response to things like pollution, the clear-cutting of forests, oil-fracking, and many other things that are changing the earth. She describes and explores the connection that people feel with the physical places that they love, places that have been damaged by both natural and man-made actions. One can feel disheartened by the changes, acknowledge the ugliness and desolation, and then choose to respond in a way that is joyful and positive. Trebbe does this herself and encourages us to do the same.This book is written with intelligence and passion, and its gorgeous prose is a sublime pleasure. Trebbe Johnson is an extraordinary writer with many interesting and important things to tell us.

This book goes into great detail about how we can find a positive way of dealing with the destruction of places that mean the world to us. Making art to honor those places changes us in a positive way and gives us courage to go on. It is a brilliant idea that absolutely anybody can do and I am very thankful for Trebbe's ability to show us the way! Read it! Then do it!

This is such an important book for our times, for ANY times, yet it is a reminder especially for us now as we find creative and healing ways of integrating the trauma of increased awareness of woundedness around the world. As we learn to bring beauty and love to those wounded places, we learn how also to accept and learn from our own inner wounded places.

Over and over again, as I read this, I was struck with the deep path Trebbe invites us to live. It is based on love, yet includes the despair; it speaks to truth and heart, while not sugar-coating anything! It is very inspiring and beautifully written, indeed.

I began reading Trebbe Johnson's remarkable book just as California was dealing with three deadly wildfires, exacerbated by climate change, that took dozens of human lives, killed untold wildlife and wiped out forests and communities. I loved this book. It comes at just the right time, when those of us who are awake to the environmental, cultural and global mess we are in often feel hopeless and despairing. With Radical joy, Johnson offers a profound and practical way of acknowledging the destruction, while promoting a different kind of fierce resistance to it. In one chapter she describes what happens when we purposefully go to a "wounded" place and mourn what is lost, and, are also struck by signs of new life; wildflowers shooting up through a clear-cut forest, or a bird's song in a desolate wasteland. "Through the jagged cut edge of grief, flows, when I least expect it, the balm of beauty. Seeing and eventually making beauty in sorrow, in damage, in chaos does not deny the dark reality, but it opens [us] to "compassion, connectedness, courage, and even joy." If you want to do but three things in response to the crazy world we live in, try this: Vote. Read this book. Then, practice "guerrilla beauty."

This is a beautiful piece of work. Although I have been involved with the organization Radical Joy for Hard Times for several years, this book greatly deepened my understanding of what we are up to. I love the section on Joy. It reminded me of the wonderful little book Surprised by Joy by CS Lewis. I also like the analogy to fairy tales, how when the heroine kisses the frog he turns into a prince. I never thought that giving love to a damaged piece of land has that transformative effect. Brilliant. I particularly like the section about the French existentialists, and how what they were facing after WWII was certainly horrifying but nothing like what we are facing today, with the changes in climate on their way destroying human civilization. And I love the discussion about gazing, and the difference between gazing and staring. I recently read a book by the ophthalmologist Jacob Liberman called The Luminous Life, in which he talks about how the pupils enlarge when one is gazing, and how in that condition light comes out of, as well as into, our eyes. There are many other fascinating moments in this book. You can read from beginning to end, or pick and choose the delightful tidbits one at a time.

Trebbe Johnson's new book, RADICAL JOY FOR HARD TIMES is absolutely the right idea at the right time! Beautifully written with passion and urgency, Johnson understands the plight and dilemma most of us feel after fighting the good environmental fight for fifty years. Despair, hopelessness, depression, and sheer fatigue overwhelm us. Johnson helps us turn those soul draining feeling around, present us with a way to engage that which we may not be able to change, and in so doing maybe, just maybe, help us to find a new path forward into the future...

Trebbe Johnson has written a book which draws on her many years of experience of looking directly at grief brought on by human-made destruction of our environment. She also brings in wisdoms from many teachings around the world, to remind us that to feel deep grief about our world, our own back yards is OK. Through this grief we can enter into a creativity which acknowledges that we still have to live on a wounded planet, so why not learn how to find love, even joy?The book is well written and educational. It weaves a narrative which supports and inspires us to go out there, to sit with the inevitable damage that surrounds us, rather than to shy away from it, and to find a relationship with that place once again. Every year we are invited to a Global Earth Exchange, to share with this heady complex mix of love, grief, rage and joy, in locations throughout the world.Thank you, Trebbe for this beautiful book and beautiful vision of our human-Gaia relationship as we enter into this critical stage of ecological transmutation.

Important, inspiring. I’ve learnt a simple yet profound way of being with the damaged places we neglect, both inner and outer

Orphaned landscapes call forth abandoned parts of our own psyche, not something we easily or automatically want to encounter. This book is a call to face both what IS in our world now, and to also open to the life-force at work deep within the broken, wounded landscape. For beauty still lives in the brokenness. Life still pulses in these devastated places with a deeper, darker language. If we can turn into these places and abide there for some time, they will mirror what is agonized and buried within us and also offer poignant clues about how to adapt and how to surrender without collapsing in despair. Trebbe’s book is all about the power of witnessing —witnessing with keen, clear eyes and an open heart. Witnessing to feel the pulse of the world beneath the destruction and loss. Slowly reading Trebbe’s writing, I'm allowing myself to feel into the effects of our wounded psyches on this beautiful world. It is bringing up both grief and hope...

Scoping out, and inspiring toward fulfillment, the indistinct shapes of how we may be able to endure within and past our age of destructive economics.