On Saturday, June 19, our non-profit environmenal educational organization, Radical Joy for Hard Times, is sponsoring a Global Earth Exchange, an international event to bring attention and beauty to the Earth's wounded places. On this day people on every continent of the planet (including Antarctica!) will gather at clearcut forests, polluted rivers, sites of gas drilling and mountaintop mining, places where show horses are over-trained and honeybees are vanishing, at urban eyesores like abandoned strip malls, and many other places to reconnect, share personal stories, and make simple acts of beauty.

We need your help!

Join us by hosting a Global Earth Exchange at a place you care about. 

All it takes is your concern for a place or species and your willingness to bring to it your curiosity, compassion, and imagination.

Visit our website and fill out the application form. If your site is among the first 100 chosen, you will:

Creating a sustainable future on Earth depends on opening our hearts to the natural world in its brokenness as well as its splendor. That's a project for every single one of us.

We had an especially wonderful vision quest and camel caravan in the Sahara Desert last month: ten vision questers from four countries, two vision quest guides, one assistant guide, eight Tuareg guides, and thirty-seven camels journeyed deep into the desert whose very name conjures up images of vastness, purity, and spiritual seeking.

The days took on a rhythm that echoed the one the nomadic Tuareg have followed for thousands of generations. Every morning we woke before daybreak. Dressed in our desert clothes, the long tunics called the gandoras that the Tuareg wear and the adaptable shesh that covered our heads, we set off with our camels shortly after the sun was up. At first we led our camels on foot, setting an easy, steady pace. Then, after a couple of hours, we'd ride, directing the camel with our feet, which we press into the animal's warm, furry neck to urge him on. Each camel is chosen intuitively for each person by our camel master, a sweet, funny, gentle man named Ouhetta, and people usually end up absolutely adoring their particular camel. 

At lunchtime we stopped under the shade of a lone acacia tree and spent the hottest hours of the day as sensible people everywhere do: by resting. After that, we set out again, walking and riding until late afternoon, when we stopped for the night. Ouhetta knows the desert intimately and plans each of our stopping places carefully so there is shelter from the wind and sun and beautiful vistas. After six trips to the Sahara, I am still amazed at how the desert can change so much, not just from one day to the next, but even from one hour to the next: from golden dunes to black mountains to broad plateaus to rocks of fantastical shapes to clumps of whispering grasses. At night, after spending some time doing practices related to the aims of the vision quest, our group gathered in a circle around the fire to eat dinner, then to talk together and sometimes to sing songs (and even play a riotous game of telephone with five or six different languages) with the Tuareg.

We fell asleep each night under a sky filled with more stars than you can possibly imagine.

This year, questers from Switzerland, the U.S., Ireland, and Germany underwent, each in her or his own individual way, a process that never ceases to astonish me. Many people embark on a vision quest with the intention of clarifying their life work or identifying some task or goal that will truly fulfill them. As the journey unfolds, however, they fine-tune this intention. They recognize patterns or attitudes they no longer need and start opening up to a part of themselves that is at once dazzlingly new and deeply familiar, something that is big, bold, wise, and utterly who they are. It is so hard, even for a confirmed wordsmith like me, to put this unfolding into words. But I think the reality of the process, and the profundity of it, is what has motivated the tellers of fairy tales of many lands to write of miraculous transformations: ordinary serving girl to princess, frog to prince, ugly ducking to graceful swan.

Photo by Malu Deck

When I got home from the Sahara quest, I learned of the death of the first person I worked for after I graduated from college, Erich Segal. It was the fall of 1970, and Erich was the best-selling and very public author of the romantic novel, Love Story. As a literature major in college and a published poet, I was feeling quite disdainful of this literary pop star as I waited outside his office at Yale for my interview. He hired me because he needed help answering the piles and piles of fan letters he got every day, and I was happy to have an unconventional job where I would have lots of free time to write.

As time went on, I began to do research for his magazine articles and his book on the history of comedy. I not only typed his articles and books, but edited them, drove him to the airport for his frequent appearances on Johnny Carson and other talk shows, transcribed his lectures at Yale, and did his grocery shopping.

Over the course of the next two years and seven months, we became good friends (never romantic friends, contrary to what many people assumed). From him I learned to create what he called "ploys" to make life interesting. He would contrive some wild and improbable thing that he wanted to do and set about to make it happen as if it were a game. I learned that you can turn your fascinations into financially rewarding projects. I learned that the best relationships have a lot of laughter in them. From Erich Segal I learned how to make a really good spaghetti sauce and that it doesn't work to cook a steak in a microwave oven. Through him I discovered the works of Aristophanes, Euripides, Ovid, and Samuel Becket.

When he got an invitation to teach at the University of Munich, he paid for me to go to Harvard Summer School to learn German. Although I quit my job a few months after we moved to Germany in 1973 (I'd fallen for a Dutch photographer), I have enthusiastically kept up with the German language all these years. It's why I'm now guiding in the Sahara, where most of our questers are German-speaking Swiss. It all goes back to Erich Segal.

He was way over-exposed in the media for a couple of years and he wrote a silly book. Nevertheless, he was a brilliant classics scholar, a wiry and determined man full of the spirit of the life force, and an inspiration for how to live with delight.