I sure needed these little nuggets of joy I found recently.

In one astonishing clip, a four year old boy speaks to his mom about his emotions and how he is processing them. Four years old!! I know forty year olds (and even much older) who couldn’t get close to this level of emotional clarity. https://www.facebook.com/reel/562156025745695

Another story highlighted the business venture of a young French architect Clarisse Merlet who is making construction materials out of recycled fabrics. Bricks to be exact. https://www.euronews.com/culture/2023/09/04/meet-the-french-eco-chic-architect-crafting-fashionable-bricks

Hers is a small, energy intense, hands-on little business. To date, she has already made 12,000 clothing bricks. She has sold them as office partitions and decorative items. She is doing a lot of research to expand their utility and reach in large scale construction projects.

The concept could not be simpler and yet more profound in its potential impact. Who among us doesn’t have a few dozen pieces of extra clothing in our closet that we could easily offload? Having them reused sustainably would be a total bonus.

Kermit The Frog popped up somewhere singing a Talking Heads cover: “Once in a Lifetime.” https://youtu.be/PCY0aeUx-Ns

YouTube gold. Kermie captured my heart years ago with, “It’s Not Easy Being Green”, a sentiment we can all relate to the way Kermie sings it. And, of course, The Rainbow Connection. That musical gem still gives me goosebumps.

A writer in the New Yorker pens a comic strip about an elderly gentleman who plays the sound of birds chirping in his car all the time. It is his way of feeling like he is in the country when he is still living in the city.

More and more often, I am reading rebellious writers like me who are pushing back against the execrable weight of information overload and faceless wealth hoarding billionaires. Like me, too, it seems, they are trying to tease out and claw their way back to a sense of what it means to be human. Especially these days.

They give me hope for today and for the future. Maybe this dog’s breakfast we are living through will have a satisfactory ending after all.

And to drift into political waters that I usually avoid like the plague, Jim Jordan wasn’t elected House speaker. It looks very much like he won’t be.

That single news story tells me there may be hope and common sense at work out there in the world, after all. Sigh.