Hi friends, it is Joy Clarkson here of Speaking with Joy.

And I am talking to you from my flat in St. Andrews, Scotland, where I'm doing my PhD.

And I had a few exciting announcements to share with you all and kind of vision for the upcoming season.

And I thought this might be the easiest way to do it.

So the first exciting announcement is that I'm

celebrating two years of hosting Speaking with Joy. And I wanted to kind of tell you the history

behind why this began and what I hope to see in the future. And just thank you for joining me on

the journey that this has been for the last two years. I feel so incredibly thankful. So the reason that I started speaking with joy came kind of out of my own experience

of feeling a bit cynical and overstimulated and fearful sometimes about the world.

We live in a world where we're constantly overwhelmed with information.

We have more access to all of bad news that could possibly flood us in the world

that anyone else has in any other generation. When I did my undergrad in rhetoric and in communications,

there was this whole field of study called compassion fatigue, where they said that because our

generation is so exposed to darkness and to things on the internet all the time,

we become kind of fatigued and we begin to feel helpless in the battle against the evil things

of the world because we feel overwhelmed, constantly exposed to them. So I really felt that

intensely and keenly, and I felt that it was something that everyone around me was also feeling.

And so as I thought and prayed about it, I wanted to do something that could be my little battle cry against the

darkness and the weariness of the world. And that's kind of where speaking with joy began.

Now, the concept behind it was very simple. It was that I would take a theme every week, whether

that was home or justice or

tea, and I would explore it through three works of art, something literary, something musical,

...