Hello, everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind, and make you brave.

I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that like everything else are doomed to die,

or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?

Hello, friend. I don't know where this episode finds you, but this is where it finds me.

A humid summer morning has melted into a moody drizzle outside, and I just came back inside

from my second cup of espresso for the day. I climbed four floors and plopped down in a couch and an apartment the size of a postage

stamp. I don't know where you find yourself, but you find me and I find myself in Paris. It's been a few

weeks since my last episode in my series on metaphors that I was recording for my new book, You Are a Tree. But today,

I'm rather happy to have a delightful interruption in that series, which will resume eventually,

for a reason that makes me pretty happy. I'm resuming my summer book club, and I'm doing so from

France. Now, for some of you who've

listened for a long time to this podcast, you know that over the past five, I actually think even

six years, I've recorded a podcast exploring some book, kind of doing a summer book club

every summer, except for last summer. So we've read books

like Clara and the Sun by Kazu Isiguru, A Rinkle in Time by Madeline Lingle, Paranasi by

Susanna Clark, The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis and many other books together. Last summer was just

too busy to be able to squeeze one in,

but I've had a lot of you sending me emails asking if we'd be doing a book club together this summer,

and I'd been wanting to. So, when I found out that I would be in France for most of the month of

June, because of some work commitments. I knew exactly the book that I

wanted to read together. And that is The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbary. Now, this book was

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