This Week I am Thinking About... 10/10/25

This week I have been blessed with not one or two but three inspiring moments.  One from the recently concluded fashion shows, one from a poet that I love, and one from an Interior Designer I admire.

Alessandro Michele’s show notes for Valentino had me thinking about those small moments of beauty that make us smile or think or just breathe a little deeper. Entitled “Fireflies”, his show grappled with the idea of seeing "fleeting sparks in the dark" of contemporary challenges.

In 1941, author Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote a letter from an Italy wracked by fascism and world war, describing how the fireflies in his garden provided small rays of light in the darkness of his garden.  The fireflies were a metaphor for hope - a hope he felt still existed in the world because of the beauty of art.  Years later, in 1975, his view had turned darker, and he mourned what he described as the death of the fireflies, due to the "more insidious and pervasive form of control emerging, enforced not by violence but by the normalizing pressure of consumerism and mass media. This "new fascism" crushed non-conformity and homogenized the culture, replacing individual identity with standardized bourgeois ambitions".  As Michele tells it, art historian Georges Didi-Huberman disagreed. He "shared Pasolini’s grief about the tyrannical standardisation of culture, but he refused to concede that all hope was lost. The light the fireflies gave off was not out, only feeble, and we had simply become too blind and atrophied by our despair to recognise it."

In this context, Michele looks to fashion as a beacon of light, describing in his show notes the “hints of worlds to come, traces of a beauty that resists standardisation".  Just as the fireflies represented a rebuke to suppression of the individual for Pasolini, Michele "presented his collection as an act of resistance to the homogenization of our global culture, explaining that fashion, in this sense, can be a bright spot that brings light, joy, and beauty into a challenging world".  I thought this was a beautiful sentiment, and it reminded me of how fashion is an important form of self expression.  Whether one is dressed in Valentino or not, the individual can always endeavor to shine.

The poet Cleo Wade, who never fails to give me nuggets to think on, reposted a story about Kurt Vonnegut, itself posted by @pleinairpoetry:

Kurt Vonnegut told his wife that he was going out to buy an envelope.  He continues: "Oh, she says, well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I'll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is — we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it's like we're not supposed to dance anymore."  This story just moved me.  We spend a lot of time hand-wringing about what social media is doing to our kids, and that is something we should worry about, but every day we choose to order online or spend time playing puzzles, we should also think about what is the internet doing to us?  

Finally, I read an old 2023 Business of Home article about the Interior Designer Ashley Whittaker.  I loved her work.  I would have killed to have her design my home with her classic, but profoundly happy, HAPPY, interiors.  After reaching the heights of her profession, she decided to stop designing and start selling real estate in her home town.  While her reasons were simple - she was spending an awful lot of time creating beautiful spaces for her clients to live in, and she wanted to enjoy her own spaces with her own family - she also had an interesting comment.  "There’s a certain amount of oversaturation. With everything coming at you from every single angle, whether it’s TikTok, Pinterest or Instagram, there’s a lot of the same things going on everywhere,” says Whittaker. “I’m not finding it as interesting or exciting as I used to, when we really had to go out into the universe and find things. … In hindsight, everything being online started to kind of wear me down a bit.”

To close, my takeaway from all of this is:  look within yourself and manifest who you are.  Let your light shine.  Let it shine in the world, with other people.  Don't be afraid of the unknown or the untried or the different. And dance.