It’s undeniable that there is a certain symbiosis that permeates the world and all its inhabitants, from the most intelligent human to (what may look like) the least significant worm.
The magic that happens when we come together in conscious, or even unconscious service to one another is what keeps this big, blue planet spinning. In this month’s Happy Headlines, we highlight inspiring stories about fans lifting up a man to his greatest joy, neighbors raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to secure a friend’s home, scientists and worms changing the face of recycling, volunteers scuba diving to clear trash from the country’s most beautiful lakes, hungry goats preventing the spread of wildfires and a service station owner selling gas at a loss to help his customers that remind us, when we work, there’s nothing we can’t do!
“No one has ever become poor by giving.” – Anne Frank
Lifted Up
Wheelchair Crowd Surfer
Alex Rodriguez, a second-year law student in Spain, bound to a wheelchair with cerebral palsy, experienced something few of us ever will. While attending a heavy-metal concert in Spain, he crowd-surfed in his chair, other fans lifting him high in the air. According to our friends at myhappyheadlines.com, Rodriguez said, “It was a rush of energy… joy, excitement… a dream come true…”
Lower prices
Service Station Owner Loses $500 Daily to Help Customers Afford Gas
Jaswiendre Singh, owner of a service station in Phoenix, Arizona is losing money daily, selling gas to his customers for less money than he’s paying for the fuel. Singh told Inside Edition “My mother and father did teach us to help if you have something, you have to share with other people.”
Clear Waters
Volunteers Remove 25,000 Pounds of Trash from Lake Tahoe
With substantial donations from Lake Tahoe businesses, the Clean Up the Lake volunteer SCUBA Team removed 25,000 pounds of trash from 72 miles of lake’s shoreline. Four other major US lakes are slated to be cleaned up by the team before they move on to the great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
Neighbors Buy a House for Tenant About to be Evicted
For nearly twenty years Linda Taylor has been a beloved fixture in her neighborhood. After working tirelessly to help the homeless and needy, Linda found herself in jeopardy of losing the home that she’d rented since arriving in the Powderhorn Park district in Minneapolis was being put on the market. Soon neighbors rallied around her, raising nearly a quarter of a million dollars to help her buy the house.
Dinner, anyone?
Polystyrene-Eating Super-Worms Could Change the Future of Recycling
Researchers at Stanford discovered that certain types of worms can digest polystyrene. They’re now using metagenomics to find the encoded enzymes in the worms’ guts in hopes of recreating the microbes that will break down plastic waste.
Dinner anyone part 2
Hungry Goats Protect Areas from Fire Danger
In Sacramento firefighters are using goats and their penchant for eating everything in their path to create firebreaks that help prevent wildfires from spreading. Learn more about this environmentally friendly, and absurdly cute, fire prevention method from our friends at The Week.
Did You Know?
- Helping others can help you live longer
- Helping others boosts your self-esteem
- It gives you a sense of renewal
- Helping others is contagious
- It creates a sense of belonging
From University College London. Read more Here!
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
Kathlene Mc Govern
Kathlene Mc Govern is a graduate of UCLA with a BA in English/Creative Writing. She is the winner of the David Wong Louie Creative Writing prize, has served as the fiction editor for PCC’s Inscape Literary Magazine and worked as a staff writer for Blindfold Magazine, a print mag that combined activism with pop culture and fashion where she wrote features on several actors and directors including Darryl Hannah and Aaron Paul and Casey Cooper Johnson.
When she's not writing, Kathlene teaches a performance workshop for dancers around the country called Acting Dynamics for Dancers. The workshop teaches dancers to create story and connect emotionally to choreography, allowing for more dynamic performances.
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