What I have been reading this week.
The story of a love affair
Dandan Hansen has a beautiful post about the love story of his grandparents. Alaskan Sunrise: a gift for my family is a wonderful story of a deep and enduring love.
I am not talking about adventure in the normal sense (though adventure they often did), unless you, like me (raised in a family based on love), think of adventure as a romance that spanned almost seventy years, five children, ten directly descended grandchildren, a still growing number of great-grandchildren, and all the children and grandchildren they claimed as their own over the long years of their love affair.
Thinking about the climate
Mike Finn’s Fiction has a review of The Myth of Rain by Seanan McGuire. This is a short story in a collection of short stories in response to the climate emergency.
“The Myth Of Rain” is spookily prescient. “Loose Upon The World” was published in 2015 so when I read a reference to this year, 2019, I know it was a guess but it reads like news headlines.
I must get this book.
Business as usual?
Nimue Brown has an excellent post about group dynamics, gatekeeping in communities, and a really good explanation of why remaining silent in a conflict means you are supporting the oppressor.
If there is sexism, and everyone looks the other way, then your community supports sexism. If someone raises bullying as an issue, and nobody wants to know, then bullying is something your community supports. If someone feels excluded because they can’t physically get into the room, and no one responds to this, then exclusion is something your community does… and there’s a startling amount of this around. Usually it appears in quiet, low drama forms, and is dealt with quietly with a shrug and a ‘this is how we do things’ that just leaves no room for change. I’ve been in a fair few spaces dominated by straight, white, middle class, middle age and older, physically and mentally healthy men, and I can say with confidence that many of them cannot see how business as usual excludes people who are not exactly like them.
Blodeuwedd
Lorna Smithers has written an excellent poem about Blodeuwedd. It’s great to have a feminist perspective on this legend.
You want to sink your talons
into Lleu for whom you were made,
who acts like such a mummy’s boy
even though his mother disowned him,
refused to give him a name, weapons, a wife.
What the lawn said
Beith at Anima Monday has a series of channeled posts. In this one, she listens to a lawn, and what it has to say is very important.
We are more than grass. Notice the flowers, and get go know them. Become aware of all that beauty and colour that you have suppressed. Look at which species show up, and whether or not they choose to stay. This is the earth speaking to you, singing its song to you.
Dowsing for Divinity 