New Documentary about Ursula Leguin.....and more.......

"Earthsea" Map of the Legendary Land by Ursula Le Guin

  "To light a candle is to cast a shadow."

Ursula K. Leguin

One of my sheroes is Ursula Leguin, one of the worlds great Spider Women. Like Tse Che Nako of the Pueblo peoples, the worlds she has spun for all of us will always live in my heart, and her wisdom always comes home. I reflect that I have spent quite a few days in her worlds, on the boat Lookfar with Ged, among Those Who Walk Away From Omelas because paradise will never, ever  be enough, watching the passing of May's Lion and remembering a time when such things were sacred...........so many worlds she has taken me to. I feel quite bereft that she is not in this world with us any longer.

A recent documentary about her life is just released:  https://vimeo.com/268831999


Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin Official Trailer from Arwen Curry on Vimeo.

Ursula LeGuin Quotations:

• We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

• There are no right answers to wrong questions.

• It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.

• The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant; in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one's true identity in both.

• The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerant uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

• I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.

• Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.

• If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

• What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

 with thanks to About.com (http://womenshistory.about.com/od/quotes/a/ursula_leguin.htm)

And here is a video by an artist who also, like me, has visited the world of the Kesh, and knows what it is like, I think,  to be Always Coming Home.

https://vimeo.com/vanessarenwick/httpsvimeocomkesh

Kesh from Vanessa Renwick on Vimeo.