A rare cloudless picture of Ireland, from the lads in the International Space Station.

* * * *

“A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, from The Dispossessed

[alive on all channels]

Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” He wasn’t talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth. A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

Ursula LeGuin, e-flux interview

https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/ursula-k-le-guin-a-few-words-to-a-young-writer/2602

Illustrations by David Lupton for The Folio Society edition of Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness

There is a point around age 20 when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Leguin

Ursula K. LeGuin (Late in the Day: Poems 2010-2014)

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.” (Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas)

Books ordered from this year’s annual national book sale that we have in Sweden every year:

A kid’s book for my second youngest nephew that should be just right for him now that he’s learning to read

A book on yoga

Atomic Habits

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

Non-stop, by Brian Aldiss

The ocean at the end of the lane by Neil Gaiman

The word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Leguin

Järnulven (The Iron Wolf) by Siri Petterson

And once the sale actually starts in the shops, I’m picking up a collection of short stories from Edgar Allan Poe.

I have told the story I was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joining of two people. What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery. So I wrote this book for my friend, with whom I have lived and will die free.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness  

sciencefictiongallery: Paul Lehr | The Legion Of Space | 1969

* * * *

"I think that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed."

~ Ursula K. Le Guin, 'The Other Wind'

Women's History Month 2023 - March 22

Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, and Places - Ursula K. LeGuin

I feel the same way with both The Other Wind and Return of the Thief. Awe, and excitement as everything came together in a beautiful ending and sadness because there's no more book in the series to read on.

[AGAIN, THAT'LL HELP BUILD THAT ROUX. CORRECT. AND THEN PARSLEY, THYME AND OURSELVES ARE AND MAY BECOME. —URSULA K. LEGUIN. THEN WE'LL ADD RED WINE, BEEF BROTH AND TOMATO SAUCE.]