Touchstone

I'm not a massive one for tribute blips but needs must when we lose a writer who's been a companion for most of my life and who's probably done more to help me realise my world view than any other. And incidentally, thanks to Kendall, she also provided the inspiration for one of the longest running challenges on Blipfoto: One Street.

I'm talking about Ursula K. Le Guin of course, who died on Monday. For me, it started with a beat-up copy of Rocannon' s World  picked up at a school fair (exhibit top left) from where I backtracked to Earthsea and then to The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed at an age when I couldn't claim to understand them, but which revealed to me important perspectives about difference and alternatives and The Way. And as I studied and then taught in the orbit of her work, around ecology and anarchy and gender and society and Tao, she offered balance at the centre of it all. A touchstone.

And so on through her entire corpus of novels, essays and  poetry, again and again and again and forever.  Walking that One Street, finding The Way.