delga | { I picture you in the sun. }

ali smith; girl meets boy

It was the song of the flow of things, the song of the undammed river, and there with the fiddler was his sidekick, who doubled the tune and who, when he played alongside his partner, found in everything he laid hands on (whistle, squeezebox, harp, guitar, old empty oilcan and a stick or a stone to bang it with) the kind of music that not only made the bushes and the trees pull themselves out of the ground and move where they could hear better, but made them throw their leaves and twigs up in the air, made all the seagulls clap their wings, made all the dogs of the Highlands bark with joy, made all the roofs dance on the houses, made every paving stone of the whole town tear itself up, stand itself on its pointed corner and do a happy pirouette, even made the old cathedral itself on its fixed foundations leap and caper.

Women work two-thirds of the world's working hours, yet earn only one tenth of its income.

So, there's this story, and it goes like this. A woman is with child, a child that she loves though she does not know its face, or its name. And her husband tells her, should you bear a girl, that is of no use to us, that is too much for us, and she will have to die. And the woman, laden with child, with love, goes to the temple and implores to the goddess, what can I do, if this should be a girl, how can I kill my own child? And the goddess, the Goddess Isis, great that she is, told the woman, no, all is well, bear the child and dress him as a boy. And this is what was done: the child was born, this beautiful girl, and dressed as a boy. And the child's name was Iphis.

Time passed, years passed, and Iphis, boy-girl that she was, made a friend of Ianthe, a girl of a girl, a girl that she loved, that she would wed. But Iphis realised that she would bring shame, to her parents, to her lover, if she should be discovered. So she called on the goddess, the great Goddess Isis, and bemoaned her advice that Iphis should be born and raised as a boy. So Isis gave help in the only way that she knew how, and Iphis was transformed, she became a he, became a man, and married his Ianthe, and their love was happy and met.

Rings that widen on the surface of a loch above a thrown-in stone. A drink of water offered to a thirsty traveller on the road. Nothing more tha what happens when things come together, when hydrogen, say, meets oxygen, or a story from then meets a story from now, or stones meets water meets girl meets boy meets bird meets hand meets wing meets bone meets light meets darks meets eye meets word meets word meets world meets grain of sand meets thirst meets huger meets need meets dream meets real meets same meets different meets death meets life meets end meets beginning all over again, the story of nature itself, ever-inventive, making one thing out of another, an one thing into another, and nothing lasts, and nothing's lost, and nothing ever perishes, and things can always change, and things will always be different, because things can always be different.

And it was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us the rope we could cross any river with. They balanced us high above any crevasse. They made us be natural acrobats. They made us be brave. They met us well. They changed us. It was in their nature to.

planning the revolution

(crying about it)

{ I picture you in the sun. }

{ I picture you in the sun. }

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