awesomealtart: This elaborate, breathtaking painting by Anna Christenson portrays Jack, a character from Charles de Lint’s otherworldly novel Someplace to be Flying.
One of my favourite books, by one of my favourite authors. The story of how Raven made the world, but he’s always losing the Very Important World-Making Pot, & Coyote is trying to find the pot so he can stir it & change the world & fix it from the last time he stirred it & messed it up. & everyone is caught in the middle, & the Crow Girls feature heavily.
At the beginning of Someplace to be Flying, is this bit of poetry:
So I asked the raven as he passed by,
I said, “Tell me, raven, why’d you make the sky?”
“The moon and stars, I threw them high,
I needed someplace to be flying.”
—Kiya Heartwood, from “Wyoming Wind”
Charles de Lint was in town doing a book signing recently, & this is one of the books I took to have signed (I videoed bits of the talk here). He told me he was happy to see my beat up copies of his books :)
ecritureacreature:
It’s been really, really cold & wet & windy & altogether miserable & very un-May-like for the past… month? Two months? Six months? Year minus that one week in March where it was inexplicably eighteen degrees & no one could believe it?
I’m banking on the fact that karma owes me a hot summer. And in the meantime, lest the above happen to me again, I am hibernating in my bedroom with a small mountain of notes & the taste of The Book Thief still on my lips from last night. (Maybe I’ve tasted love before & haven’t brushed my teeth in a while.)
May where I am is the rainy month, & it’s so amazing. Thunderstorms & everything getting so green and lush.
We should switch places, because later the summer here will be scorching hot & sunny & I’ll miss the rain.
AMPHITRITE was the goddess queen of the sea, the wife of King Poseidon. Some say she was one of the fifty Nereides, others an Okeanis, but most simply describe her as the female personification of the sea: the loud-moaning mother of fish, seals and dolphins. As such she was essentially the same as Thalassa. When Poseidon first sought Amphitrite’s hand in marriage, she fled his advances, and hid herself away near Atlas in the Ocean stream at the far ends of the earth. The dolphin-god Delphin eventually tracked her down and persuaded her to return to wed the sea-king.
Amphitrite was depicted in Greek vase painting as a young woman, often raising her hand in a pinching gesture. Sometimes she was shown holding a fish. In mosaic art the goddess usually rides beside her husband in a chariot drawn by fish-tailed horses or hippokampoi. Sometimes her hair is enclosed with a net and her brow adorned with a pair of crab-claw “horns”.
Her name is probably derived from the Greek words amphis and tris, “the surrounding third.” Her son Tritôn was similarly named “of the third.” Clearly “the third” is the sea, although the reason for the term is obscure. Her Roman equivalent was Salacia, whose name means “the salty one.”
In the Homeric poems she does not occur as a goddess, and Amphitrite is merely the name of the sea. The most ancient passages in which she occurs as a real goddess is that of Hesiod above referred to and the Homeric hymn on the Delian Apollo, where she is represented as having been present at the birth of Apollo.
source: www.theoi.com // www.mythindex.com
image: Poseidon and Amphitrite ride across the sea in a chariot.
(Source: lonelyspelltoconjureyou)
