Quests not related to the Moth Pixies
Use this lil nifty menue until the index is made up :)
Index
Summertime Memories
I’ve never particularly cared for summer. Growing up I was a child dependent on structure and those vast summer months away from school often made me slightly depressed. As an adult I’ve often put my work leave in spring and autumn. But there is something about summer. Like a warm tint of nostalgia on those precious memories. Here’s a few.
Midsummer might be my favourite holiday. All the other holidays are spent with family in one way or another, but we had no such traditions in our family so my parents got to make up their own. I have countless fond memories of the big parties with my parents friends and their families. Football tournaments in way too tall grass with players aged 5 to 50. Makeshift crafting of a midsummer pole, some years quite impressive, some years short and wonky. Those summer nights that never goes dark with wonderful people sat around in an overgrown garden and just enjoying being in all that happiness.
When I still lived with my mum we used to go hiking every summer. Me, my mum, two of her friends and their respective daughters the same age as me all took the night-train up north then took a wild array of busses and ferries and what not to arrive at some desolate ski resort where only the really odd people stayed year round and went up over an edge and there it is. A vast ocean of mountain. The air, the plants, the animals the company and the lack of everything else. The feeling of infinite time and space a couple of days in when people are scarce and the ache in your body has gone from feeling stiff like a board to just feeling strong and alive.
Then there’s the small ones. I was in the middle of a break up with someone very close to me in a City where I only knew three people. My two other friends, one new and one old, brought me to a stream a warm day. I was working nights this summer and was quite groggy to begin with but when we got there all became crisp and beautiful. My friend from before never learned how to swim so we tried our best to teach him but mostly we just splashed around in the current, sun-dried on the rocks and explored.
I think I need to revisit these memories more often, they make me smile.
New Releases
I don’t read much anymore, like the overworked 20 something I am. But I’ve rediscovered audiobooks. As a child I always listened to audiobooks, I had a radio that was both a cassette player and CD player which combined with a library card made for many hours in my room painting and crafting while consuming the most wonderful of stories. It actually seems strange it took me so long to be back.
Now of course it’s an app in my smartphone and I listen in my wireless earphones, but I still paint and craft, and as of recent I even revisited the kind of epic fantasy tales I engrossed myself in as a child.
This is turning into one of those recipe blogs where you get an entire life-story before you get to the point so I’ll reveal the subject of my ramblings.
I’ve listened to the series of books about Earthsea written by Ursula K. Le Guin and finished the last book the other week. Not exactly a new release, but new to me and lord did it awaken my inner child in the best ways.
It’s fantasy like you want it to be. Fast paced with epic tales of magic and adventure, but also the small details of everyday life on the different islands in the archipelago that this universe revolves around. Characters that came alive and stayed with me during my reading, no matter how small a role they played. It made me want to simultaneously become a wizard, save the world and get a small cottage with a garden and some goats with my badass goth wife and our adopted child. But also reflect upon the patriarchal structure, in our world and those we create, as well as mortality and how we think about and cope with our own inescapable death.
I enjoy the good old Tolkien fantasy, but for me reading these books was realising how narrow my own perception of fantasy has been, and how this way of writing fantasy is something I’d like to read more of.
It also included a lot of cool shit like a magical school on a magical island, magic companionship with animals, wizard staffs and titles, a terrifying shadow, dragons, stealing artefacts from holy labyrinths, fucked up magical drugs, coming back from the dead and soo much more. I’m so inspired to create, and read more of her books. This is definitely a series I can see myself reading to my future kids (like my dad read Bilbo and Harry Potter to me) and it makes me giddy and warm inside to think about.