who only by moving can balance

The Disc is a world and mirror of worlds, so naturally stories about the Disc are in fact stories about stories. This is, I think, what my mother fails to understand when she complains that Pratchett never wrote a single original thing; he takes stories and puts them together differently, shows you the parallels and the differences and the power to define the world depending on the story that you tell about it. They are stories about stories that reflect us back to ourselves, and tell us there's no such thing as fair or easy; or at least that they're rare and we don't get to expect them but fair, at least, we have to believe in in order to be human. That we will make hard choices and we will choose wrong and we will screw up but, also, we can muddle through; that if there isn't space for us we can tell stories that create it. Mirror and lens both: to bring into focus and to cast light and to show what is hidden, to show us that we are real, to show us an unfamiliar view of the everyday that permits that we see it anew in all its detail and its brightness. And, perhaps most importantly for me - at least right now - that being a monster does not mean you are constrained to re/act within the shape of others' belief of what your kind of monster is.

It was Discworld, I think, that taught me it was okay for me to be a monster, and that being a monster didn't mean I had to be what other people thought that meant. It was Discworld that first managed to communicate to me that we work so hard to believe the little lies because it makes it possible for us to believe in the big ones. It was my first real fandom and it gave me somewhere to exist and it talked about worlds that had space for me in them. Pterry told me I could be a witch of the land and a teacher and that I could endure and make hard choices. He made and makes me kinder.

Huh, apparently I haven't actually recced A Litany for Survival here, at least not any place I can find it readily? So let's start with that.

( A Litany for Survival )

from Walking Our Boundaries

The sun is watery warm
our voices
seem too loud for this small yard
too tentative for women
so in love
the siding has come loose in spots
our footsteps hold this place
together
as our place
our joint decisions make the possible
whole.
I do not know when
we shall laugh again
but next week
we will spade up another plot
for this spring's seeding.

( from Eulogy for Alvin Frost )

Here you go; and of those my favourites are Grief, On the Death of Beth Meacham's Father, On the Death of Spider, Yarnell Fire, and On the Impending Death of Iain Banks. Via poetree.

Helen's funeral is going to be in Cambridge on the afternoon of Thursday the 21st (her birthday). I don't have more details yet but if you'd like me to pass them on to you as and when I know them, give us a shout and I'll do my best (but my head's a bit everywhere at the moment, so please do prod me if you haven't heard from me).