(Pixabay – Public Domain)
Solarpunk
Hope for the future
Books like Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin; A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers; The Fifth Sacred Thing and City of Refuge by Starhawk.
These are books that envision a solar powered, sustainable future. There may be dystopias over the horizon, but home is a place where handicrafts and home-made things nestle together with solar power and sustainable technology.
Solarpunk is a portmanteau word created from the “punk” part of steampunk and cyberpunk, and the concept of solar power and other sustainable technologies.
(Photo by Nkrita – CC-BY-SA 4.0 International)
Samizdat
The spirit of resistance
Samizdat was literature as resistance, painstakingly copied from censored materials:
“Samizdat (Russian: самиздат, pronounced [səmɨzˈdat], lit. ‘self-publishing’), also samvydav (Ukrainian: самвидав), was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader. The practice of manual reproduction was widespread, because printed texts could be traced back to the source. This was a grassroots practice used to evade official Soviet censorship.
Spinning and Weaving
Creating gold from straw
Both weaving and spinning have been used as metaphors for storytelling. The magical qualities of weaving, and the mesmerizing effect of spinning, both lend themselves well to the concept of storytelling and narrative.
Weaving is a metaphor for creating community, and for creating reality itself (the Wyrd Sisters in Norse mythology, the Moirai in Greek mythology, the Fates in Roman mythology, were all weavers).
Soul Alchemy
The magic of transformation
Alchemy was the attempt to make gold out of base metals, mostly lead. The word alchemy comes from Greek khemeioa, possibly referring to Egypt as the land of black earth, or from Greek khymatos “that which is poured out,” from khein “to pour”.
Even at the height of the quest for gold, alchemy involved the transformation of the alchemists’ soul at the same time as the substances they were working with, and metaphorical imagery abounded.