The breath that made me live

'I think,' Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, 'that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.' - Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

For a writer who was so preoccupied with the interplay of life and death, with mortality and living, and whose works did so much to make me confront death's finality, I was surprised by how hard Ursula Le Guin's death hit me. There was something ageless and eternal about her, and she seemed to pop up everywhere, generous with her words and thoughts and wisdom.

Her books are part of the fabric of me.

Above all things, she wrote about migration and exile, and she wrote about ordinary, ceaseless, everyday work (particularly 'women's work') in a way that imbued it with a kind of power and magic, and she wrote about the ways women and our work are both seen, and not seen. I remember in particular reading The Tombs of Atuan, Tehanu, and, later, The Other Wind as a teenage girl and young woman and coming to understand the terrible things I would carry, being a woman in this world. Those stories showed me this frightening, inescapable truth, but helped me face it. In some ways I feel that her writing helped me understand how to be a woman.

My Twitter profile has always said that I am located in 'Selidor'.

I remember reading an obituary of Terry Pratchett that described him as 'both wise and kind', and the same was true of Le Guin. She was kind -- her writing was kind -- without ever being sentimental; it was a kindness that illuminated and educated and pushed you out of your complacency. Not a word was out of place, and her words resonated like stones dropped in clear, still water. And every word served a purpose: striving, illuminating, witnessing without flinching. Doing the work.

And now she is 'done with doing', but the words and work remain.