Women In Greek Tragedy

"It is not every one," said Elinor, "who has your passion for dead leaves."

I feel that my entire experience with reading Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility can be summed up in the sarcasm of that sentence.

You can get lost in nature

it entices you into its graceful grasp

luring you into a dream

of eternal sunshine

Many folktales throughout different cultures feature a heroine being given the impossible task of sorting through grains/seeds– whether that be picking them from the ashes, from between each other, or from their rotting counterparts.

In this task, she often does as much as she can before submitting to a higher power, whether that power recognizes her virtue or she directly asks for help varies based on the culture and tale.

Featured are eight such tales, most of which can be categorized into “Snake Bride” (ATU 425) type tales or “Cinderella” (Both often ATU 510 in the folklore index– Cinderellas are specifically ATU 510A)

The circle puts them in no particular order, as “origins”  and lineages are muddied, and many of the current incarnations have been influenced by each other, though Ye Xian is the oldest known “complete” version of Cinderella.

Snake Brides:

Psyche, Eros and Psyche (Greco-Roman)

Sukkia, The Snake’s Bride (India)

Donan Sampakang Tale about Gansaļangi and Donan Sampakang (Indonesian)

Cinderellas:

Aschenputtel (German)

Tam, Tấm and Cám (Vietnam)

Unnamed Heroine The Wonderful Birch (Finish & Slavic)

Ye Xian (Chinese)

Neither (ATU 480B– Stepmother and Stepdaughter)

Vasilisa, Vasilisa the Wise (or Beautiful) (Slavic)

everything just really comes down to how I wasn't a person for most of my life. by which I mean I did not consider myself a person. it made such a profound impact on the way I navigated the world & yet standing on the other side of it I could hardly explain it to you

I am good. I am loved.

Isolation

We can cross over and connect

find peace in small things

travel beyond even our simplest dreams - 

I’ll see you in a moment, sitting by the sea 

lost in this forgotten memory

Keep reading

I still cannot bear

Loving what we used to love

Together, alone

we are that which is foreign; daisies which drift & dwell upon the air of elegance, delicately untouched by the vast twine of such sorrow, only ever shared but never held & never seen.

Much of what happens to us in life is nameless because our vocabulary is too poor. Most stories get told out loud because the storyteller hopes that the telling of the story can transform a nameless event into a familiar or intimate one. We tend to associate intimacy with closeness and closeness with a certain sum of shared experiences. Yet in reality total strangers, who will never say a single word to each other, can share an intimacy — an intimacy contained in the exchange of a glance, a nod of the head, a smile, a shrug of a shoulder. A closeness that lasts for minutes or for the duration of a song that is being listened to together. An agreement about life. An agreement without clauses. A conclusion spontaneously shared between the untold stories gathered around the song.

John Berger, "Some Notes on Song (for Yasmine Hamdan)"