Asbestos = a soft, greyish-white material that does not burn, used especially in the past as a protection against fire and as a form of insulation.
“Some writers can handle lava with bare hands, but I’m not so tough, my skin is not asbestos. And in fact I have no interest in confession. My games are transformation and invention.”
–Ursula K. Le Guin
Art by Dani Soon.
Symbiotic = involving interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association.
“Stories … are genuinely symbiotic organisms that we live with, that allow human beings to advance.”
– Neil Gaiman
Art by Rob Rey.
Dandelion = a small wild plant with a bright yellow flower that becomes a soft white ball of seeds called a dandelion clock.
“Most of the dandelions had changed from suns into moons.”
–Vladimir Nabokov
Art by James R. Eads.
Clay = a type of heavy, sticky earth that becomes hard when it is baked and is used to make things such as pots and bricks.
“The imagination is the true fire, stolen from heaven, to animate this cold creature of clay, producing all those fine sympathies that lead to rapture, rendering men social by expanding their hearts, instead of leaving them leisure to calculate how many comforts society affords.”
– Mary Wollstonecraft (in a 1794 letter)
Art by Michael Cheval.
Humdrum = monotonous routine.
“In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.” – Stephen King
Enchanting art by James R Eads.
Grief = intense sorrow, deep and poignant distress.
“Grief is the tax we pay on our attachments…”
– Thomas Lynch
Art by Dani Soon.
Awareness = knowledge or perception of a situation or fact.
“As a separate entity one always feels alone and, as such, life is a process of easing the pain of this loneliness through substances, objects, activities and relationships. As Awareness, one is also alone but only in the sense that there are no others to be either separate from or one with. This is the aloneness of love.”
~Rupert Spira
Art by Kinuko Y. Craft.
Fluster = to make somebody nervous and/or confused; to make hot and rosy, as with drinking.
“There is no whole self. It suffices to walk any distance along the inexorable rigidity that the mirrors of the past open to us in order to feel like outsiders, naively flustered by our own bygone days.”
– Jorge Luis Borges
Art by Magdalena Korzeniewska.
Transmute = to change or alter in form, appearance, or nature and especially to a higher form.
It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
– E.M. Forster
Art by André Poffé.
Bowline = A rope fastened near the middle of the leech or perpendicular edge of the square sails, by subordinate ropes called bridles, and used to keep the weather edge of the sail tight forward when the ship is close-hauled.
…
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
– Mark Twain
Art by Carl Brandt.