Audrey Hepburn Cooling Off On The Set Of Roman Holiday (1954)

"Grey time-worn marbles

Hold the pure Muses;

In their cool gallery,

By yellow Tiber,

They still look fair."

- Consolation by Matthew Arnold

perhaps the goddesses of old still live

i. perhaps artemis can be found in the wild girls. perhaps she is in the woman who brings signs and banners to protests, the woman who guards the wildlife that is left. perhaps in the protected forests, perhaps in the girls who tie themselves to the thousand year old sycamores, perhaps in their chains. 

ii. perhaps hestia can be found in the woman who runs the homeless shelter for women. perhaps in her wrinkled hands which knead dough over and over again to feed those without. perhaps in her eyes, which age every time another girl comes in with a hijab torn off, or her skin bruised, or her home taken from her. 

iii. perhaps athena can be found in the women who invent a new world. in the way that their computers blink as they find ways to reshape the universe. perhaps in the stars, which they will be the first to fine. perhaps in the professor of science, the woman who taught her children to be smarter than her. perhaps in the books which she writes, or the podium which she carves for herself.

iv. perhaps demeter can be found in the gardens which the caretaker in the retired community tends to. perhaps in the soil and the seeds and the stems and the little green sprout. perhaps she can be found in the girls who tend to fields of daisies, or in the girls who tend to fields of corn. perhaps in the songs the earth sings, or in the girls who still know the language. 

Her disintegration went down a shaft of phases, every one more racking than the last; for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.

Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (via quotespile)

One of my favorite stories about Artemis is that after she required Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia, she stole her away at the last moment and left a white deer in her place. After that, people disagree on what happened, but I like the story where Artemis transforms her into Hecate, because can you imagine them in the modern era?

Artemis, protector of young women and goddess of the hunt turned vigilante, hunting down the ones who attack girls in dark alleys, the ones with beer-hard hands and no sense of decency even if they’d been sober anyway.

But when Artemis finds the girls, she takes them to Hecate–Hecate, who was mortal once, led like a lamb to an altar by a man who was supposed to protect her. And sure, Artemis is the one who makes them pay, who delights in their screams and dances in the moonlight once she knows those men will be scared of the dark forever, spend their entire lives looking over their shoulders fearing her.

But Hecate… Hecate is good with herbs and potions and she understands the nightmares, the heart-pounding, sweaty hands panic that wakes them up screaming in the middle of the night, and she makes them herbal draughts to help them sleep, because unlike Artemis, Hecate understands. She isn’t vengeful, an angry older sister out for blood like Artemis. She’s the best friend, the mother, and the sister rolled all into one.

So Artemis avenges them and Hecate cares for them and the moon-goddess Selene shines her absolute brightest for them, fills every shadow with bright silver so they don’t need to be afraid of the dark anymore, and the three goddesses call these their Lost Girls, and at first Apollo was sort of skeptical but there’s no stopping Artemis when she sets her mind on something, and before Apollo quite realizes it, he’s running beside his sister, chasing a boy who couldn’t keep his hands to himself, and he’s never felt more right.

FIVE CHEESE ZITI AL FORNO

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Is this how you roll?

The excavation of the ancient city of Ur led by archeologist C. Leonard Woolley in Tell al-Muqayyar, Iraq, 1934 [859x611]

“Years of love have been forgot, in the hatred of a minute.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

Don’t you dare pity her She traded a suffering soul for a throne of bones She exchanged watchful eyes for a court of her own The seasons of the earth depended on the very breath she took She had death wrapped around her fingers and spring at her beck and call and the ruler of the heavens tasked with finding her She turned the world upside down to find freedom The daughter of flowers escaped her prison made out of roots and thorns and became the queen of death and forged her new home out of shadows and power

Persephone was the real winner (via starlightpoet)

We belonged to each other, but had lived so far apart that we belonged to others now.

André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name (via terxture)