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Drawing Dragons

I keep looking for dragons: Day 121

In October of 2000, Ursula Le Guin spoke at Literary Arts. You can listen to her speech here at the Literary Arts archive project.

Slowly, she unfolds where ideas come from. She talks about the power of the imagination, whole and true. Fire and beauty.

 

But the phrase that held me in, and that I keep coming back to all these years later is this one: “I keep looking for dragons.”

For me, it was never about fire and flight and flame. It was about the idea, the possibility, that something bigger and wilder and stronger than us could exist just on the edge of our imaginations. That we could envision something just on the other side of the mountain, ready to take flight.

“Dragons are one of the truths about us,” Le Guin said.

I have to believe that is true. I have to believe that we can BE those dragons too, alight on the edge of possibility. Full of hope and fire and flame and most of all the belief that our wings will carry us into the sky.

Sketch of a cute almost fierce drgaon in pencil no claws yet