winter

What is one to do with such moments, such memories, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap, or trivial? Would you not live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement?

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

No winter lasts forever, no spring skips its turn.

How many lessons of faith and beauty we should lose if there were no winter.

Plants and animals don't fight the winter; they don't pretend it's not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that's where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in it.

Keep me in the warm place of your heart where all the good dreams, memories and duas (supplications) are stored.

Every winter has its spring.

It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than to have words without a heart.