winter

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.

While snow fell carelessly
floating indifferent in eddies of
rooftop air, circling the black
chimney-cowls,

a spring night entered
my mind through the tight-closed window,
wearing

a loose Russian shirt of
light silk.
For this, then,
that slanting
line was left, that crack, the pane
never replaced.

As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater. So is my word that it goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

When it snows she has no fear for her household; for all of them are clothed in scarlet wool.

There is not a creature on earth but God provides its sustenance.