find beauty in all you do

Thank your for the nice compliment, anon! ❤

Winter is my favourite season, so I’ve a lot of recommendations. I decided to only put my absolute favourites below or otherwise this list would have become endless.

“Shapechangers In Winter” by Margaret Atwood “Winter-Lull” by D.H. Lawrence“Alms” by Edna St. Vincent Millay“Lines For Winter” by Mark Strand “The Cold Earth Slept Below” by Percy Bysshe Shelley“Winter Colony” by Anne Sexton “Good Hours” by Robert Frost“Wintering” by Sylvia Plath “Snowdrops” and “Winter Morning” by Louise Glück ”Winter Stars” and “A Winter Bluejay” by Sara Teasdale “Starlings In Winter” and “A Letter From Home" by Mary Oliver“Antelope” and “Porch In Snow” by Joanna Klink

Here are some of my favourite excerpts from poems, which don’t directly deal with winter, but are still hauntingly beautiful:

Winter is in us.                                                  —   Charles Wright, from Half February in “Appalachia”

(…) hunger,and the bitterness of deep snow.                                                            — Margaret Atwood, from The Singer Of Owls in “The Door”

I say, leave me alone, this is my winter, I will stay here if I choose                                                            — Margaret Atwood, from Hesitations Outside The Door in “Selected Poems I: 1965-1975″

snow crystals, flies, husk of bone and throat,lure of another life. (…)                                                           — Joanna Klink, from Raven in “Circadian”

The snow has quietness in it; no songs,                                                       — Anne Sexton, from Letter Written During A January Northeaster in “The Complete Poems Of Anne Sexton”

(…) Paint ghosts over everything, the sadnessof everything. We made ourselves cold. We made ourselvessnow. (…) — Richard Siken, from Landscape With Black Coats In Snow in “War Of The Foxes”

for whiteness of snow,I gave this heart                                                            — Marina Tsvetaeva, from Playacting in “Moscow In The Plague Year” [translated by Christopher Whyte] (…) snow, like silence coming from the sky,                                                — Louise Glück, from A Warm Day in “Poems 1962-2012″

I think I can rememberbeing dead. Many times, in winter,                                                            — Louise Glück, from Persephone The Wanderer in “Poems 1962-2012″

The days close to winterRough with strong sound. We hear the sea and the forest,And the flames of your torches fly, lit by others,Ripped by the wind, in the night. (…)                                                           — Louise Bogan, from The Sleeping Fury in “The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968″

I’m also very fond of Matsuo Bashō’s nature haiku. If you would like a taste of them (as well as of haiku by other Japanese poets), I can really recommend “A Haiku Garden: The Four Seasons In Poems And Prints” (it has beautiful illustrations too!).

As for prose, Angela Carter’s short story The Snow Child (found in “The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories”) has always been a favourite of mine as well as “The Snow Queen” by Hans Christian Andersen and “The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe” by C.S. Lewis. And “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens is a must-read for me every December!

Don’t get too close, his father says and turns around to work on his latest piece again.

Myths around the world challenge @thewinedarksea & @ibuzoo

We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down, and worry about our place in the dirt.