"Rilke considered the cold season the time for tending ones inner garden. 'In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer,' Albert Camus wrote a generation later. 'If we didn't remember winter in spring, it wouldn't be as lovely,' Adam Gopnik observed after many more revolutions of the Earth around the Sun in his lyrical love letter to winter. But if we are to reap winter's quiet and invisible spiritual rewards, it seems that special regard must be paid to day of the seasons onset as the time to set such interior intentions. That's what Annie Dillard (b. April 30, 1945) invites in a splendid meditation on the winter solstice, originally published in her 1974 masterpiece Pilgrim at Tinker Creek -- which I revisit frequently as a sort of secular scripture..." Maria Popova shares more in this beautiful post.
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