Annie Dillard on the Winter Solstice
"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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