Category Archives: Quote

“The cultivation of Christmas trees” from Brainpickings.org

“There are several attitudes towards Christmas, some of which we may disregard: The social, the torpid, the patently commercial…” – T.S. Eliot

In a rare gem of trailblazing vision from Brainpickings.org:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/12/24/t-s-eliots-the-cultivation-of-christmas-trees/

A Winter Night by Sara Teasdale

A Winter Night by Sara Teasdale

My window-pane is starred with frost,
The world is bitter cold to-night,
The moon is cruel, and the wind
Is like a two-edged sword to smite.

God pity all the homeless ones,
The beggars pacing to and fro.
God pity all the poor to-night
Who walk the lamp-lit streets of snow.

My room is like a bit of June,
Warm and close-curtained fold on fold,
But somewhere, like a homeless child,
My heart is crying in the cold.

Art by Frances Ridley Havergal, 1885.

May magic be

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”
Neil Gaiman

Art by Alphonse Mucha.

What if…

What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself…”
Friedrich Nietzsche

A yet lived life comes with new trousseau of thought and feeling. At times we have to give in to treading softly and happily as if we have to relive it all over again…and there are never too many moonlit paths, nor enough spiders.
That is why we write, to feel in the mouth the sky of the life already-lived.

Write down all the things that make you so goddamn glad you’re alive. Simple things like: watering plants, the sunlight that seeps on your bed at 10:00 A.M, smelling the crispy autumn air, dancing in the rain or playing in the snow, watching the sunrise or sunset, decorating your room with fairy lights, googling for surrealistic paintings, lighting too many candles in mid-days, eating pizza while watching your favorite show, searching how many people have the same name as you in the world…

Write down more ways and words to say: “I love you”… Armors for moments when you feel depleted and drenched of kindness. Dissolve this by writing.

This is my predicament, situations and people that make me forget who I am, how kind I am, who make my heart turn to stone, but who never, ever, were permitted to steal the real Me.

Léon Frédéric – Flemish Lace Maker

Winter is cold-hearted

Winter is cold-hearted,
Spring is yea and nay,
Autumn is a weathercock
Blown every way:
Summer days for me
When every leaf is on its tree;
– from “Summer” by Christina Rossetti

Art by Florence Harrison, illustration to “The Poems of Christina Rossetti”.

The cold earth slept below by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The cold earth slept below by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The cold earth slept below;
Above the cold sky shone;
And all around,
With a chilling sound,
From caves of ice and fields of snow
The breath of night like death did flow
Beneath the sinking moon.

The wintry hedge was black;
The green grass was not seen;
The birds did rest
On the bare thorn’s breast,
Whose roots, beside the pathway track,
Had bound their folds o’er many a crack
Which the frost had made between…

Art by Vladimir Kireev, “Winter”, 2014.