#21 winter solstice 2015

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I love the fact that in our modern sense of winter I can grow a Myer lemon in my house. I remember in 2011 after our trip to Italy I was inspired to try. Each year since then my friends make fun of my spindly tree that hangs low with two or three lemons each season. With our warm house and digital communication I can grow a lemon, take images of my pots on drawings and share the days of diminishing light with far flung friends. It is a way to find meaning and my way through the maze of a dark and hectic season. The solstice is literally a moment of pause. Writing and photographing is another form of pausing time to find the beautiful, the peaceful, and the mix of mystery that vibrates between the historical and modern worlds.

21 winter 2015.jpg "A taste for winter, a love for winter vistas -- a belief that they are as beautiful and seductive in their own way, and as essential to the human spirit and the human soul as any summer scene -- is part of the modern condition. Wallace Stevens, in his poem "The Snow Man," called this new feeling "a mind of winter," and he identified it with our new acceptance of a world without illusions, our readiness to live in a world that might have meaning but that doesn't have God. A mind of winter, a mind for winter, not sensing the season as a loss of warmth and light, and with them hope of life and divinity, but ready to respond to it as a positive, and even purifying, presence of something else -- the beautiful and peaceful, yes, but also the mysterious, the strange, the sublime -- is a modern taste."
--Adam Gopnick

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