Rob McCall

Just as we store up fuel and food during the warm months to sustain us through the cold, we can store up plans, dreams and visions during the cold months to inspire and guide us when the leaves again return to the trees. It is a time to look back and pack up the past, then look forward to form the future.

Plot out your next garden or book or painting or wedding. Sketch the new boat or the new out-building or the new world. Dream up new schemes to save money or energy or time or the planet. Envision a trip beyond the far corners of your town, or beyond the far corners of your mind. In a warm window, start seeds of broccoli and beauty, cilantro and silence, hollyhocks and hope, cabbage and compassion, peas and peace, to enrich the dreams of a bleak midwinter.

Some Glad Morning: Holding Hope in Apocalyptic Times. Wainscott, New York: Pushcart Press, 2020, p. 108, "She Sleeps." 

John Gray

“If you can do anything,” he told me, “then the solution to time scarcity is only to do the things that you really think are worth doing, and nothing else.”

Nikki Giovanni

Her staying power over half a century comes from a stream of acclaimed work, her proclivity for a punishing schedule of tours and readings, and a fearlessness born of not caring what foolish people think.

"The best thing you can do for yourself is to not pay attention," Giovanni said during a video interview from her home in Christiansburg, Va.

"People who pay attention all end up on drugs or alcohol, or crazy, or mean," she added. "You can't let people you don't know decide who you are."  

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/books/nikki-giovanni-make-me-rain.html