Window Watchers.

It snowed all day yesterday - and there was rain and heavy wind, too - so Lily and I stayed inside and made pancakes and watched from our window. At one point in the morning, the top headline on CNN read: Seriously, just stay home. We did, and the day passed slowly: we worked, we read, we went to bed early. Not so long ago, this level of inactivity might have made me antsy; these days, though, I'm learning to embrace seasons, ones that occur internally, and the ones passing outside my living room window. Nothing happened today, I told my parents on the phone last night.

Sometimes, in winter, that's okay.

Wishing you all a very happy Valentine's Day. I'm spending mine outside the city, celebrating a friend's birthday in a very top-secret fashion (more on that later). I'll be back next week with a new POV post; in the meantime, reading material for the weekend:

-Fruit loaf and sponge cake by George Orwell.
-Italian pasta divas.
-Beautiful books with curious titles: Stories of Strange Women; Travels of a Rolled Oat; Stars, etc.
-And lastly, on heartbreak: "[Its] purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open…make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life. And you do."

See you Tuesday. Photos via my Instagram.

Li'l Lenox.

This is Yung Lenox. He's seven. He likes rap and he likes to draw. What happens when those two passions collide? See below (and here, and here, too). 

See also:
1) If I slip, then I'm slippin'.
2) Circuses in the forests.
3) Children with swag.

Such Great Kites.

Gerco de Ruijter takes photos using a camera (of course) and a kite, capturing landscapes and the tops of trees the way a bird might see them. The results are spectacular.

Visit Gerco de Ruijter's website, here. Found via Design Ark. Happy Wednesday!

PS: For another perspective: thoughts on looking up.

Lights In the Attic.

Filmmaker Vera van Wolferen got an early start as an artist, using cardboard refrigerator boxes to craft houses and spaceships, even a makeshift gas station and a post office for her dolls. Today, she makes lamps by hand out of the same material. There's a house with a window in the attic and a ladder to climb out ("to get closer to the stars and moon"), and a towering lighthouse. They're stunning and sophisticated, but, says Vera, "I'm still a girl making things out of cardboard."

Visit Vera's Etsy shop, here. (That's her, building a boat, above.)

Happy Though Human.

In a 1959 book addressing "nearly every important problem of everyday life," W. Beran Wolfe writes: If you observe a really happy man, you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator.

I'm tempted to spend these last few frozen weeks of winter in hiding, but why not write a symphony (or a letter)? Build a boat (or draw all over your bedroom walls)? Look for dinosaurs (or new books, or new music, new recipes, shapes in the clouds)? It's how to be happy, says the author of this book, though cold, though restless, though human.

Thanks, things magazine. Have a wonderful start to the week!