Once upon a time, bloggers used to share poetry on February 2nd to mark St. Brigid’s Day and the Imbolc festival, which span the first couple days of February and mark, like Groundhog Day and Candlemas, the midway point between the Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox.

Largely, the practice has faded away, but I’m fond of it, so today you get a poem by Billy Collins, which I think may resonate with a certain number of us in the wake of the last week:

Shoveling Snow With Buddha
    ~Billy Collins

In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over a mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair tied in a knot,
a model of concentration.

Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word
for what he does, or does not do.

Even the season is wrong for him.
In all his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid?
Is this not implied by his serene expression,
that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?

But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.

This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.

He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway
you could back the car down easily
and drive off into the vanities of the world
with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.

All morning long we work side by side,
me with my commentary
and he inside his generous pocket of silence,
until the hour is nearly noon
and the snow is piled high all around us;
then, I hear him speak.

After this, he asks,
can we go inside and play cards?

Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk
and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table
while you shuffle the deck
and our boots stand dripping by the door.

Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes
and leaning for a moment on his shovel
before he drives the thin blade again
deep into the glittering white snow.

In previous years, I’ve shared poems by Vadim Kagan, Tom Disch, Sharon Olds, Emily Dickinson, Kyle Dargan, Barbara Crooker, William Stafford, Mary Oliver (twice), Wislawa Szymborska, Stuart Dischell, Jean Esteve, John Frederick Nims, Grace Paley, Heather McHugh, and Barbara Hamby, all of which are worth another read.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Everyone on my block shoveled, so for the first time in the 22 years I’ve lived here, you can safely walk the whole square. (This stops being true in short order.)

2. My friend Sergio reached out to ask if I wanted to come hang out with their two small kiddos. I did, so I spent a couple hours answering “Why…” questions, admiring the emergency vehicles that pulled up to their block, and making funny voices for toys so they could get a little work done. Sergio and Michelle fed me lunch and Sergio provided rides to and from their metro station, so it felt like a little vacation from my life.

3. Jess and I were the only ones from our team who were going to be able to make the game, and you need at least three players to not forfeit. So I pinged Aroush and Jordan, who braved the bad conditions to come to our rescue. The other team didn’t have any women, which is also a prerequisite, so they forfeited to us. We then played 4×4 and beat them anyway, which felt satisfying indeed.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday at That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share bookish discoveries we made last year. I thought I’d focus on writers. Of the 59 authors I read, 39 were new to me. Here are ten of those whose books I gave four stars to:

1. B.K. Borison, Good Spirits (romantasy)
2. Abiola Bello, Love in Winter Wonderland (YA romance)
3. John Scalzi, Starter Villain (sci fi adventure)
4. Kate McKinnon (yes, that one), The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science (kidlit adventure)
5. Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time (sci fi)
6. Emily Henry, Book Lovers (romance)
7. Alexene Farol Follmuth, Twelfth Knight (YA fiction)
8. Sylvie Cathrall, Letters to the Luminous Deep (romantasy)
9. A. Kendra Greene, No Less Strange or Wonderful (nature essays)
10. Sara Raash, The Nightmare Before Kissmas (romantasy)

I’ll definitely be checking out more books by these authors in the future.

How about you? Did you stumble across any authors last year whose books will hit your tbr list?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. I went to the big Safeway in Georgetown last weekend and ran into one of my middle school players and her girlfriend while I was there. It was really nice to see them and to touch base.

2. My team’s season started this week, and half the team was unable to make the game. A friend had offered to sub in when I needed an extra player, and while I hadn’t expected to accept on week one, it felt great to see him after a couple of months.

3. Sunday offered conversational snow — the sort that you remark upon, but which requires no work from you. I tucked myself into boots and the hot pink cape my mother made me and took myself out for a walk. As I paused on the bridge to take a picture of the snow drifting down into the creek below (the snow did not show up in the shot, so it looks just like every other day), I noticed the girl behind me paused as well. I glanced her way and she said, “I’m sorry. I had to take your photo. You were the only color in the entire landscape. Do you mind?” And I didn’t, because I was.

Before we get to That Artsy Reader Girl’s weekly Top Ten Tuesday topic, our 2026 goals, let’s check in on how I did with last year’s:

1. Read 52 books. 62 titles finished.
2. Read 25 books I own. I managed a piddly four.
3. Read more diversely (15). 18 titles were written by authors who identified as BIPOC or queer.
4. Write at least 6 non-Top Ten Tuesday posts about books this year. I managed six review posts.
5. Read more backlist titles (15 books published outside this half-decade, and at least 7 from before the year 2000). I finished 10 books from before 2020 and only two from the 1900s.
6. Read 3+ books of poetry or novels in verse. Fail, although I did finish two works of prose by poets.
7. Read more nonfiction — at least 5. 10 books.
8. Read a book by an author who lives in Africa and one who lives in Central or South America. Fail.
9. Send the books I’ve bought as gifts to the people they’re meant for. Fail.
10. Give every book I own a permanent home on a shelf. Fail

Okay, so that’s not a great track record. I read more, read more diversely, and read more nonfiction, but still leant toward recent works of fiction from the library.

Let’s see what we can do about it with some goals for this year:

1. Read 52 books. This number works for me as a target.
2. Finish at least 20 books I own.
3. Read 3 works from pre-1900, 5 books from the 20th century, and 10 books (total) published before 2021.
4. Publish reviews for all 12 months DURING 2026 (with a few days’ grace period for December).
5. Finish 1 play, 1 short story collection, and 2 books of poetry.
6. Read works by authors from at least 7 countries, at least 5 of which should be in translation.
7. Read at least 5 books by queer and/or trans writers.
8. Read 5 works of nonfiction, in at least 4 different Dewey Decimal areas.
9. Send the gift books out into the world. (I bought them so friends would get to read them. Silly to hold on to them forever.)
10. Give every book I own its own shelf space. (This should be my ultimate goal for my personal library and if I can’t figure it out, more books should move on to other bibliophiles.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Volunteering started back up this week after our holiday break. We’ve switched up groups of kids, so it’s exciting to think about sharing volleyball with a new class.

2. I got to play pickup at the elementary school by my apartment, which offered a fun time and a short commute home afterwards.

3. I was trying to make crackers out of sourdough starter discard this week, and while the outcome isn’t really a cracker, it is crisp-like and still quite tasty.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?f