It’s snowing again. Es schneit. Il neige. Det snöar. I don’t believe it will ever stop snowing. It is going to simply pile up and up and up until we can walk out our bedroom window onto a shifting landscape of cold pale light. I’m drowning in snow. My eyes are starving for color, but instead it’s wind-whipped and white everywhere I look. My eyelids froze shut when I was walking outside yesterday, eyelashes glued together by snowflakes and tears. It sounds poetic, but it felt strange and disorienting.

There’s no color in the Maine landscape right now, which means I must find it elsewhere, and right now, “elsewhere” is a screen. But Kilian Schöenberger’s photographs are gorgeous and make me view the winter landscape with a little more forgiveness. It can be beautiful, despite my cabin fever. 

I love how Schöenberger captures the patterns of trees and mountains—the layers and the abstracted shapes, the geometric logic that lies beneath a seemingly lush and wild landscape.

He also has a series inspired by the Brothers Grimm fairytales. I feel like I’ve been a bit heavy on the fairytale stuff lately, but jeez, I couldn’t NOT post this:  Or this:

Straight-up magical. No other way to put it.

In other wintery Sunday news, I’ve been making myself feel better about the Maine winter by watching a series of short films produced by PBS and Alaska Public Media called “Indie Alaska.” Look! A place in the world that is colder and snowier than Maine! The documentaries are short, and each one features a different person who is living and working in Alaska. There’s a shockingly attractive family jug band (can I join?), an aurora hunter, and a ski train polka meister. Every film is inspiring in its own way. It also makes me think about my work (I write profiles of builders, craftsmen, and makers in Maine) and how I can improve it. Being charged with someone else’s story feels (I know this sounds cheesy) kind of sacred to me. I’m always thinking about how I can tell these stories more skillfully—with more empathy and honesty. I’ve been a writer for seven years now, but I’m still learning.

Anyway, enough about me. Go peer into someone else’s life for a bit and try to forget about this ridiculous blizzard.