These days my usual steady intake of media-of-all-kinds has slowed dramatically. I’m forgetting to check in with my lit blogs, I’ve ignored the Times for days at a time, facebook isn’t tempting me with its time-suck ways, and I don’t even think I have library books checked out at the moment*.  I’m making more, I’m reading less. Various happenings of the last months might explain my need to craft, to make, to create, even while my brain slows down and shuts off for a while. I hope it reengages soon, but I’m content to keep making until it does.

Even in the midst of my reading desert, though, I’ve still been taking random selections to page through on the bus every day. Earlier this week it was Adrienne Rich:

We are driven to odd attempts; once it would not have occured to
me to put out in a boat, not on a night like this.
 
Still, it was an instrument, and I had pledged myself to try any
instrument that came my way. Never to refuse one from conviction
of incompetence.
…
I had always heard that darkness and water were a threat.
 
In spite of this, darkness and water helped me arrive here.
 
I watched the lights on the shore I had left for a long time; each
one, it seemed to me, was a light I might have lit, in the old days.
 …
whatever it was, the image that stopped you, the one on which you
came to grief, projecting it over & over on empty walls.
 
Now to give up the temptations of the projector; to see instead the
web of cracks filtering across the plaster.
 
To read there the map of the future, the roads radiating from the
initial split, the filaments thrown out from that impasse.
 
To reread the instructions on your palm; to find there how the
lifeline, broken, keeps its direction.
 
To read the etched rays of the bullet-hole left years ago in the
glass; to know in every distortion of the light what fracture is.
 
To put the prism in your pocket, the thin glass lens, the map
of the inner city, the little book with gridded pages.
 
to pull yourself up by your own roots; to eat the last meal in
your old neighborhood.

Words to put in my pocket, to pull out often, to return to.

(*Nope. I do. I’m still me.)