It started several months ago, sometime after my husband Allen’s death brought inevitable change to my daily routines. I’d manage to get out of bed (another day, I can do it), shake out the kinks, make coffee, go to my piano for a while then, coffee cup in hand, settle into the reading chair that had once been his, reach for a book from the stack on the side table and begin to dip in.
I should preface this by saying that I’m one who underlines, makes margin notes, and brackets passages in books I’m reading. What I’m doing these days is dipping into some of those that I’ve read over the years, the ones that have survived a long series of cullings. I open randomly and look for pages where I’ve marked something in pencil or pen—red, blue, black, whatever. If one of these catches my interest, I’ll read on a bit or back up to see what came before. These become my morning meditation and never fail to offer some focus or inspiration to carry me through the day.
It's so freeing, not to read with intention. You just open yourself to whatever presents itself to you. The book at the top of my stack right now is Free Play—Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch. I don’t remember how I found out about it or when I bought it but I can tell I’ve come back to it several times over the years by the way it’s marked up. One passage I stumbled on today was clearly significant because I wrote the date, November 2008, next to it in green ink. In it, Nachmanovitch quotes Wendell Berry:
It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
Just what I needed to rediscover in Summer of 2026.