Trying to Rescue My Mind

To my astonishment I discover it has been well over a month since I posted anything in this blog.  I have missed writing more than a phrase at a time, as one does on Facebook - but Facebook is the perfect enabler for someone with the brand of  attention deficit disorder  I seem to have in a very serious way. My ADD  takes the form of being interested, nay fascinated, in way too many things.  I am spellbound by gardening, cooking, food, politics, the politics of food, birds, travel,  ecology, the emerging world of sustainability in all things we humans need and do, wildlife and its protection, literature, poetry, art, hiking, kayaking,  and many many more.  On Facebook I can flash from one to another of these subjects, read posts, write posts, click on links, "like" new and wonderful pages and websites - a bit of pollen here, a drop of nectar there, never taking the time to really absorb anything or read it to the end.  The Internet offered too much of this mode of communication and learning already, and then I fell into a social network.  Doom.

I'm not writing in my blogs, not reading other people's blogs (okay, I AM reading my niece Jessica's blog with lots of pictures - to keep up with her life with two small children, a three year old and a new baby - it's so wonderful and funny, I am addicted), not reading many articles in any deep or thorough way, fear I am going to lose the ability to write in complete sentences, let alone put them together into paragraphs. The saving grace is books, real ones, that I can hold in my hand and read as far away from the computer as I can get.(I fear the Kindle and its kind would be the last straws for me - so, no.)  Since my last post whining about having nothing  that I felt like reading, I have found reading matter to keep me occupied. One fabulous novel (probably more slanted towards female readers than male, though by no means "chick lit") by Dana Sachs, called If You Lived Here. was one of the best contemporary novels I have ever read. Everyone to whom I have recommended it agrees. Unfortunately I followed it with one of my favorite writer's latest book - Louise Erdrich's Shadow Tag.  This is a brilliant book, but a deeply painful and disturbing one. I could not put it down, but this story of a marriage in shreds and flames left me shattered and bleeding.  The review to which I link is an accurate expression of my own thoughts and opinion on the book - so I think I'll leave it at that.

Currently I have embarked on a Ursula K. Le Guin reading binge, starting with a book of her essays called The Language of the Night, which led me into the first volume of one her young adult series, Gifts.  I hope to escape for a while from both this world of teabaggers and discord in which we are all living, as well as my own scattered and disordered world of interests and passions.  I will weed, rake leaves, turn compost and live vicariously for a while in another world.  If I can just stay off Facebook.