Winter arrived and the blues, too.

This week, I am eating, sleeping, slothing.

Make something is my usual prescription against gloom. In making something — soup, a cup of coffee, a to-do list, any small act — I’m engaging mind and shifting mood.

In my writing life, too.

I can usually find poetry in the everyday. But in my dreary state, creativity plummets. That’s when I know it’s time to turn to my trusty trick: Cut & Shuffle.

Searching for a spark, I hunt through newspapers, magazines, junk mail . . . I sort, shuffle, cut, collage, embellish and erase. Poetry is often the invention of reinvention. Somewhere between found poem and collage poem, I make something new.

Today’s poem is comprised of phrases and lines borrowed from Pheasants Forever, a magazine I found in the local library’s stack of free stuff. I’m not a hunter — except for words — but this publication’s beautiful photographs, coupled with writing by editor Tom Carpenter, could make me appreciate the beauty of the sport (well, aside from the killing). In art, the literal becomes the figurative.

Sometimes it takes just a small spark — and the art of rearrangement — to lift and shift.

How about you: What are you making?

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Thank you for reading & writing.