I've been house sitting for a friend during the last week. She had to leave town, and her cat had been ill, so I stayed in her house to make sure the kitty was okay. Giving him injections didn't go real well, but he seems to be doing really well in spite of that.

One of the many things I realized during the week at her house, which offered a refreshing perspective on my regular life, is how much I depend on the radio. I couldn't figure out how to work the clock/radio in her kitchen, so I took one of my radios over there.

And as I thought about that, I realized I have something that I started wanting a long time ago, and it happened so gradually that I didn't notice it all at once.

One of the first things I wanted when I began doing Shadow Work was to read more. When I was younger, I read quite a lot. I remember saying to a friend that I could be quite happy living in a library, though that was also about doing historical research, which I also loved.

At some point I stopped reading much, for several reasons. For one, I had read several books that had sent me off on huge projects. For example, I read a biography of the Wright brothers and spent 3 years trying to write a screenplay about them. Another reason was that it seemed another way I was removing myself from my family, and I wanted to spend more time with my daughter. I wasn't conscious enough at the time, however, that when I stopped reading, I simply started watching more movies. I had, and still have, a craving for stories.

During my first Shadow Work training, I practiced doing the What's At Risk process over and over before I really got it. And one of those What's At Risks was about reading. What was at risk for me to do more reading?

I no longer remember the specifics of the process, except that it somehow related to my ex-husband's father, Lloyd Swift, a man I admired and loved. Somehow it seemed I had given up reading in part because of losing Lloyd. I can't remember the reasoning now or how the two were connected.

Several years later, I believe I did a Shadow Work process about wanting to read more.

I've found over the years that Shadow Work processes integrate in different ways. I once did a Tombstone process and immediately packed my things into my car and prepared to move -- that's the kind of rapid effect a process can have. In other cases, I felt a big emotional shift right away and saw a change take place over days or weeks. In a few cases, usually with Sovereign work (getting support and blessing), I noticed the change after a year or more had passed and realized it had happened gradually.

So it apparently was with reading. Because it struck me that I listen to NPR for at least 2 hours every day, sometimes more. And listening to NPR is reading. I'm doing it with my ears instead of my eyes, but there's no doubt it's reading. The stories I hear are about world affairs, through the eyes of a correspondent. They're fictional to that degree. But there's an extra thrill, actually, to know that they're "true."

And I love listening to the radio so much I don't know how long I could go without it. If I got stuck on the proverbial desert island, a radio is one of the things I would miss most. It would be partly because I'd be out of touch with the world. But it would also be a lack of stories.