A few months ago, I started taking a random book from the Little Free Library in front of my house every day, opening it to random page, and cutting up the words to rearrange them into little poems, or koans, or divinations, then laying them out over a photomicrograph of something (a feather, a lichen, a leaf) I had encountered that day. Here is what came out: https://themarginalian.org/2025/12/07/little-free-library-divinations/
via her linked post:
Street Library Divinations: Searching for the Meaning of Life in Discarded Books and Found Objects
By Maria Popova
One day during a challenging season of being, longing for something that would turn my spiraling mind outward, knowing that a daily creative practice has always been my best medicine and that constraint is the mightiest catalyst of creativity, I decided to try applying my bird divination process to the little street library, trusting the lovely way our imagination has of surprising us and, in doing so, reminding us that even in the bleakest moments i
Every day for thirty days, I took a random book from the little street library, opened to a random page, and worked with the text on it, making no aesthetic judgments about the literary value of the books — self-help, airport romance novels, finance textbooks, breastfeeding guides, Lemony Snicket, Tolstoy, Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and the Bible were all raw material on equal par.
As every creative person knows, and as Lewis Carroll so perfectly articulated in his advice on working through difficulty in math and in life, our most original and unexpected ideas arrive not when we strain the mind at the problem, but when we relax it and shift the beam of attention to something else entirely; it is then that the unconscious shines its sidewise gleam on an unexpected solution no deliberate effort could have produced.
After reading over the page, I would take a long walk to let the words float in my mind as I knelt to look at small things — pebbles, petals, leaves, feathers, and a whole lot of that great teacher in resilience, lichen — picking one thing up to take home. The words invariably arranged themselves unconsciously into the day’s… divination? koan? poem?… that always surprised me, always revealed what I myself needed to hear that some part of me already knew.
Upon returning home, I would place the found object under my microscope and take a photograph — cellular and planetary at the same time, itself an invitation to a shift in perspective — then begin laying out the text over the image.
Words from a page in Ever After by Nora Roberts over micrograph of lichen. Available as an acrylic block.Words from a page in The Decline of Pleasure by Walter Kerr over micrograph of mica from my hometown in Bulgaria. Available as an acrylic block.Words from a page in Stuff White People Like by Christian Lander over micrograph of paperback birch leaf. Available as an acrylic block.Words from a page inWords from a page in The Life of Chuck by Stephen King over micrograph of lichen. Available as an acrylic block.
be you. 