Do painters overdose on paint? Do bakers tire of flour; do gardeners get sick to death of dirt? I wonder this, as I lie in bed in the early morning, thinking about how I travel through my days gorging on words.

We live in a wide, fast-moving torrent, a Columbia, a Colorado, a Mississippi River of words, and sometimes I think we writers have the hardest time of all staying afloat. We flit around our computers like desperate minnows, gulping headlines, slurping tweets and posts and emails. Then we order our waterlogged minds to Swim! Focus! Take just a few words and make one tiny sentence, and then another one and another one!

It is an act of such tremendous will, such concentration, that it’s a wonder we’re able to do it at all.

What enables me to focus on writing is reading. Not the waves of emails, tweets, posts and updates, but words that have been composed with care and reverence: a poem, an essay, a story, a novel, a psalm. I start most days with a cup of coffee and a book. This morning, it was The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, a lovely volume by essayist Brenda Miller and poet Holly J. Hughes.

Pick up the right book and the rushing onslaught of the world’s words settles into calming, healing currents.  Hughes writes of her summers spent on a commercial fishing boat in Alaska and how she used Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh’s simple phrase—Breathing in, I breathe in the world; breathing out, I release my thoughts—to ease the transition from what she called her “wheel-watch mind”—the level of attentiveness required to steer the boat through tricky waters—to a parallel but more open kind of mindfulness: the poet’s “focused attention and sacred reverence to all that we meet each day.”

“And then we can write it down,” she concludes this first chapter.

And then we can experience what is so mysteriously wonderful about the act of writing: what actually happens when we write it down.

At a conference on Alzheimer’s disease last week, I heard the phrase, “We are hard-wired for green,” meaning that we respond to green trees, grass, growth in a visceral way that transcends and outlasts dementia. Hard-wired for green: my brain wouldn’t let the phrase go. It was the bobbing branch to which I clung as I floated a river of words that day about Alzheimer’s research, treatment, statistics, drugs. I wasn’t quite sure what I would do with it, but I knew I wanted to write about it.

But it was not until I sat down and wrote that I realized that what I loved about this simple phrase was that it transcended the context—here’s something to remember when you’re with someone who has Alzheimer’s disease—and became a much larger truth: one that is vividly clear to me right now, as I look out my window at all the trees that are newly green or on the April verge of green.

We are indeed “hard-wired for green:” as valuable a truth for writers drowning in words as it is for therapists who need to calm a broken mind. A truth I didn’t quite grasp until I calmed my own mind with a book and then fished one phrase from the ocean of words I’d heard in a day, and wrote them down.