I’ve always said, “Writing crystallizes thought.”

I believe it too, but if you’d ask me what I mean by that, I’d be hard pressed to answer definitively. I just know it. I’ve experienced it. I can feel it in my bones.

Anyway, I’ve been stuck–emotionally…mentally–for a long time. It probably began with my father’s passing, but the full tarry mire of stuck-ness didn’t arrive until my son’s death 20 years later.

In those first grieving days a dear friend told me I should write, and I knew that–I’m a writer, after all. But sometimes you can’t write because you’re so afraid of what might come spilling out. Will it be very ugly? Will there be a bloody massacre of words in death throes strewn across my page? Will I discover the painfully naked shell of the person who lurks among the shadows inside? Worse than that, what if somebody else discovers it all?

Several years ago I was laid off from my job in the drilling industry, and of course, that’s always an unsettling experience. My response was to turn to God and pour my heart out to him. About everything. I told him that I wanted to write, “this book that’s in me.” And I asked him to help me be the writer he meant for me to be, if it was his will.

Within one year, two book deals were dropped squarely into my lap from out of the blue. Tailor-made for me! Imagine. Nobody gets published like that; but, miraculously, I did. I felt my prayers had been answered. Yet, THE book still remains incomplete. Heck, it’s barely started.

It (the book), and other parts of me, have been compartmentalized. I am fragmented, and I’ve picked up all of the broken pieces and tucked them safely into their own little rooms and closed the doors.

The problem with that is that “self” is a whole. It’s like a hologram. A hologram’s most fascinating property is the way it stores information about a scene. If a piece of a hologram is broken off, the entire scene is still viewable through the little piece. This happens because the information of the scene is present in every part of the hologram. It is this property of the hologram’s ability to contain the whole within its parts that has made it interesting to theoretical physicists—but I think it has psychological implications as well.

Try as we might, walling off and living with a select few of our broken pieces can never work. Even our tiniest shards contain the information of our entire truth. We cannot escape, or insulate ourselves from our whole truth indefinitely. We will stumble upon it among the fragments again and again.

So, today I begin writing again. I will go to the painful spots. I will experience both revelry and tears. It must be done. Because what is an artist without thoughts and devoid of sensation, but a land of drought with nothing to offer—and all for so much vain toiling at an impossible task.