Over the last six months, for the first time I can remember, I didn’t want to write at all anymore. I have never felt less like a writer.  I didn’t know what to do next.

2012 was a slow year. I wrote a few stories. The stories are shabby, too - weakly pleading a case for sorrow unearned. Sometimes I felt the happy flip of my stomach when a sentence came out shiny, but shiny sentences and dime-store sentiments are not the thing. 

I realized, slogging through the sodden attempts, pages heavy with trial and error that fell to the side of error - what the problem was. I saw myself on a trapeze swinging wildly between caring too much and too little. I cared how I did things more than what I did, and cared how I said things more than what I said. 

Whether I like it or not, I’m a solid person happiest in the kitchen with a pot of soup and a radio. The revolutionary inside me lives mainly in my heart, and these last years, like Bukowski’s bluebird, I’ve rarely let him out. It doesn’t help. 

I’m not as edgy as I think I am. For example, I like symbolism. To admit this, I feel like writing’s stodgier version of Margaret Thatcher. I want to write about having, and not having - money, love, and hope. But not the way I thought I would. All I know has undergone tremendous schism - my private world warm harbor, life outside it ever more roiling. 

The mind gets lost in it. I still find myself wishing for a thing that will not come. I think instead about a wild-eyed woman on her front porch swing holding a bottle of unopened nail polish remover, a dog in front of her, and a flea comb. “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.” Fortitude is a funny thing. Keep your mouth shut and end up shorn. I think of the same woman half a world away with her hands on the plinth of a classical deity's statue, it’s marble mouth poised to swallow the sun. Lamb or lion? I still dream of lions.

I’m freer now. I worry less. This creative thing I do, quite privately now, is a strange business. More than ever, by necessity, it is very solitary. I don’t talk about it anymore with anyone, because I’ve said too much already. I write about it here, but mainly as a record of my own thoughts. A year from now, I won’t feel the same, and with these ramblings I can see what I thought today.  

I think about it now, digging into work I never meant to do. Sometimes I feel like the shepherd tending little, lost lambs, and (ever less but still some) I am also a lost lamb looking for a shepherd. That is what the work demands. The work is the work, not my identity or connection to the world around me. This quiet distinction makes the world new again through my fingertips. 

There's a writing prompt in there for you somewhere. Are you a lamb or a lion? Sheep or shepherd?