This is a photograph taken of me at 13, just a few months after a terrible car accident left the mother who was driving me home from school, paralyzed, her eldest daughter to a long series of knee surgeries and her youngest, my friend and schoolmate, in a coma from which she blessedly awoke.

I was lucky. I just lost my front tooth which was reimplanted by my dentist after we found it intact in my blue canvas book bag.

But I also lost my voice. It was the early 70s and we just didn’t talk about scary stuff like that back then.

It wasn’t until I saw my classmate several decades later, at our 20th high school reunion, that the memories of the accident were reconjured and I began to write about it for the first time. Then all I did was write. As a journal entry, a newspaper column, a radio essay, long-form memoir, short story, shorter form memoir, a poem, an even shorter essay and then, finally, a story for the stage. Memory so wants to remember.

All that writing generated an enormous amount of pages and some serious writing practice and has become the well I draw from when I teach. But perhaps even more importantly, those drafts and those hours gifted me with emotional and spiritual healing … and my voice.

You can read about that writing journey here in the Fall 2015 issue of Medill Magazine (pages 26-27.)

And if you live in the Chicago area, you can hear me tell the story, using the voice that was silenced so many years ago, at the October Story Sessions show at The City Winery on October 18th, 2015. I’ll be letting you know more about that show as details become available.

“In all chaos, there is a cosmos. In all disorder, a secret order.”

                                                                                       — Carl Jung

Ever since I saw this video of salt responding to changes in vibration and sound frequency, I’ve been mulling over how chaos wants to be art.

Salt is randomly spread by a salt shaker on a flat, black surface and subjected to different sounds and vibrations. After each round of sound and vibration, the salt shape-shifts into distinct, repeating patterns. It’s exquisite and mind-boggling. Worth a look.

I believe that writing, which is a physical activity, shakes the ‘salt’ loose inside of us. Fingertips to keys or hands moving across a page in a constant rhythm – in combination with concentrated thought – invites energy, frequency and vibration, the three elements from the Tesla quote from the video.

“If you want to find the secrets of the universe,” Tesla wrote, “think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”

This is the added beauty in writing personal narrative. We aren’t only making art from life, we open up the channels for personal discovery. The secrets of our own universes. Out of the chaos of experience.

It’s not only true about the written arts. The photograph below is a close up of frost on a window in the second floor of my house. See the patterning?

In the photograph below,  ivy vines take a pleasing shape on another upstairs window.

In the photograph at the top of this post, a leaf that fell onto a Chicago street brings out the pattern in the concrete.

We think of falling, freezing and growing as random acts. Organic to life itself. But there can be, as Tesla wrote, a secret order in the disorder. An entire cosmos to discover in the chaos.

A reason, if you needed one, to sit down and write.

Window photographs by Ellen Blum Barish. Street photograph by Gary Lang.