The Fallow Season in Creativity

A quiet return to what is already there

There are seasons in a creative life that don’t look like anything at all.

No finished work.

No clear direction.

No visible progress.

Just a sense of something shifting beneath the surface,

and the uncomfortable feeling of not knowing what it is yet.

I have been here more times than I can count.

In the early years, I resisted it.

I thought I had lost something.

That I had drifted too far from my work.

That I needed to find my way back as quickly as possible.

So I would push.

Start something new.

Sign up for a course.

Try to force clarity where there was none.

But over time, I began to recognise this space for what it is.

Not a failure.

Not a pause.

But a necessary season.

In agriculture, land is sometimes left fallow.

Untouched.

Unworked.

Left alone to rest.

Not because it has nothing to give —

but because it has given so much.

And in that resting, something essential happens.

Nutrients return.

Structure rebuilds.

Life gathers quietly beneath the surface.

From the outside, it looks empty.

But it is anything but.

Creative work moves in the same way.

There are seasons of output —

where ideas come easily,

where work just flows,

where everything feels alive and visible.

And then there are seasons like this.

Where the work becomes quieter.

More internal.

Less certain.

⸻

I am in one of those seasons now.

In between things.

The studio is being built.

My practice is shifting.

Something new is forming — but it doesn’t yet have a clear shape.

There are moments where I feel the pull to rush ahead.

To define it.

To name it too soon.

But I’ve learned that this is the moment to do the opposite.

To wait.

⸻

Because this is where the real work is happening.

Not in the making,

but in the becoming.

⸻

I notice it in small ways.

In what I am drawn to.

In the materials I keep returning to.

In the ideas that won’t quite leave me alone.

In the way my attention lingers.

Weeds give something back...

writes nature writer Richard Mabey.

They green over the dereliction we have created… Their willingness to grow in even the most hostile environments means that they insinuate the idea of wild nature into places otherwise quite shorn of it.

There is something in that which feels deeply familiar.

This quiet insistence of life.

Even in the gaps.

Even in the uncertainty.

The yearning for a simpler time is not nostalgia.

It is a pull towards something we already know —

something that has been obscured by noise, urgency, and the need to constantly produce.

The fallow season returns us to that knowing.

It asks different things of us.

Not:

What can I make?

But:

What is asking to emerge?

Not:

How do I move forward?

But:

What is already here?

There is a kind of trust required here.

A willingness to sit in the not knowing.

To resist the urge to fill the space too quickly.

To allow the work to gather in its own time.

This is not always comfortable.

There are days where it feels like nothing is happening.

Where doubt creeps in.

Where the absence of visible work feels like absence altogether.

But I have come to understand that this is part of the cycle.

As essential as the making itself.

Because when the work returns —

and it always does —

it comes with a different depth.

A different clarity.

Something that could not have been forced.

So if you find yourself here —

In a quiet season.

In between things.

Unsure of what comes next.

You are not lost.

You are in the field,

left open,

resting,

becoming.

And beneath the surface,

something is already growing.

A few quiet questions to sit with

• What am I being asked to rest from right now?

• Where am I trying to force clarity too soon?

• What keeps returning, even when I try to move away from it?

• What might be quietly gathering beneath the surface?

If you feel called pull an oracle or tarot card holding each question.

If this resonates, and you’d like to continue walking alongside these rhythms, I share reflections, prompts, and seasonal practices in Stories from the Studio, sent with the new and full moons.