Working in Cycles: Letting Creativity Flow

I have learned to recognise my creativity by how it moves.

Not forward in a straight line, but in rhythms — waxing and waning, opening and closing, gathering and resting. Over time, those rhythms began to echo patterns much older than productivity or output: the moon’s cycle, the turning of the seasons, the rise and fall of my own energy and attention.

The Wheel of the Year gave language to something I was already sensing.

The sabbats and cross-quarter festivals became points of orientation — not deadlines, but markers. Places to pause, to notice what was stirring, what was receding, what was being asked for next.

Working this way didn’t make my creativity quieter.

It made it truer.

Working with tarot has become part of how I mark this rhythm.

At each New and Full Moon, I sit with the cards — not to predict or instruct, but to listen. The questions shift with the phase: what is beginning, what is asking to be seen, what is ready to be released. Over time, this has become a quiet conversation between intuition and attention, one I share with my community through my Studio Stories letters as a way of pausing together at the threshold points of the cycle.

The cards don’t tell me what to do.

They hold a mirror up to what my body already knows.

There are times in the year — and in a life — when nothing appears to be happening.

No shoots.

No visible growth.

The soil looks still.

I’ve learned not to panic in these moments.

The cycles I live by have taught me that stillness is not failure. It is preparation. Winter is not a mistake in the calendar; it is part of the intelligence of growth. The same is true in creative work. What lies dormant is often doing its most important work underground.

Trust comes from repetition — from seeing, again and again, that what looks quiet will return when the conditions are right.

Many years ago, my husband bought me a book by Glennie Kindred which opened a door I didn’t know I’d been standing beside.

Through her writing, I began to understand that living with the seasons — with nature, with the female cycle — was not nostalgic or idealised. It was practical. Grounding. Radical in its gentleness.

What began as an exploration of living slowly became, over time, a way of living cyclically. And that way of living quietly nourished my creativity. It offered me a framework spacious enough to hold change, health, ageing, responsibility, and return — without asking me to flatten any of it into constant output.

The work didn’t need to be forced.

It needed to be listened to.

I don’t follow cycles as a method. I live them.

Some seasons ask for making. Others ask for gathering, composting, or simply paying attention. Some weeks, ha few hours with my materials is all I have — and it is enough, because it arrives at the right point in the cycle.

This way of working has given me confidence when the work changes shape, goes quiet, or asks to be made differently. I recognise these moments not as failure or loss of direction, but as turning points on the wheel.

A necessary shedding.

A pause before return.

A reminder that creativity, like life, moves in seasons.

If your work ebbs.

If it shifts.

If it goes underground for a while.

You are not broken.

You are not behind.

You are not failing at being an artist.

You are alive — and your work is moving with you.

And when it’s ready, it will return.