Honoring the Cycles and Seasons of Our Creative Lives
On taking breaks, the sacred pause, and letting yourself regenerate. Also, notebooks, keeping track, and rekindling joy when you feel blah.
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Gifts of the Fallow Season in Your Creativity
I’ve been thinking about the value of taking breaks in your art-making, particularly taking breaks from whatever your primary art form or creative pursuit is. Your break might be for a week or two, perhaps several months. The lives of creative people are filled with stories of these hiatuses—sometimes of many years—which led to wonderful outpourings later.
What’s striking about these breaks is that, afterwards, something new and profound often breaks forth, like new shoots from the springtime soil after a winter. Because our creativity, like all of life, moves in seasons and cycles. And we need to learn to recognize and honor these, to allow for the fallow periods when the soil needs time to regenerate.
What I’ve found in my own creative life is that these periods of sacred pause can be so fertile. Sometimes a leap in ability presents itself when I return to my beloved art form after a time away, as if some vital integration of understanding or learning has been happening in the dark. Sometimes it’s a radically new perspective, style, voice, or view that emerges, that needed time away from the old worn grooves of habit to be birthed.
Because I become miserable and lost in my life after only a couple of weeks away from creative activity, I prefer to fill these sacred pauses with another form of art-making, as I’m currently doing by pausing from writing poems to pursue visual art.
I’ve started to feel a wonderful growing hunger in me for language, a longing to return to the pen and to words, but I’m not rushing to fill that hunger yet. I’m letting it grow and take its time. And I definitely intend to keep playing with drawing and painting too, because it feeds me in a very different way.
Notebooks, Journaling, and Keeping Track
I have kept a journal for daily reflections (and morning pages, scribblings, and things like gratitude practice) since I was nine years old. I also have a ring-bound notebook I use for first drafts of creative writing because I prefer to write these long-hand.
I have used a Franklin day planner for appointments, to-do lists, and weekly notes for decades. I’d be lost without it. This is a key element in the Sacred Time Management system that I teach, and in the process I use for staying in motion towards my heart’s dreams and whatever matters most to me. The planner also has sections for things like lists of books to read, movies to watch, and other helpful reminders. I know lots of folks use their phones nowadays for most of this, but I prefer to be on my phone as little as possible. I try to keep my phone in another room from wherever I am or all the way across the room as much as I can. I don’t want the distraction and interruptions—these are terrible for a creative life; they’re terrible for the soul life. And I really love the feel of paper and pen. There’s something very different about the tactile nature of recording things on paper and being able to see them all easily at a glance, to flip through many weeks or pages, rather than having it all parsed out on a little screen.
Recently, I started an art journal to log what I made or did creatively that day and any other helpful notes, such as tools or color mixes I like or ideas. But I found pretty quickly that it felt like a chore, rather than a helpful aid, to have to record things daily, so I’ve stopped for now. I think I’ll just use it for visual art notes and ideas rather than tracking everything I make.
I have 3 notebooks for tracking my health—one solely to track the medications I took that day, one to record daily symptoms, significant measurements like weight or blood work, and treatments I had—periodically, I stop recording in this one or slow down, as it sometimes feels like too much focus on the negative symptoms—and one to record notes from treatment sessions and research. These have been invaluable on my healing journey.
Even with all this tracking, or maybe because of it, the system is imperfect. Many significant things go unrecorded, or I can’t find them. Partly that’s because I never want any of this to become drudgery. Mostly, because I don’t remember to write everything down, or don’t get to it, and it gets forgotten. Still, it’s far better than trying to hold it in my head or relying on memory.
I’ve also been playing for months with bits of illustrated journaling in my daily journal. Mostly, my illustration is confined to lettering, which I enjoy and feel more confident about than drawing. I illustrate the date each day and sometimes other headings and lists. I keep a bag of colored pens and highlighters with my journal for this purpose. It’s brought an element of fun, color, and delight into my journal practice that has been a boon, and makes my journal so pretty to look at.
Weekly Wonders—The Sacred Pause
This week, instead of taking in a bunch of new inspiration—whether in art or nature—I found myself slowing way down, pausing with the solstice, and using that sacred pause to its fullest.
We had our Summer Solstice fire circle, which was beautiful, deep, and good. Some heartfelt reflections emerged as we celebrated what we were grateful for about the season of springtime just departing, and honored where we find ourselves now and the new longings growing in us for the seasons ahead, the time between now and the Winter Solstice.
As I shared last week, the Summer Solstice is a particularly powerful window of time for setting or re-setting intentions, calling in prayers or wishes, and getting clear on what we desire to bring forth in the coming months, the second half of the year. Astrologers also say that right now we are supported in dreaming big, transforming limiting patterns and perspectives, and calling in our heart’s true desires.
The day after our solstice fire circle, Don and I made a smaller fire and reviewed where we are in relationship to the dream we had named as our Breakthrough Dream for 2025. That dream was all about moving to Costa Rica and building a home and community there. But we’ve had to put that dream on hold to focus on my health. And that’s given us time to reconsider and reflect. It has raised deep questions for us about where and how we want to live—questions we don’t yet have answers to.
One thing is clear: Now is a time for both of us to focus on healing. So we let go of our former Breakthrough Dream, and named a new one, centered around profound healing, healing in service to All Life.
Then, we created a new intention to call in Divine guidance around where and how we are to live in community. We did some processes to call on the spirits of nature to support us in that as well.
We also took some of the ashes from our firepit, ashes from many moons of sacred fire circles, and sprinkled them around the perimeter of our home and gardens, calling in blessings and protection.
We cleaned and refreshed our altars.
And we rested a lot throughout the weekend, not going out anywhere.
It felt so good to align with the solstice in this way, to call in clarity and vision, to reset our course for the second half of the year, to prepare the way.
The rest of the week, I’ve found myself incredibly tired and sleeping so much. Part of me gets frustrated by this, and a bit alarmed, wanting to have more hours in the day to get things done. But another wiser part knows this is a necessary cycle, that resting is one of the very best ways to heal. And this too shall pass.
I’ve also been irritable and feeling blah, not lit up the way I had been. And what I realized about that was that it’s okay. This is a cycle too. I can let these feelings move on through, not wallow in them or feed them, but not resist them or make them wrong. I can feel what I’m feeling, honor this cycle and the wisdom in it—it’s asking for more space for myself and to attune to some inner needs—and then gently begin to rekindle attention, wonder, small sparks of joy.
I’ll share some sparks with you below to help you honor your inner seasons and rekindle joy if you’re feeling blah. These weekly sparks are for paid subscribers.