The Quiet Season

For months, my art practice went silent. No drawings shared, no updates posted, no creative momentum visible to the outside world. It wasn't creative block - it was something deeper. An incubation I didn't know I needed until I was inside it.

The pause began to make sense this summer at an unschooling camp, in the beautiful Abington Woods near Cambridge, sitting in a field drawing mandalas while the children played freely around me. For the first time in months, I was surrounded by community that actually aligned with my values. Families who'd also chosen to step away from conventional systems. Parents who understood that learning happens through living, not through curricula. People who knew that real connection can't be rushed or scheduled or optimised.

Being there reminded me of something I'd forgotten: what it feels like when your life actually matches what you believe.

We'd made the choice to unschool years ago, rejecting the factory model of education for something more alive, more responsive to our children's actual needs and interests. We'd stepped away from conventional parenting, choosing trust over control, relationship over compliance. These weren't easy decisions, but they were aligned ones.

So why was my art practice still caught up in systems that felt hollow?

I was buying plastic-wrapped supplies online, clicking 'add to cart' from a screen, creating in ways that felt increasingly disconnected from everything I actually valued. The art itself wasn't soulless - there was still meaning in the marks, still intention in the making. But the process felt misaligned. The materials had no relationship to the earth, to heritage, to place. It was efficient, convenient, and somehow hollow.

The quiet months weren't a pause - they were a gestation. My body knew something my mind hadn't caught up to yet: that I needed my creative practice to align with the rest of my life. That if I was going to reject conventional education, conventional parenting, conventional ways of being in the world, why was I still accepting conventional ways of making art?

At camp, surrounded by families who understood that another way is possible, I began to see what wanted to emerge. Not just different art, but a different relationship to making itself. Art as connection rather than consumption. Materials sourced through relationship with place rather than relationship with algorithms. Creation as sacred practice rather than productive output.

The mandala I drew that week felt different. Not because the technique had changed, but because I was drawing them in alignment. Surrounded by community that reflected my values, my hands remembered something they'd been trying to tell me.

When it came time to leave, I gifted that mandala to Debs, who runs Abington Woods. It belonged there, in that place where it was created, with the person who'd helped create the space for such aligned connection. Some art is meant to stay where it's made.

I came home hungry for materials that matched this deeper knowing. For inks made from berries I'd gathered myself. For papers stained with plants that had been chosen for their protective qualities by ancestors I'd never meet. For art that connected me to heritage, to the earth, to the ancient human practice of making what we need with our own hands.

The quiet season was preparation for this: a practice that doesn't just create art, but creates connection. To place, to heritage, to the parts of myself I thought were separate. To the understanding that everything in our lives can be an act of alignment if we're willing to question what we've been taught is normal.

Sometimes you have to go quiet to remember your own voice. Sometimes you have to stop making to remember why you make at all.

The silence is over. But what's emerging isn't a return to what was - it's an evolution toward what wants to be. Art that matches my values. Creation that connects rather than consumes. A practice that's as much about becoming human as it is about making beautiful things.

This is where the real work begins.