holding shapelessness
Any moment, any day of the year is a not-knowing space. Life rarely offers certainty, no matter the season. But if one time of year is especially saturated with this not-knowing invitation, it is this one (Imbolc to Ostara).
We are in the belly of the creative cycle now, held in in the amniotic dark in which this new year floats. In this womb space, this fertile void, something is gestating, but it has not chosen its shape just yet.
This is the moment our culture does not know how to tolerate.
To sustain the impossibly fast pace of capitalism, these not-knowing, in-between spaces must be erased. When productivity is treated as the only measure of worth, slowing down to pause or listen becomes delusional. There is simply no other way to uphold this system than to bypass this part of the creative cycle and keep moving (fast) at all costs.
As artists, we are here to challenge outdated, harmful narratives, and ask: What kind of world am I agreeing to co-create?
The world many of us long for depends on honouring these liminal spaces: the moment between shedding something old and reaching for something new. Only here can we really observe, reflect, integrate, and learn.
It might be helpful to remember that, contrary to what we may have been taught to believe, there is time and space here, between idea and execution.
This past season asked us to name what could not come with us: what had to be shed, dissolved, composted. What structures could no longer hold life, and therefore, what needed to die. In a few weeks, Spring will ask what is being born. And it is easy to forget that between these two questions lives another: What is asking for my attention now, even if I don’t know what it is clearly asking of me?
In every creative process there is a sacred moment where we are not meant to decide the form, only to become capable of holding what is still shapeless. To become the vessel, a container for creativity to be poured into, channeled, and eventually directed.
And so, this very season, this moment in our collective creative process, is for inhabiting the questions rather than to seeking immediate answers.1
(Ugh… I know… how uncomfortable…)
The creative mind desperately wants clarity and direction. Plans, proofs, next steps. But forcing shape at this stage, can distort it (yes, yet another lesson from my pottery experimentations).
We must resist pulling the future toward us before it is ready.
We do not dig up seeds to check whether they are growing, and we do not tug on roots to help them lengthen. We trust the dark to do its work.
In this part of the creative process, it is more helpful to let our eyes acclimate to the darkness, and let things be revealed.
Where in your creative life or work are you trying to force outcomes prematurely? Where are you demanding answers too soon?
What might happen if you paused instead?
How could you approach your creative work with the patience of Imbolc?
Prompts to play with the energies of this season
Prompt 1: Notice the curiosities, questions, and ideas that surface between now and Spring, but resist the urge to act on them immediately. Instead, treat them as experiments. What if, rather than forcing them into a finished shape, you approached them as a creative laboratory?
A concrete example from my own creative life: I spilled coffee on a canva every day during January without any kind of plan, just curiosity about how it would naturally evolve. Do I like the result? No, but it doesn’t matter. The process was actually intriguing.
Prompt 2: Start a discovery journal. Jot down all the questions swirling in your mind, and whenever you get an intuitive nudge, a hint, or a clue, capture it. Don’t feel like you need to answer the questions right away, just track what comes in until Spring.
Prompt 3: In the tale of Vasilisa, she does not escape the forest by following a map. She can return with the fire-skull lantern, because she was brave enough to pay attention to the wise voice within that knows when to wait, when to walk on.
Where is your intuition asking you to move, even if the path is still invisible?
Receiving support in your creative life would feel like a big exhale?
I believe our most profound art emerges when we stay with the question long enough to hear what it’s really asking. I hold space for that work: listening deeply, discerning what to release, and noticing what wants to come through.
To navigate it, we sometimes need guidance. Someone to walk alongside you, and help you unearth what is ready to emerge into form. I’d be honoured to be that creative companion for you.
When you’re ready, here’s how I can support you:
꩜ 1:1 coaching partnerships: let’s meet in a free clarity call.
꩜ The Creative Liberation Portal, a self-coaching space to move from self-denial to self-expression.
꩜ Email coaching, a simple way to receive guidance & direction.
*As always, I encourage you to use discernment here. You don’t have to reshape your creative process to match the rhythms of modern life, and, you don’t have to force it to follow the natural cycle either. Your entire creative life doesn’t need to exist in the Imbolc phase. What part of it does? And can you allow yourself to embrace that?