Rut

The thing about creative work is how suddenly creativity can disappear.

You spend years building a practice, solving problems, refining your eye — and still, you can sit before your own work, paralyzed.

That’s where I recently landed. I sat down to shape a fresh batch of printed pieces, and the room went still. The current stopped. And as the silence stretched — through starts, stops, and circling back — a question surfaced.

What if I have nothing left to say?

Anyone who makes anything knows this particular vertigo — not fear of failure exactly, but an unnerving absence of direction. The current that carried you here is gone, and you’re suspended in its place.

The choreographer Twyla Tharp wrote: When you’re in a rut, you have to give time a chance to do its work. The capacity to enter into the struggle is itself a talent.

No romance here. Only the returning: sitting down again, revisiting the same unsolved problem, staying inside the discomfort. Not waiting for inspiration — working despite its absence.

The painter Georgia O’Keeffe said it unflinchingly: I have been terrified every moment of my life and it has never kept me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.

So perhaps fear is the real struggle. And it’s in staying present with it — patiently, without retreating — that something begins to shift. A choice lands. A path clears.

In time, I finished my designs and sent them to the printer. Soon they’ll arrive: real, in my hands — a small thing of beauty that didn’t exist until I did the work that was mine to do.

That’s the invitation of creative work: to bring forth what is within you — even when it falters — because to hold it back is to shrink from your own becoming. ✦

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The email version of this Little Letter included a masterclass from Twyla Tharp, a short film about creative struggle, and a poem by Wendell Berry that belongs in every creator's pocket. Want the next one to land in your inbox? Sign up here.

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