The Turning: Winter, Disorientation, and the Return of Creative Fire

This winter felt unmoored.

The small rituals that usually anchor my days quietly disappeared. The squirrels stopped visiting the old stump outside my studio window. The birds were gone. No flutter, no chatter, no rhythm marking the hours. Even the landscape seemed to be holding its breath.

At the same time, social media, long a necessary bridge between my ceramic work and the people who love it, faltered badly for artists. Followers weren’t seeing the accounts they had chosen to follow. Instead, they were fed endless “recommendations.” Connection gave way to noise, and for those of us who rely on visibility not for attention but for survival, it was deeply disorienting.

I struggled to adjust. I questioned my footing.

And then something changed.

Without warning or plan, a surge of creative energy arrived. Not frantic. Not forced. It felt ancient and unmistakable, like a current rejoining its river. New ceramic designs began to emerge at the wheel and the worktable. Forms I hadn’t consciously pursued found their way into my hands.

Almost in perfect synchrony, the wildlife returned.

The squirrels came back to the stump. The birds reclaimed the air. Each day became a small pleasure again. Each kiln opening felt like a revelation. I would lift the lid and feel that quiet astonishment every potter knows, the sense that something alive had passed through fire and returned transformed.

I don’t pretend that all my social media challenges are solved. They aren’t. But something more important happened. My renewed excitement for making generated its own gravity. Interest followed. Reach improved. The work began to speak again, and people heard it.

What I realized, deep in my gut, is that I had crossed into a place I recognize from earlier seasons of my life as an artist. A sacred creative threshold. A turning point.

I call it The Turning.

This collection was born from that passage. From uncertainty into momentum. From winter stillness into motion. Each piece carries the imprint of that shift, the quiet persistence of making when external systems fail, and the joy that arrives when you stay long enough at the wheel for the world to come back to you.

I cannot wait to see who adopts these pieces, who feels their own resonance in them, who carries them forward into new homes and new stories.

Because this is what I know, and what I trust more deeply with each year:

Creative life does not move in straight lines. It moves in cycles, in spirals, in seasons of disappearance and return. And if you stay present, stay listening, stay faithful to the work itself, the turning always comes.