Some days, the studio feels like an abandoned wing of your own mind… The light is too clean, your hands hesitant… What once sang through you is now a fog, barely humming at the edges.
And still, you’re here.
There is a peculiar grief that comes when inspiration leaves… as if it never existed. The colors become dull, the music skips and the shapes inside you scatter like dandelion seeds — a strange in-between where something once sacred has gone silent. If the muse is a body, then this is her ghost.
We don’t talk enough about the seasons of no –
No clarity.
No making.
No drive to “push through.”
In the dominant culture, we are fed the myth of constant production; daily output, endless sharing, staying “relevant.” But the feminine creative body is tidal... She sheds, empties and refuses. There are times she must go to ground… this happens not because something is wrong, but because something is changing.
Tracey Emin once went six years without painting. Then, after a violent rupture in her life, she locked herself in her studio – naked, fasting, refusing to leave — and painted. For days. She emerged transformed… because she allowed herself to go through the rupture before returning to her art. She wasn’t taking a break; she was becoming.
Absence is not erasure… Absence is architectural.
What if we stopped calling it a block? What if we named it The Smoke; the form inspiration takes when it no longer wants to be held? Instead of seeing it as failure, Smoke reveals the in-between, the metamorphic, the state between burning and ash, between what was and what’s to come.
Mequitta Ahuja stages herself as mythic, ancestral and fragmented in her paintings. Her self-portraits are not polished performances; they are layered, cracked, half-becoming. Ahuja lets the gaps in identity show; the pauses, disappearances. Her figures are women in process, fully legitimate in their fragmentation.
When your muse becomes Smoke, it is a call to notice your own architecture – What is under renovation? What is being rewired?
Citra Sasmita paints from rupture. In her Timur Merah Project, the erotic, the ancestral and the mythic converge. Her works mirror the state of undoing and reformation. Women split open, re-stitched by time and symbol. When the outside world demands clarity, she offers myth instead.
This is the gift of the in-between: you no longer owe anyone an explanation. There is no shame in the pause. There is only space.
Erykah Badu, known for her electric originality, hasn’t released a studio album since 2010’s New Amerykah Part Two. In the years since, she’s moved as smoke; making, mixing, collaborating, appearing on stages but not on release schedules. Her new album is releasing this year – on her time, not ours.
This too is sacred defiance – refusal to collapse your pace into the world’s hunger. Refusal to confuse absence with death.
Sometimes, the most radical thing a woman can do is to not produce… To let the pressure rot away and listen instead. To allow the fog to stay and let the muse become Smoke.
Let her drift. She will return… as something new.
Enter the BOA-Current.
(Journal) Prompts
What has recently left you (a form, a rhythm, a voice) and how have you been treating its absence?
If your creative space had a weather system, what would the forecast be this week?
Make a little nest in your creative space this week, without the intention to make anything. Nest as in; bring a drink, a snack, light a candle or incense, but sit in silence and be present with yourself and the space. Do not take a notebook – you aren’t here to document, but simply research… What emotions arise?
Write a short love letter to the version of you who didn’t make anything for a while.
Choose one artist (from this essay or your own lineage) and study her dormant season. What wisdom does it hold for your now?
What architectural metaphor matches your current creative state? Ruins? Blueprint? Greenhouse in fog?
Trace the outline of a past creative “winter.” What grew afterward?
Make a short playlist called The Smoke Season. Let it be the soundtrack of your current or next creative pause.
Imagine your muse as a person. What would she look like when tired? What would she say?
Write a small ritual for welcoming your muse back… Emphasis on “welcoming”... You are greeting her and approaching her with reverence.