What if the turning point isn’t a grand decision or bold move… but a quiet moment of presence?

This week on the blog, I explore how the simple act of listening—truly listening to your inner rhythm, your soul’s pacing, your layered truth—can soften the old stories and invite in the new.
It’s not about fixing. It’s not about knowing. It’s about making space.

The train pulled away from Milan just as the afternoon light began to soften the city’s hard edges. She sat by the window, fingers wrapped around a small paper cup of espresso gone cold, watching her reflection flicker over the blur of olive trees and ochre villas.

She was traveling alone. For the first time in years.

The choice had felt quiet but certain. A slow rising from within. Not a dramatic escape, not a reinvention—just a soft instinct to go somewhere beautiful and let the stillness catch up with her.

There Are Seasons for Quiet, and Seasons for Becoming
Listening to the rhythm of your soul

We live in a culture that glorifies constant motion, always urging us to do more, be more, show more. But the soul? The soul moves differently.

The soul is seasonal.

And just like the natural world cycles through winter’s hush and spring’s unfurling, so too do we.

She arrived in Périgord under a pale afternoon sky, the kind that made the stone villages glow as if lit from within. The taxi wound through fields of sunflowers and rows of lavender, each bend in the road feeling like an exhale. She hadn’t known exactly why she came—only that something within her had stirred in recent months. A soft tug. A need to shift, to shed, to listen.

She’d signed up for a month-long artist’s retreat at the edge of a small village, a quiet cluster of shutters and slate roofs perched above the Dordogne. Her room overlooked a garden filled with rosemary, thyme, and soft yellow roses. Mornings were for tea and journaling beneath the fig tree. Afternoons were spent in a stone barn-turned-studio, where others painted or wrote or wandered in thoughtful silence.

I Am Returning to Something True

There are moments when the path forward doesn’t feel like a grand leap or a brand new chapter.

Instead, it feels like a quiet remembering.
A soft turning inward.
A return.

She arrived in Paris on a drizzly Wednesday, her suitcase wheels clicking over the wet cobblestones like a heartbeat. She had rented a small apartment in Montmartre, just above a florist’s shop where the scent of eucalyptus and garden roses drifted up to her window each morning. It had been forty years since she first walked these streets as a wide-eyed college student with a sketchbook in her satchel and dreams blooming like spring.

Now, at 59, she had returned—older, quieter, carrying a longing she couldn’t quite name. A soft pull toward beauty. Toward remembering.

A Soul Truth From the Quiet Places

Last fall, I sat at a retreat tucked away in the stillness of the season—leaves loosening, light softening. I hadn’t come with a plan, only the ache of needing space. Space from the noise. Space from the narrative. Space to listen.

Somewhere between the silent mornings and shared circles, it arrived—not with thunder, but with a whisper that felt older than me:

“I am being revealed to myself.”

There wasn’t a single moment of revelation.

No lightning bolt. No sky-splitting “aha.” Just a slow, quiet unfolding—a soft rhythm of noticing, creating, retreating, returning.

I used to think my path had to make sense in hindsight. That all the creative experiments, the shifting seasons of my life, the pauses and pivots, would eventually lead to a singular destination. A place where I could say, “Here I am. This is what I do. This is who I am.”

But the truth? That place never quite arrived.

Beginning can feel like the hardest part.

Whether you’re returning to your creativity after a long pause or standing on the edge of something entirely new, it’s easy to get stuck in the swirl of “Where do I start?” and “What if I get it wrong?”

I’ve been there, too. More than once.

There’s something that happens when you pause long enough to hear yourself.

Not the to-do list voice. Not the self-doubt voice. Not the echo of all the things you think you should have accomplished by now.

But the voice underneath. The one that says,
This is where I am.
This is what’s stirring.
This is what wants to become.

You don’t always call it art.
Sometimes it’s the way you tear the edge of a receipt and tuck it into your notebook.
The way you pause at a faded photo in a thrift store bin, feeling its weight even before you know why.
The way you arrange your day around a sliver of light that only enters your studio at 3 p.m.

You are already creating.

You don’t need permission to begin.
You’ve already begun—in whispered ways, in gentle acts of noticing, in the quiet gathering of a thousand small things.

Some days, beginning is the bravest thing we can do.
Not because the act of creating is hard—but because we are carrying so much tenderness.

Tenderness around time, energy, confidence.
Tenderness around “getting it right” or “not wasting it.”
Tenderness around wanting it to mean something.

And sometimes what we really need… is a permission slip.

Your story is layered.

It holds threads of joy and ache, growth and unraveling, silence and song.
It isn’t linear or tidy—and it was never meant to be.

But it is yours—and within it lives a kind of radiant wisdom that cannot be taught, only lived.

There’s something sacred about the moment you sit down to create—not to produce or perfect, but simply to be with your own creative unfolding. In a world that moves fast and praises output, choosing to tend your creativity with gentleness is a quiet act of resistance. And a radical act of self-trust.

In a world that prizes output and urgency, soul-tending can feel radical. But here, within the rhythm of Artistry & Alchemy, it is essential.

To nurture your soul is to honor your inner landscape as sacred.
It’s to slow down long enough to hear what your heart is whispering.
It’s to understand that the quiet moments—the tea breaks, the morning pages, the walks without purpose—are not distractions from your art.

They are the art.

There is a spark in you.

It’s not something you have to earn, prove, or explain.
It’s there when you’re painting at the kitchen table, scribbling in a notebook, arranging wildflowers in a jar, or letting your mind wander in the shower.
It lives in the little moments of curiosity, intuition, and beauty-making that come so naturally, they’re easy to overlook.

Maybe it’s been weeks… months… even years since you last touched a paintbrush, opened your notebook, or sat in stillness with yourself and a blank page. Not because the desire isn’t there — but because life got loud, and your art got quiet.

You are not alone in this.

There are seasons when the throughline feels clear—when the work flows, the pages fill, and your hands know exactly what they’re doing.

And then there are seasons like this one.

When what you have are pieces.
Snippets.
Whispers.
Unfinished phrases. A color that won’t leave you alone. An image you keep sketching again and again. A sentence you tear from a book and tape to your wall, not knowing why.

This, too, is a kind of making.

This is gathering.

There is a quiet kind of knowing that lives in your hands.

It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t rush. It doesn’t demand perfection.
Instead, it hums beneath the surface—steady, lived-in, true.

This is the wisdom you’ve earned through experience, through showing up, through years of becoming. And in the creative life, it’s often the very thing we forget to trust.

There’s something sacred about making space—not just for our art, but for the unfolding of it. The wandering. The layering. The not-quite-sure-where-it’s-going moments that often turn out to be where the real magic lives.

That’s the space I’ve been craving.
And that’s the space I want to share with you.