Most ruts are easy enough to explain. The work dries up, the card comes back with nothing on it worth keeping, and you feel flat for a reason you can point to.
The one I have been in is stranger than that. This year has brought the best commercial work I have made, and the pictures have kept coming. And still, on the few mornings that belonged to no client and no brief, I could not find my way out of the door. A rut made of good work rather than the lack of it, which is a far more confusing thing to sit in.
This piece is where I try to understand it. It began when I dug out a piece I wrote about ruts fifteen years ago and found it understood far less than it thought it did. Underneath was an old mistake I thought I had beaten long ago, in a disguise I had not recognised. And the way back out, I think, lies closer to home than I wanted to admit.
Subscribers to Serenity in the Woods now also get a short private note from the woods each week, a small observation that does not appear anywhere else.
See you next week!
Tim