Writing about creativity is an ouroboros

We Live in Cycles, 2025 by Carolyn Yoo

Engaging in a creative act and writing about it are deeply intertwined practices to me. Though I create art in multiple mediums, writing has always been the most foundational practice that guides my awareness and direction.

This self-referential process of creation, documentation, and reflection reminds me of the ouroboros.

An ouroboros is an ancient symbol of a snake (or sometimes a dragon) eating its own tail. The symbol is a circle, a never-ending loop that is often interpreted as the cycle of life.

I first learned about the ouroboros symbol at my engineering job. Our frontend system had an “ouroboros error” that surfaced when an embedded iframe was trying to redirect to the external page, causing an unending loop of an infinite redirect. This example is an ouroboros gone wrong, forever trapped in a recursive state that consumes itself and endlessly recycles the same input and output.

But the ouroboros is not inherently a bad thing. The cycle represents transformation led through the self, digesting what it has created for itself and birthing new creations from that nourishment. By eating itself the snake is engaging in an alchemical process, integrating its lived experience and generating another version of itself.

Here’s what the ouroboros process looks like:

GENERATION → PROCESS → INTEGRATION → GENERATION

Commonly in creative practice we see others’ creations (generation) and process (documentation). The integration is often invisible, held privately in diaries and conversations with peers.

I publicly write about my creative practice because I am most fascinated by the integration phase. Writing is my way of integration, and without it I feel like an untethered balloon floating in a cloudy sky. If I don’t write, I don’t know where I’m going or why I’m creating.

When I do write, I am finally closing my fangs and starting to chew. I eat my creations from the past so they can be fertilized into new seeds, ready to be birthed into the next project. I pay attention to what felt easeful and what felt sticky. I jot down questions I want to linger on and others that I’m ready to say goodbye to. From this reflective process, the new shape of myself and my next creative act starts to take form.