The Puffin, the Spider, & the Comeback

Or What a Soggy Boat Ride in Ireland Taught Me about the Creative Process

This summer, my family and I traveled to Ireland. Somewhere between the pubs, the rolling hills, and the kids discovering that sheep are both adorable and deeply judgmental, we made our way to Rathlin Island...supposedly for the puffins. We had booked a little excursion to see them, the famous little birds with the colorful beaks, which in theory sounded charming. In practice, it was cold, wet, and mid-July, and I was questioning my life choices as a father/tour guide. But somewhere between shivering on the boat and wondering how many puffins one really needs to see in a lifetime, I stumbled into a creative insight I never saw coming.

1997 called. They want their Braveheart references back.

On the bus ride up the hill, our driver told us a story. Here, on the island, was where Robert the Bruce hid in a cave in the early 14th century. He had fled here after a crushing defeat in battle, hunted by his enemies and with few places left to turn. The local lords who owned the island had promised him shelter, with one caveat: if the English found him, he was on his own.

I've always had a soft spot for Robert the Bruce, largely because of how he's portrayed in Braveheart. He’s a complicated character, caught between loyalty and survival. Torn between his conscience and his own ambition. In other words, he’s not some cardboard hero. He’s human.

And yes, here I am, a man with a dad-bod, casually referencing Braveheart like it is 1997. But give me a break. When you’re trying to make a point about courage and inner conflict, sometimes a Mel Gibson epic is just sitting there, waving at you. Stay tuned for next week’s essay on The Patriot.

The story goes that after suffering yet another humiliating defeat, Robert the Bruce fled to Rathlin and hid in a cave. There, alone in his fear and depression, he watched a spider attempt to weave its web between two very large rocks, each time swinging across the gap and falling short, failing six times in a row before finally succeeding on the seventh. Inspired, he returned to Scotland, rallied his forces, and eventually defeated the English at Bannockburn.

Sometimes you just need a good cave.

In creative work, we have our own versions of that cave. Sometimes we find ourselves there after a failure, or after a season of exhaustion. Sometimes we go there on purpose. The cave is where the noise stops. It is where you are forced to sit with the silence and the echoes. I once heard Willie Nelson talk about a dry season in Johnny Cash’s writing career. “Sometimes you need to go back to the well,” Willie said. The cave is the well. You don’t go there to produce. You go there to reflect. To remember. To see the spider. Silence isn’t an absence of progress; it’s where progress learns to speak.

And then sometimes you gotta put on your kilt and kick some...

"Why was it off in the first place?” you ask. Look, it was a cave. He was alone. I’m not a historian, but you’re gonna tell me I’m off-base here?

The trouble is, the cave can trick you. The quiet feels safe. You can convince yourself that staying there is noble, that reflection is enough. But the spider moment is not the end of the story. It’s the signal that the story is about to start again. As the rebel monk Thomas Merton wrote, “I have come to the monastery to find my place in the world, and if I fail to find this place in the world I will be wasting my time in the monastery.”

Robert the Bruce didn't set up a permanent Airbnb in that cave. He left. He fought. And that fight was not aimless. It had direction, fire, and the kind of stubbornness that comes only when you have been humbled and reoriented. A vision that never leaves the cave dies there.

I think about that in my own work. There are seasons where creativity dries up, where the ideas feel like they are sitting in another room with the door locked. When that happens, the temptation is to push harder, to demand results. But the better move is often to step away, to find your cave, to give yourself space to see the thing you could not see in the frenzy. Ireland did that for me. Not because the landscape whispered perfect plot points into my ear, but because it put me back in touch with why I create things in the first place… and that if spiders don’t give up, none of us have an excuse to. The cave restores your strength, but the battle proves you have it.

Still, the cave is not home. At some point, you have to get back in the fight. You take what you saw there, what you felt, what you remembered, and you put it into the work with every ounce of energy you have. You fight not like a machine or a content mill or a person endlessly refreshing their analytics, but like what the last line of Braveheart calls a “warrior poet.” Which, for all the dad jokes and Mel Gibson baggage, is still not a bad way to live.

PS. Puffins are freaking adorable and 100% worth it.

PPS. A great book on creative work and exiting the cave from my friend, Blaine Hogan.

PPPS. A song from our kids media project for schools about perseverance…à propos: