Arrival, in Spring
Hello, Welcome, and an Introduction
I’ve written repeatedly about arriving to the seasons here: how to enter into winter, savor summer, what the autumns of our lives teach us about the leaves falling to the ground, and what we do to emerge slowly, unhurried, into a season like spring.
A connection to the undulations of earth is what I remember and return to. It’s the thread I come back to when all else fails — especially in writing. I feel grounded by this guide: remembering seasons, nature, and this planet, feeling that generous connection. This generous connection helps me steady my breath, my pen, my words, my gaze; it is the heartbeat that reminds me of my focus.
Each of us is a part of nature, irrefutably, even in the presence of technological constancy. We have our own rhythms, our waters, our fires, inner ecologies, and our seasons. We have the paths we turn to, the neurologies we’re familiar with, the new paths we’re carving. This inner nature is much of what I write from, what I make books from, and what I want us all to see, celebrate, and savor as we’re writing, thinking, creating, being. This is the nature of our life.
I did not always feel this way — did not always have this thread binding me, gently but firmly, to the landscape, did not have this tether to the earth and its surroundings. I was separated; I sat at computer desks, in dimly lit offices, in spaces with drop ceilings and fluorescent bulbs, barely yielding a glow, telling my creativity no, when it asked softly, and then loudly, for a yes. A whisper arrived, a seed in spring that grew into a shout, and I left the office world. It’s taken practice — decades of learning to love this solidarity with seagulls in the sky; this feeling of mind like a wave; this feeling of breath like water; this feeling of body as soil, as earth, as stable, as fluid and growing, as rich ground.
Much exists in our world that attempts to separate us from our nature, and much benefits from the separations between each other, and ourselves. There are days when despair seeks into my cells and escapes from the corners of my eyes. Then I see the sky, I write the feeling down, and remind myself that all of our thoughts are like clouds, temporary, feelings passing by, ephemeral, and I feel connected to something wider, broader, and deep, like a seed in the ground, or the unknown depths of the ocean. This is the thread I turn to: a constant arrival to nature.
Last summer, thick in the heat of August, I arrived back to this city on a whim, inching forward like a seed in the soil watered with the heat of the moment and the nutrients of community, of possibility, and intuition. This is how I’ve approached my travels, my business, my first move to New York, my road trip and attempted move to California — interested in the whispers of thought, dream, ideation, the breath of what if like oxygen to my internal creative fire.
What I love about these roles of artist and writer, as my guess is many of us do, is that it nourishes my tendencies toward tending the inner landscapes. I savor this cave-like state, this turning in, this solitude like a seed. I love the quietness; it holds my attention softly, like the serene stillness of a westward desert. This is my internal winter. But then the spring comes, dew laden and new; it wants revival, energy, momentum, a blooming out in the world. My teaching practice is the thing that draws me out, like a sunset, like a spring in bloom. I learn as much from the seeds and the grounds and the soil and the leaves and the birds flying and the way the trains fly by throttling past as I do from my students. Everything in life is a teacher, each a part of this constellation, an inspiration or lesson or starlight in some form, illuminating our moments, if we allow it.
As I write this to you, two mourning doves have visited. They are small, quiet, cleaning. They preen their feathers, vying for each other, perching out on the rusting iron of the fire escape. Beyond their grey plumes, the city lulls into a tired sunset, mauve clouds against the last hints of blue. Creative practice is as essential to our lives as our grooming, our perching, our noticing, our everyday turning toward the sunlight, our collective witnessing of the turning tides, like the sun, like the moon.
I want to arrive here today with an invitation for us all to root down into what we can in this moment and in this season ahead. Let’s pay attention to what nourishes, depletes, restores the soil of our inner ecologies, our connections with each other, and gives to our creative lives. What is it that grows your creative world? Some prompts I’m turning to while writing and walking, for you, too:
What does this season give? What do you offer it? What does it say?
How can you honor your introversions in a time when everything is blooming?Â
What do your extroversions have to say?
What’s something you’re growing in this moment or the season ahead?
As with any practice, any season emerging, a feeling might arise — a discomfort, a joy, a question, a block, a wonder, an agitation — let’s stay with it as it shakes, pulls us, challenges us momentarily. It is all a moment. It rises, peaks, and passes. Then we settle. Then, release. Then it comes again.
Here at arrival to this season, I’m met with curiosity. A slight departure from our usual cadence, as we have grown here lately,I’m opening up commenting for this one: comment below and say hello, share where you’re reading from, what’s inspiring you to write, walk, create this season. And if you missed it last week, fill out last week’s survey.
On the note of arrival, and conversation,
an introduction:
I’m Kelly — artist, writer, voice behind your newsletters, teacher in classes, and founder at Odette Press. On paper I’m a printmaker and bookmaker by training, with a background in yoga, meditation, traversing the path of entrepreneur. I have been a singer, a server, an educator in museums. I founded Odette Press in 2018 on a road trip, making books out of the back of my car by the mountains, ever inspired by the desire for adventure.
Along those two months and ten thousand miles of driving from East to West and back again, camping outside, hearing coyotes, and staying with friends, I gathered together this creative thread and stitched this business in connection with nature. There, humming along with the road and the earth, driving long stretches of desert road and highway, I learned about the wide sky, about the soft earth, about how to soften heart and strengthen mind, and that the more time I spend outside, the more I write and make art, the more connected I felt to life. I make all our journals by hand, one by one, out of my home studio. My intention is to create classes, paper goods, and experiences as spaces for us to connect, remember, and experience the ecologies of our inner lives — to celebrate your own ideas like seeds, to care for your life and your own inner nature in the process.
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What I have learned, and what creative practice continues to teach me, is that the nature of life is constantly unfolding. We open and close our minds, our lungs, our books, and bodies like the seasons of the earth. We breathe like a shoreline, our breath in the bellows of the lungs, our hearts opening and closing to the terrors and joys and boredoms of the everyday. Our creative practices are the pulses within us, rhythms, embers, seed, that needs oxygen and tending. Through caring for our own inner lives, each other, and our communities out in the world, we are tending to the practice of life. They are ecologies, wide and varied, nutrient dense, adaptive, important, and so necessary. I hope you never forget that.
If you’ve ever felt burnout with creativity, wondered if you’re good enough for it, or if creative practice is for you, you’re not alone. I am traversing those trails, too — the ones of overextension, doubt, confusion, wonder — and write for all of us from these places.
Creative Nourishment — these weekly letters to you — is a practice of reflection on stitching our attention, generously, to life, while noticing the art that exists in the peaks, valleys, plateaus of our everyday, and how to take care of our lives with creativity from day to day.
Paid subscribers go deeper: think, digging down, digging in, with audio and video guides, like the seasonally focused sessions.
My aim is that these letters are equal parts grounding — places to rest and turn to — as much as they are energizing and invigorating, like looking to the face of a friend, the marks of a painting, the wide blue of the sky, or feeling the textures of a song, learning to deeply taste a plate of food, or of breathing into life with a wide view. I write these for us as a love letter to life, to the art that exists in the small moments and the big views, cities and nature. To look to the earth and see the small flowers pushing up between the concrete. To notice, if just for a moment, the way the clouds hang and dance heavy in the sky. To take our own abundant inventory of life — to root into the cellars of our experiences, parse through the pantries of our memories and minds and come up abundant. To show up, daily, like the sun, and as always, to take good care. To know that any and all iterations of your creative life belong, and know that there is always something here.
A Seasonal Q&A:
On the thread of seeds, spring, and ground, paid subscribers, I have a collection of ideas and essays in the works for the year ahead. Submit your questions below, or reply here for our first Q&A — ask away about creative practice, meditative practice, art practice, life, taking care of your ideas or creativity.
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classes and upcoming experiences:
Join in for creative practices with me in NYC and beyond:
4/14 Bookbinding: French Link Stitch
4/14 Ottobar Maker’s Market [baltimore]
4/21 Earth Day Journaling
4/21 Suminagashi 2: Meditating on the Landscape
4/24 Bookbinding: Casing In
4/24 Build Your Journaling Practice
4/25 Suminagashi Basics [baltimore]
4/30 Journaling for Intention [online]
from a past season:
studio views:
