Arrival, and Grounding
(An Introduction; Start Here)
An updated version, for 2025
Dear Reader,
Welcome to Creative Nourishment
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, the the heartbeat that reminds me of my focus, and a guide to what you can expect here from week to week.
Each of us is a part of nature, not separate from it, even in the presence of technological constancy.
We have our own rhythms: waters, fires, seasons, ground, that which gives us air, our inner terrains, and each influence our creative practices. What I have learned, and what creativity 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 we live through. We breathe like a shoreline, our breath in the bellows of the lungs, our hearts open and close, and we continue.
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.
Creative Nourishment is a practice of reflection on attention.
Free Subscribers,
You’ll receive free, weekly lyrical essays that mediate the nature of living, traveling through ideas, expanses, and cities, and a weekly podcast. Each piece pulls on noticing the art that exists in the everyday: peaks, valleys, plateaus of living, while rooting into, reviving and enlivening the senses. I write about meditation, creativity, art, food, environment, and share prompts and practices with you to ground down, remember your creative center, and guide yourself in life.
Paid subscribers
Your support helps me continue this work; your subscription dives you deeper into your creative life. You’ll receive all free, weekly essays; access to commenting, and the full archives, including:
Seasonal Sessions, Ongoing
Field Guides: Audio Practices and Meditations, Ongoing
Colorway Essays, 2024
Sensing the Month, 2025
Who am I?
I’m Kelly Odette Laughlin — artist, writer, voice behind your newsletters, and founder at Odette Press. I’m a NYC-based teaching artist, meditation teacher, photographer, and creative guide, with a background in printmaking, yoga, and meditation. 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, sleeping under starlight. I teach workshops on bookmaking, paper marbling, and journaling, and write about nature, travel, cities, creativity, meditation, and food.
These letters are here for us as a love letter to living: to the art that exists in the small moments and the big views, cities and nature, ourselves and each other, in our inner lives, shared moments, views of the ocean, sounds around us, plates of food. Look to the now: see the rhythms and the pulse. Feel the city skyline, and the small flowers pushing up between the concrete, and the still silence of colder seasons. Here, we pause to notice, if for a breath, the way the clouds hang and dance heavy in the sky.
Thank you for being here!
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From a Past Season:
Clutching the Boulder
ON ROADTRIPS: "One summer, in the desert, I found myself clutching a rock. This was years ago, heat of Arizona, red rocks, views of the Grand Canyon, wide expanses of cavernous Earth that seemed to go on endless in all directions..."
Studio Views:
