ODETTE LOVE LETTER

This week, tune to the ground. What steady steps are you making? What’s growing? What are you paying attention to? In a walk around the city, everything unfolds. Today's letter is a riff on spring unfolding, warming up, and playing with pacing -- when we move fast, and when we go slow.

Today, an invitation into the sunlight, the season, the soil, the slow things unfurling and a riff on trusting the creative process.

Creativity is a practice in collaborating, in trust building with the unknown; today's letter pulls on the threads of I don't know, inspired by a single mourning dove by the window. A reflection on sound, space, silence, stillness, with prompts for your practice. Grab a journal, pen, and settle in for practice.

Today's letter: a riff on the sunset. Movement nourishes our creative lives in the way it helps shakes things loose, to get unstuck; this week's writing is an arrival to the river again, a run, and a stark sunset.

What are you meeting? What are you returning to? What are you flowing with? In today's letter, explore the shorelines of the mind, the intricacies of our inner experience, and experience the small things: the generative details of our lives.

Sometimes, creating the container for my own practice seems to be: turn down the lights, turn off the phone, exist for a minute or ten in silence. What are we crafting here together in this time, moment, space? Today's letter: a riff on holding and expressing, crafting the vessels for our practice, those creative containers in body, mind, and making.

A riff on a walk on a cold night; the warm glow of collective togetherness and effervescence.

In front of fires, we may find ourselves listening: listening to stories and those who are sharing, to the shifts and sounds of meals cooking, to explanations of starlight and glacial formations, to the way the earth outside lulls itself to sleep. In today's letter, we explore a reflection on relating to storytelling, awe, and how stories make us human -- how they can dazzle and connect us, like sitting in front of a fire or flame.

Like any landscape we're traversing, anything we’re making, like anything we are collaborating with or relating to in life, writing can be a way of befriending ourselves, becoming our own companions, and noticing the depth and the horizons of our stories and celebrating what makes us human. Sometimes, it's helpful to write to the root: where did this story come from? What is it saying? Following the pathway of a thought process.

Think of the last time you deep belly laughed. Or a moment that rocked you with grief that you felt it in your stomach. Go to that place for a minute — can you feel it?

In today's letter, I'm sharing some reflections on creative practice from an embodied place, examining the role of the core within us physically and metaphorically, and sharing some prompts for your own reflective practice.

A riff on trees, walking, writing, finding center and expanding out. What happens when we emerge out of our circles of comfort?

What are you rooted into? What people, places, tastes, songs are you anchoring into? What are you rooting for or aiming towards? What roots are nourishing you? Today, a reflection on seeds, metaphors of plants, and the conversation between inward seasons and expanding out into the world.

I want to tell you about the delight I feel discovering a fig tree (and other reflections on walking, writing, and mapping through life). In this note, I talk about figs, tracking, growing, and prompts for now and then, as we tune into the past, present, and the future.

Imagine this: there is a spotlight on a piece of cord. Cord, like the soft rope used to hang clothing from the line, cord like the line used on boats and sails. Soft, beige. It hangs in the air, frayed on either edge — vignette of shadow surrounds the center of the cord, revealing individual fibers, radial threads fanned out like rays of the sun. Up close, gathered together, they are stronger, woven, held tightly and intertwined, strong in the gathering together.

Today's letter is a riff on strength, togetherness, resilience. It touches on writing, music, and walking.

What holds you? What moves you?

As humans in the creative process of life, we are looking often for balance, feeling into the places where imbalances and asymmetries are blatant. Where the salt goes, the sweet comes in, the fat and the acid, when cooking; how the breath like the sunlight rises and falls in our bodies and the seasons; where the paint goes, or how to place the graphite on the page, or how and where to erase a line away. In practice, we are looking for the center, often, tasting or sensing when something is off, and adjusting, like in meditation, adjusting our posture. In today's letter, I share some thoughts on simple pleasures to counterweigh grief in the everyday, and share some practices for being and embodying feelings on and off the page.

Mentioned in today's letter:

What feels clarifying and reviving? Water can drip, slowly, and amass into rain, fall down, envelop, hold, give space, and on the earth, it is contained. Today's letter is a reflection from a beach weekend, with prompts for hydrating your creative life.

In today's letter, we're diving into the name of the Odette Press newsletter: Creative Nourishment.

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What does caring for you and your creativity look, feel, sound, or taste like? In today's letter, we're exploring practices of care, with a summertime reflection from a favorite river.

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We need wonder. Wonder draws us out of our habituated tendencies into the space of what we’re curious about. Awe shows us something to savor, fully, and be with. In today's letter, we're exploring awe and wonder.

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Exploring together and alone, interdependently, what can we learn? When we soften into the unknown of our inner experiences, what loving care can emerge? When we gather together in strength, what gets revealed? These are some of the questions from today's letter for the season ahead.

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What are you curious about? What’s your creativity asking for? In this week's love letter, we're getting into creative flow, curiosity, and upcoming classes.

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On writing and walking and the practices therein.

Mentioned in today's newsletter:

• Walking and Writing: Artists as Cartographers by Karen O'Rourke
• Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit
• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
• How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny O'Dell

On the nature of grounding in colors.