Creativity in the Realm of Place & Mindfulness

How mindful observation, sense of place, and radical acceptance open our flow of creativity

Today Terrain.org published three of my new poems, including audio readings. Small poems, quick listens. One of those poems is a short elegy/lament written after my nephew died in a car accident. Another new poem, also about my nephew, I’m sharing here for the first time:

It will be a good long while (I hope), in this natural cycle of human memory, before I forget that scene. I remember where I was standing, his body, back to me and thin as I’d ever seen him, listening to music and not seeing me as I waited a moment to say hello, then left. He died in a car accident in October of 2023, one week shy of his 21^st birthday.

I’ll remember that place too. That tree, a crying tree now, and placeholder. Holding place where energy went from human to beyond-human in some great mystery I don’t need solved. It’s nature’s nature. No explanation necessary to keep on loving this natural place we’re all so fortunate to experience—if we make space and time to receive it, protect it.

The poem ends with a rhyme—uncharacteristic of my poetry, and I like when things accidentally go uncharacteristic. What is a thread among most of my work is a subtle or overt sense of place. I am interested in environments, intersections, and ecotones. The beyond-human is vital, even when a human or humanity is centered. All of which asks first for observation. Sometimes a glance, sometimes an immersion. Choosing to be a silent witness, mindful of place, and observant of the macro and the minutiae. That’s poetry. If someone asked me how to start writing poetry, I’d say that’s how.

We hear it all the time, but what does “sense of place” mean? Check out this in-depth conceptualization at The Upper New.

At The Upper New, their examination suggests sense of place includes a place’s identity, the concept of time or moment, the understanding that different humans experience a same place differently, that we have different sensory or emotional attachments to a place, and that “sense of place cannot be explained simply as cause and effect, is reciprocal between behavior and experiences, and is associated with person, process, and place.”

In other words, and as usual, there is a mystery to sensory experience within a place that language cannot fully express. And, like it or not—awareness or not—place is having an effect on us. And vice versa. So we must be mindful of our impact.

Last week, antiphony journal and press released its summer print folio on the theme of “place.” For the virtual launch event I provided a video recording (below) of my piece, “Brunch, Santa Monica Blvd, Sept 28, 2024, 72°.” That poem’s final destination in the folio evolved in three place-based phases:

First, observing space while literally brunching on Santa Monica Boulevard. Second, writing from an intentional space at home that has been a decade in the making. Third, recording the video in a special, sacred, & protected space that my husband and I call “The Amphitheater.”

The Amphitheater is a shady creekside bower complete with a backing track of trickling water and birdsong. It’s a privilege to borrow & share that space with nature, and to be reminded we are just as much of it as we are experiencing it. It’s a privilege to access a contemplative space. Natural uninterrupted space like that is, unfortunately, a human and beyond-human deficit. Speaking of natural space access is also a conversation inextricable from classism, racism, ableism, indigeneity, and beyond.

There are also other ways. Intentional contemplation or mindfulness does not have to take place at a creek, temple, or retreat center. It might be in a dark closet, under the covers, or on a city balcony. Walking our route to work. Eating. We do not have to be fully removed from society, nor does the space need to be free from stimuli. It’s more about taking time for the self without agenda. Sitting or lying back and simply experiencing that. Thoughts can flow freely in and out, just as the breath, as though the thoughts (that need not be labeled “interruptions”) are merely clouds passing through. And what happens next is… anything!

I make the assumption in my poem above that my nephew didn’t want to be mowing the tall grass beside my mother’s garden that day. That teenagers are begrudging of such tasks. But what if I made a misjudgment about his place within place? Maybe mowing was his reprieve. I’ll never know all of the demons he was fleeing in his otherwise noisy, chaotic, boring or anxiety-filled days. I should have said hello. His back should not have been my last lasting image. We didn’t know it or intend it, but our final shared in-person experience was a turning away from one another. I should have been more mindful of my assumptions. Interrupting his work might also have been part of his reprieve. What if he wanted to see me? What if people want to see me? The very concept is quickly challenged by the Midwest/Scandinavian artifact that is deeply seated in my self-critical internal voice. It says at every turn: Don’t be so self-absorbed. Don’t be so self-assured. Don’t go thinking you’re somebody.

It is my own undertaking to grant myself the possibility that people might, and do, want to share space and time with me. Here—right here in this space holding you and me—we can see the psychology of creativity writhing in real time. I am formulating this now, on the fly, and I’m about to click send, to you. Not as catharsis or healing, but as curiosity, observation, and examination. Doesn’t matter what it’s doing for me, my intent is for it to somehow resonate with you. As theory on how sense of place and sense of mindfulness inform our creativity. How the compressed bud of our days unfolds and relaxes into the natural state that is our creative release. Where our artistic impulse is granted its desire for destination, externality.

The mindful approach to creating, living, opening oneself up to all possibilities, is a topic I’ve been going on about for the better part of two decades. I’m sure it’s always been in my nature, but in a more professional sense I’ve been writing about it since starting the Holistic Health graduate program at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, in 2002. That program was and is one of the first and few of its kind.

There, mindfulness and meditation aren’t trends or buzzwords or click-bait. They are foundational to the understanding of human holism. Free, accessible, and inseparable. Nobody can take them from us and they can profoundly change us. Should we want, a meditation practice or cultivating everyday mindfulness are ways into the habit of switching from reactivity to witness—a radical acceptance of what is. Not what was or could be, not what we habitually analyze, criticize, label, or judge, but all that is-what-is in this moment, in this place.

Being more mindful is a kindness to the self and a recharge of that which helps us engage more fully with the world and with one another. Mindfulness is a here and now proposition. In that sense, it’s not a getting away, letting go, and clearing the mind as it’s so often characterized in luxury-retreat marketing materials. It’s a gentle letting in of all senses, all place, all time—and we have infinite capacity to receive. That said, we must sometimes turn off.

Just yesterday, poet Mark Nepo wrote in his Substack post “Screen Mentality”:

“…the lurking tragedy of screen mentality is that without such awareness and a commitment to being truly here, we will, in time, become a screen ourselves that others will ignore.”

My hope is that we can receive that sobering honesty as an invitation to let the screens go dark and do a little bit of nothing. “But that’s boring,” people say. “And it’s hard,” they say. To which I’d respond, “Yes. I believe you.” And, “You can handle difficult and boring things.”

I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again
-Georgia O’Keeffe

The good news for the rest of us busy creatives, Georgia, is that by pausing, stepping away from the screen, grounding oneself in the space they’re in, and opening to the anything of the moment, something is bound to arrive sometime.

But let’s not ask for a result like an equation or a transaction or a return-on-investment. Let’s not expect a change to show up on a timeline or look for the opportunity to be disappointed, yet again, when something doesn’t reach its perceived potential. Let’s not ask anything of mindfulness or of meditation. Let’s put a pause on expectations and the transactional currencies that we’ve programmed ourselves into trading in. Mindfulness opens us to the free-flow of goods of a different kind. Let’s let it surprise us. There is plenty of creative energy just waiting to flow into spaces that were once too cluttered to receive. I call them “arrivals.” There’s something to be said here about the notion of writer’s block, but I’ll leave it at that.

Years ago, I wrote a small, approachable, everyday e-book/PDF about mindfulness that the Holistic Health program still uses with its students. It adds a bit of how-to flavor to what I’ve introduced herein. This summer I’m revising that book for its 2^nd edition and I’ll make it available here for subscribers.

Meanwhile, I’m taking pre-orders for a handful of copies of the new antiphony journal “place” folio. It features fifteen writers, including Jared Stanley, Dean Rader, Michael Gottlieb, and Carrie Hunter. Plus, the cover is pretty pink! For $15 each (includes shipping), I’ll be glad to send ‘em out once they arrive. Please email me at bradleydavidwriter@gmail.com to request a copy while they last.

Below is the video of the “Santa Monica Blvd” poem reading I contributed for the folio’s launch event. It was recorded in The Amphitheater and only available here: