Whenever my creativity needs rejuvenation, I travel to Carmel-by-the-Sea.

Located along the shore of California's Monterey Peninsula where blue curls of ocean meet stoic rocks and wind-bent trees, Carmel has retained its fairytale character for a century. Even in today's hectic times, the village's atmosphere hums its peaceful song of sunlight and shadow, of wind and sand, a quiet enchantment that drifts into the mind, illuminating thoughts with subtle flashes of inspiration.

After the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, artists, writers, and photographers left the city for the unspoiled nature on the coast to the south. Carmel developed into an arts community and the list of those who found sanctuary there reads like a roll-call of talent in American culture.

Ansel Adams became a resident and photographed the rugged shore and gnarled trees. Painter William Merritt Chase offered art lessons at the former Arts and Crafts Club. Poet Mary Austin and actor Herbert Heron established the open-air Forest Theater. And the poet-mason Robinson Jeffers and his wife Una built their home in Carmel Point, Tor House, where Jeffers wrote and the couple received visitors such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, Charlie Chaplin, Sinclair Lewis, and George Gershwin. Jeffers later built Hawk Tower, a forty-foot stone edifice he crafted himself, stone by stone. All of these artists and more were drawn to the natural beauty and restorative seclusion that the area offered in abundance.

As a writer and folklorist, I am interested in how nature and the "sense of place" unique to an area sparks creativity. So when I last visited Carmel, I went with camera and notebook in hand to seek what makes it special and to capture that feeling of sanctuary that has called out to writers and visual artists for decades.

I found that the muse takes delight in the soft sunlight that dances on the water and warms the skin.

A rough wooden bench next to the bent Cypress tree was the perfect spot to sit and contemplate the next word of a poem.

As I strolled along Ocean Avenue, inspiration stirred from the sight of the green hills that sloped and curved down to the shore, and back up again into town.

After walking up and down the hills and on the thick sands of the beach, I found rest in a shaded bower on the street.

But there was an ineffable quality of majesty about the shoreline and the silhouetted Cypress trees that brought me and other visitors back time and again to sit in a serenity made all the more enticing by wind and wave.

In his poem "Carmel Point," Jeffers lamented the encroachment of land development and construction in the area and concluded with the following lines:

His words speak to me about an underlying principle of creativity and its relationship with the environment: the necessity to get outside of ourselves and our mundane, daily worries, and to experience with joy and respect the pulse of the world which created us so that we in turn, might be able to create more beauty.

When I am surrounded by light, water, air, and earth in a place like Carmel, the part of my mind occupied with daily affairs can rest and my creative mind then opens like a flower to blossom. And while I breathe in the clear air and watch the gulls dip their wings to the sea, my creative energies feel restored. I can write the next words with confidence.