Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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Hello, friends. I am so pleased that in this episode of Insights at the Edge my guest is Jacqueline Suskin. Jacqueline Suskin has been working as a professional poet since 2009. She’s the creator of Poem Store, which is this very interesting improvisational—I’ll call it entrepreneurial—form of poetry in the world. Are you ready for this? She’s created more than 40,000—yes, you heard that right—40,000 improvisational poems where people bring forward a theme, a topic, something they would like to have a poem in their life on. They pay what they want to pay, and Jacqueline comes up, believe it or not, with a new verse just for them in that moment. Poem Store. Her work has been profiled in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and Yes! magazine. She’s the author of six books, including two books with Sounds True: Every Day Is a Poem and a new book—it’s called A Year in Practice: Seasonal Rituals and Prompts to Awaken Cycles of Creative Expression. Jacqueline, welcome.
Jacqueline Suskin: Thank you. So good to be here.
TS: Right here at the beginning, this notion of being a professional poet now for 14 years. Different people come up to me who are poets and they say, “Are you interested in publishing my poetry?” And I think, “Oh gosh, that’s tough.” “And I want to be”—this is what they’re saying to me—“I want to be a professional poet. I want to make a career out of my poetry. Tami, you’re an interesting person with entrepreneurial instincts. How do I make it work?” What would you say to people in that position?
JS: I’d say that everything that’s happened in my life that’s created the path for my work to be successful in any way has actually just been based upon real human-to-human connection with friends or artistic community and a lot of experimentation, a lot of things that didn’t work, a lot of paths that I followed that seemed interesting that then led to something else. And in the end I was published by a friend of a friend, or my work found its way into the world in these natural connections, as opposed to following some steps provided by an institution or something like that. And I think that is a really hard thing to describe to people. There isn’t this recipe for being a professional poet. There maybe used to be, maybe if you followed sort of the university setting or the institution like that, that path might be spelled out for you in a little more direct way.
But I definitely just let my own creative impulse be the guide and found myself, as you described, performing on the street or in public settings, writing poetry. And then interacting with people in such a deep capacity tended to lead to the next thing and the next thing, an appearance at a gallery or request to come to someone’s bookstore or someone’s home, even. And so a lot of what has happened in my life, which has led me to having all of these books published and all of these poems that I’ve created, it’s all come from me following this instinct of at least just being devoted to the craft of poetry, staying with it, studying it, reading tons of poetry, learning the process and practice of other poets who I love, and just letting the experiment be the guide.
TS: I’m curious about this—I’ll use my language here—following these inner breadcrumbs, if you will. When do you know, “Oh, this is a breadcrumb I’m going to follow. It has the right feeling or sense or this connection does. Or no, I don’t think so”?
JS: I think the word “feeling” is definitely what I stick to in that. There’s a feeling usually in my body that’s excitement or even familiarity, something that I’m like, “Ooh, that feels like something I’d like to try.” So it’s also curiosity. There’s an instinct there. If my curiosity is sparked, then I definitely lean in that direction. And I do think it’s important to illuminate that it doesn’t always work. It’s not like just because I feel excited about something then it has this outcome exactly as I thought it would.
And I think that’s probably at the heart of my advice around creative practice turning into profession is you don’t really know what it will look like. I knew that I would always write poetry. I knew that I would always write books. It’s just something I’ve been doing since I was a child, but I didn’t know that it would be my job and I didn’t know it would continue to be my job even after it was my job for years and years.
There’s this kind of guesswork in it and a deep, deep trust. That’s usually what I tell people is there’s this trust that you can adhere to and that feeling in your body. And then if it doesn’t work out, it was still probably very interesting. You probably met someone interesting, you tried to create something really interesting, and I think that’s the thing I like to recognize in that.
TS: Tell me about the creative spark that brought you to your new book, A Year in Practice. What was it that lit up inside you, and you’re like, “I got to follow this?”
JS: Well, I am an ecstatic Earth worshipper. That’s how I identify. The Earth is my main muse. It’s what guides me in all of my work. And I had been seeing a lot of artistic friends of mine and people, cohorts and colleagues, just all these people who I’m inspired by talk about their practice. And often searching for a new method. And I know for myself in all of my years of being a poet, I’ve consistently tried to recreate my practice in a way that allows me to show up to my desk or to my imagination with a newness or an excitement, or just something that feels grounded and reliable. And I don’t want to have to constantly recreate it. The work of finding that rhythm can be really exhausting, and it can take away from the actual practice itself.
I thought, well, what I would normally turn to in this is the Earth. The Earth is what always guides me. The Earth is what always gives me suggestions and inspiration, so why would it not show me how to do my practice? I found that each season actually did that very clearly, very directly. Here is how it feels energetically in winter to create things. Here is how it feels in the next season and the next season. And I thought, “Oh, I don’t have to reinvent the wheel all the time.” The Earth is constantly offering this suggestion, this guidance, and if I can remember to follow it, if I can remember to tune in to that and practice that attunement, then I don’t have to constantly recreate what it is that I’m trying to do with my practice and find my footing over and over again. I can just turn to this reliable source that also happens to give me tons of inspiration, but it gives me wisdom and guidance and this cadence that I can follow throughout the year.
And if I get lost in my practice, if I don’t exactly know what to do next, I just turn back to the season at hand and it’s a guarantee that it will show me something. It will show me when to rest or when to try a little bit harder or when to gather up my resources or when to share things. And once I really looked at that, I thought, “Well, this is something I need to share, because if so many people are questioning all the time how to adhere to an artistic practice, then this is an answer that’s very accessible and free and available to all of us.” So I wanted to create something that would encapsulate that and let people reflect on how that affects their own practice.
TS: Now, you called yourself an “ecstatic Earth worshipper,” and I read that you married the Earth when you were in your 20s, and I wanted to hear more about that. What does that mean you married the Earth? Did you have a ceremony? I mean, what happened?
JS: I think for me what that was was this idea that I symbolically—well, first of all, I married a tree, which symbolized the Earth to me. But what I thought about that was is that my love and my devotion in everything that I do in this lifetime is connected to the Earth. It always comes back to the Earth. And this consistent love and this deep feeling of reverence is connected to the planet. And I am of this place. I am Earth itself. It’s also sort of like a dedication to myself and my own feelings, and expressing that seemed, well, it was a very private experience, but then I started to write about it and share it because I thought, oh, this is just a good example of what devotion can look like and how—I mean, one of my most favorite things about being human is that we get to make up our own meaning and our own rituals and our own symbols and let that charge us up.
And my feeling of turning towards the Earth and saying, “I’m devoted to you. We’re in union,” was this sense of, for the rest of my life and everything that I make and everything that I work towards, the Earth will be the central point of that in my heart and my spirit. And that felt worthy of a ceremony to me.
TS: Now, when I hear you say, “I am Earth,” I want to just take a moment and look at that more closely, because sometimes I think, “Well look, we’re nature.” Obviously we’re nature. We’re not—nature’s not something out there that we’re separate from. Sometimes when I hear the word “Earth,” I think of the dirt or something or the trees. And I think, “Well, that includes the animals, and humans are animals.” Anyway, I just want to know what it means to you when you say, “I am Earth.”
JS: I think I also mean, “I am nature, and I am this planet, and I am of this place.” So I think there’s a disconnect that happens. We tend to forget that our bodies are the Earth, and we are affected in the same way that the Earth is affected. By all of our choices that affect the planet, we’re also affecting ourselves. And so if there’s exploration of self and tending to self—which is often what happens through artistic practice; there’s a lot of self-exploration there—we are also then able to tend to the Earth more and remember the Earth more. And I think remembering that we exist on this planet in this time is something that seems really simple when you say it out loud. Just remember you exist on the planet Earth. The planet Earth exists.
But I actually find that there are so many distractions from that, and there are so many things that just come up in daily life that don’t really allow us to remember that and connect with that. And so when I say, “I am the Earth,” it’s me remembering this deep connection. And in that remembrance then I can also tune myself to whatever that connection is offering me, which is usually some deep wisdom and guidance. But if I forget that I am married to the Earth or if I forget that I am the Earth itself, I might forget to listen to it. So it’s a bond I think of, and that similarity or that thread helps me just stay grounded in the bond.
TS: Now, this may sound like I’m taking us off on a tangent—and I really don’t want to, and I’m going to be fast about it—which is at one point many years ago, it was probably a decade ago, I interviewed a gentleman named José Argüelles who was very committed to the lunar calendar. And he was like, “Tami, if we all operated according to a 13-month lunar calendar instead of a Roman calendar, everything would be different. Our sense of being connected to the cycles and rhythms of nature, instead of this superimposition where we have a leap year that confuses everybody.” Anyway, and I was like, “Well look, that’s not going to happen. We’re not going to suddenly shift, so this isn’t very practical.” And he was like, “Well, you should have a lunar calendar along with keeping track of things on the Roman calendar and see how it changes you.”
And so in reading A Year in Practice and in seeing the emphasis that you’ve put on us seeing our own rhythms in relationship to the rhythms of the seasons, I thought of this and I thought of how in a way it’s just like we’re out of sync. We’re out of sync. I mean, we don’t necessarily have our work schedules coinciding with the seasonal calendar, maybe if you’re a poet or an artist or someone who’s not in a kind of job where you take your two-week vacation when it’s not seasonally placed necessarily. So I just wonder what you have to say about that, in a way, what you’re talking about in terms of connecting with the seasons, on the one hand it seems obvious, and on the other hand it’s so far away from how we live.
JS: I love that example. That’s exactly what I was thinking of while writing this book is that there are these incredible rhythms in place that are natural, and they’re inherent in us. Even if we’re disconnected from them, even if we don’t ever think about the lunar cycle, we’re affected by it. And we might never be conscious of that in our lifetime, but it’s there for us. And so even if our jobs don’t align us with the ability to—obviously in winter I can’t just hole up and go in a cave, even though I would love to, and I have done long retreats in the winter, because I find that’s what works well for my practice—I still am interested in utilizing whatever little tiny aspect of that that I can in my daily life. And that is what I tried to put into the book, which is these really accessible tools that you can at least touch upon, and they might realign you or give you the chance to tune back in to something you’ve been forgetting.
And even just feeling that for a moment or allowing yourself to try to play around with it or experiment with it can open up this whole new understanding, which I love that example of the lunar calendar. It’s like, if you did have a chance to do that, what would happen? And I think anything that gives us a framework—we’re always looking to these different modalities that help us feel better or transform or learn something new about ourselves or reset. I think anytime we give ourselves just a little opportunity to try on something like that, there’s something in it that will work and that we can connect with, and that will further our practice.
And as I’ve been talking about all of this, I’ve been thinking about the word “practice,” and part of it applies to practice as an artist, but part of it just applies to the practice of living and trying to live in a way that feels better or feels more in touch with what you’re really going for or hoping. And there’s this practice of just living daily life that I think requires this kind of information. And when it’s natural, when it comes from just the way that the Earth and the moon and the stars and the sun work, I think there’s something in that that feels really liberating. Like, oh, you can practice embodying what you actually are just tuned in to that, instead of having to buy a bunch of things, or try out some complete framework of a modality that is just seemingly human. There’s stuff that’s just alive in you, and then we’re reminded of it, and then we can try it out.
TS: In A Year in Practice you devote each section, four major sections of the book, to the seasons. And I hear that you wrote the book while you were in each season. And I wonder if you could talk about each season, because you write to each season as a muse, as an active muse in the writing of A Year in Practice, and here if you would speak to each season in its muse-like form?
JS: Yeah, I felt so inspired by the fact that that lined up that way, that I was able to write the book in sync with these seasons and not—I’ve lived in places where seasons are not as intense or clear. I live in Detroit now, where the seasons are very stark. And you can tell it’s winter; you can tell when it’s spring. But I lived in a place—I lived in LA for six years where those seasons are so much more nuanced. But still that energy, that muse of each season, whether it’s nuanced or in your face, is I found in researching and studying while this book was coming out of me was they’re all the same. They’re all steady, very steady.
And winter is just constant with its ask for introspection. It asks you to dial it down, to downshift, to go inward. And that muse really suggests to me, “Try to find moments to retreat within yourself. Don’t worry about outcome; don’t worry about output. Just worry about your imagination, your inner landscape. What does it have for you?” There’s probably so much there that in other seasons you don’t get to see or witness.
And then spring comes, and it’s chaotic and frantic, and it requires great care to transition into it, great care to enter into it, which is something I discovered while writing this. I don’t think I had fully realized how intense spring is and how grating and harsh it is with this exposure and this coming out of the darkness into the light. There are lots of points in the book where I suggest make sure to tend to these transitional times. Because then once spring takes hold, the muse is rebirthed and plentiful energy, and it’s vibrant and beautiful and so giving.
And then it transitions into summer, which is just really communal, togetherness, sharing. It’s a time where people want to be out and fully out. Spring wavers back and forth for a while. It’s like how you get used to coming out. And then in summer you’re just out, you’re in the sun, you’re reviving, you’re soaking up not only that feeling of the actual weather or the season, but of other people, of togetherness and how that charges us in our artistic practice, being in community.
And then fall comes, and we start winding it down again. We start coming back, we collect our reserves, we start gathering, we start seeing, “OK, what’s everything that I’ve learned over these last few months? What will I take with me into my den?” I don’t have a lot of room in winter to process a million things, so maybe now I make my decisions of what will I process and what will I take into this next season of introspection? And then it goes again.
TS: Tell me a bit about the use of this word “muse,” what it means to you that the seasons were as muses?
JS: Yeah, I think for me there’s a few different levels of what a muse is, and the initial muse is the muse of inspiration—the muse that brings a feeling or an idea, or something that you want to let pass through you. And then there’s another phase of that, which is the editing muse, and I talk about this a lot is just this idea of how sacred it is to then come back to whatever that first initial offering was and revise it and rework it and commune with it. And I think the feeling of the word “muse” for me is this acknowledgement of something outside of myself that’s informing me. And even though I am it also, which we talked about this, I am also the Earth, but the Earth is full of other beings and other information and sensory offerings and all of these deliveries, all of this information. To me that’s a muse. That’s a word that kind encapsulates whatever it is that’s giving to me.
TS: You have these interesting prompts from the planet that you start each section, each season with. What is the natural world up to right now? How does it include me? How is it my mirror? Tell us a little bit more about how you sat with whatever was happening during the season as a mirror to your own process?
JS: I really make myself go outside every day. That’s a huge—a lot of people will ask, “How do you stay connected to that?” And I have a simple answer, which is I go outside. But in the midst of going outside, I do try to answer questions like that. “What is the rest of the Earth doing right now? What is it offering me, and how do I listen to it?” And I think that the prompts from the planet really came to this. I got clear on that because I thought each season is offering something particular. Each season is offering a different prompt, a different thing for me to tune in to, and what the answer to that will be different for everyone. The answer to that will be unique for each person who answers the prompt.
And I thought that was what was an important through line in this book, that the season is asking you to turn towards this self-reflection or something in your own personal practice, and that will look so different for everyone. It’s not a prescriptive book. It’s not like, “If you do this, then this will happen.” It’s full of suggestions from the Earth. And then each person’s response is going to be their own and unique, and it will give them information about how to proceed with their practice, what nurtures them, what guides them through this time of the year and what doesn’t, what doesn’t work for them. What do they need to turn off or set a boundary with.
TS: It’s interesting that you started by responding by saying, “I go outside every day.” Because for whatever reason, what I’m feeling into in this conversation is how I think a lot of people aren’t going outside every day. They’re either in an air-conditioned or heated home or car or elevator, or not having a lot of experience. And I myself have placed myself where I’m living very much in a natural environment, because it’s so important to me. But I also feel in touch with spending a whole lot of time in indoor spaces and being on a computer and seeing what artificial intelligence can do for our future and being completely out of touch with going outside every day. And it’s almost like, I don’t know, as we’re talking, it’s almost like I feel like we have these different world spheres happening where there’s a bunch of people who might be like, “Jacqueline, what are you talking about? Connecting—I mean, that’s like, what world? I live in an urban environment. I’m not observing these kinds of subtleties in nature on a daily basis.” Anyway, I wonder how you see that, this notion of people living in different world spheres?
JS: Yeah, I mean, I’ve experienced both of those worlds. I live in Detroit. I live in an urban environment, and I do think that a lot of folks probably don’t recognize a connection to the Earth in the way that I’m talking about. And as I’ve been living here, I’ve been working in schools and helping kids with poetry projects that are tuned to the natural world, getting them to write about their feelings and their ideas about the natural world. And these are kids who have grown up in an urban environment. And it is just right there under the surface. You give them one moment to think about it, to recognize it, to listen to me talk about it for five minutes, and then their hands go up. They have things that they want to say about what they’ve noticed, what exists in their front yard, what kind of animals they’ve seen, what birds are flying around, and how that makes them feel.
And I think there’s been something in that practice of going into the classroom that has shown me this sense of, even if there are people who initially maybe on the surface are like, “Well, I don’t connect with this. I don’t have time for this. This is not what I do.” I really have this deep belief that it’s not that far under their consciousness. It’s right there. It’s right on—it’s not even subconscious even sometimes. It’s just there’s no room for it to come out in their daily life. There’s no activity that suggests that they should go outside and look around. And obviously, that’s a very simplified version of what they could do. But I think that’s part of what my hope is with this book is creating this sort of toolkit for remembering to do that. And doing it in whatever way you can.
And this circles back to this idea that your body is also the Earth. And so there are forces that often get in the way of our embodiment. And what happens when even maybe you can’t go outside during the day, but you can check in with your body and your breath and what even that gives you in the name of nature or a natural connection to the Earth. And I think there’s just all these different levels of that. And I love the idea of someone being in the position where they’re like, “I’ve never thought about this before, but now I am. Now I’m thinking about it.” Now I’m working with these students who probably haven’t written a poem about nature ever before, but then now they have, and what will that do for their lives?
And I think that is the thing that we have to illuminate and that a lot of artists and writers and people who care about the Earth are trying to illuminate, which is just that there is a way in. There is a reward in it also. It’s a big reward to connect with the Earth. What happens to you when you connect with the Earth, there’s a deep reward in that. And I think trying to show that and return to that in my work is really important to me.
TS: “Being an artist for the Earth” was a phrase I wrote down as I was reading A Year in Practice and tuning in to you. And I thought, “That’s what Jacqueline is. She’s an artist for the Earth.” And I wonder when you’re working with kids, how do you help them—because I think this will help all of us just peel back a couple of layers—as they start to approach their first Earth-inspired poem?
JS: Yeah, it’s usually sensory based. That’s the easiest way in is I ask them to connect with any of their five senses, any of their many senses. Some of them would identify other senses that they have, but any sort of sensorial input that feels like it’s connected to the Earth. And that’s usually their entry point. It’s like a gateway for them to be like, “Oh yeah, I really like the smell of grass clippings.” And then they’ll be interested in, “All right, because the grass grows and how does it grow?” And then they’ll get into the whole idea of this growth cycle and what happens when you cut the grass, and there’s always a little entry point like that. Again, it suggests that all of the inspiration is right there, and they just need one thing to lead them to it. And usually it’s their senses.
Usually it’s a memory or something like that, something that was enjoyable or even something that was scary, like a big storm or something like that. A thing that gets lodged in you where you think, “Oh, I’ve recognized the Earth.” And there’s so much that comes from just that moment of recognition.
TS: Now, you recently won some type of a Detroit poetry contest for poems related to climate justice, climate health. I wonder if you can share the poem with us that won that award?
JS: Yeah, I’d love to. It’s called “Time.”
We are gone in ourselves.
One second we try and avoid
knocking down the spider’s web,
only to walk right through it
a minute later, unnoticed.
We are cut like the melon, made of mush,
drowning in the sweet, thick summer stick
of the mind that keeps churning.
The plants never stop singing directions.
But oh the distance from hearing
to listening is measured like fermentation—
the need of the dark cold waiting, added spice,
and suddenly the bubbling mess of delight
comes into perfection for us to taste.
We worked for it, with it, and against it.
We bite down on the rolling swell
of our limitlessness and cry. I cry before
I swallow. I think again on how long
it took us to see the truth and know
it’ll all burn up before we can apply the lesson.
But some magic lingers. Something good
carries on like a braid full of seeds,
buried deep in the darkest dirt.
TS: That poem I think illustrates something that I’d love for you to talk about that I read is important to you, which is this balance between hope and hopelessness. And how you bring that into your work with kids when they’re writing poems and how you embody that in your own writing. How do you see that balance?
JS: Yeah, I think that we live in a world full of so much brutality, and we’re constantly witnessing so much darkness, so much pain. And yet at the same time there’s so much beauty and there’s so much inspiration. And humans are just constantly trying to keep going and even thrilled by the chance. We’re always awestruck, which I love the word “awe” because it involves fear. And it’s not just this simple “if you’re hopeful, you’re hopeful” or “if you’re hopeless, you’re hopeless.” It’s more of the balance between both of those things and how I can actually feel the complexity of hope and hopelessness at the exact same time. And it’s actually important for my mental health to hold both. If I tried to deny all the hopeless feelings that come up during a day just to remain hopeful, I actually think it might diminish the power of that hope.
But if I do vice versa and just sink into my hopelessness, I don’t think I would be able to achieve any sense of light or brightness. I think of that when I think of what’s happening with the planet. And how this poem talks about we can see our expansiveness, we know how limitless we are, we know how to solve so many of the issues that face us and our planet. But there is so much in the way of that, and it’s this kind of vacillation between, well, we might as well try and something good usually survives. That’s what happens. That’s what’s happened throughout history. And we can believe in that, and that even can be a piece of hope. And to me it’s this sense of, yeah, there might be a really dark end of this road that will be really hard to stomach and will be really grief-stricken and horrible, but and there will always be something beautiful and growing and striving, because that’s how life works.
And I think if we get to reframe our hopelessness in certain moments and add some hope and get to go between the two, we actually get new ideas of what that end could be. And that’s what I’m most interested in is, and especially in the realm of being an artist of like, what if you let yourself imagine beyond just the block of hopelessness? And if it could be something bright and new, what would it look like? And a lot of times throughout history those imaginings are the things that push us all forward and keep us going. I think that that balance is really nourishing for me.
TS: Throughout A Year in Practice you bring in the work of poets you love. And I wonder, for you, what is the sacred function of the poet? Your love of poets in your life, and then of course now what you’re bringing to other people?
JS: I think what always happens to me, when I read a poem that really moves me, I think the heart of what’s happening there is either I’m reflecting and feeling a deep affirmation like, “Oh, this other person feels what I feel, and they took the time to put it into words.” And there’s a communion happening there. They’re reflecting something back to me, and I’m seeing myself in it. And that feels like, “Oh, I’m part of something bigger. I’m not alone. It’s not just me in my space thinking and feeling these things. Here’s another person speaking to me through the page, and they crafted this perfect way of saying it, took time to make sure they said it.” It’s just so loving, I think, to take so much time with language like that.
And equally, I think there’s this sense of there are these huge things that we want to say. The human experience goes from this micro to macro all the time, and that can be really overwhelming. And I feel like a poet steps in and is like, “Let me just condense that for you and let me make it in a concise, digestible, accessible package.” And sometimes it might be esoteric and strange; sometimes it might be not as accessible as other times. I like all the poems, but I think that at the heart of poems that work really well for very many people, what’s happening is there is work that was done there to take this macro and micro and balance that and offer it up in a way that you can read it and think, “OK, that’s right. I’ve accessed the heart of whatever that subject matter is here. And in not too many words, it didn’t take too much of my time. It soothed me or it inspired me or gave me affirmation, and now I feel like I understand it or myself a little bit better.”
And I think that that is just so needed in our world. And that, I mean, I think poetry is this ancient craft. It’s this ancient old, old way of trying to talk about the deepest feelings, the deepest experiences, but in a more condensed way so that it maybe is delivered right to the heart or the spirit.
TS: When people ask you, they’ll say, “What season? What are you, Jacqueline? Which season do you relate to the most?” It’s kind of whatever when people say, “What vegetable are you?” or whatever. What do you say in terms of the seasons?
JS: Oh yeah, winter is definitely my favorite season. The winter section of the book is the longest, and I think that that’s true because I love what happens to my practice in that season. I love the slowing down, and after writing over 40,000 poems and all of these books over all the years, there’s been so much speed and so much effort, and that there is a season that allows me to find that quiet and that slower pace and that I feel like the Earth is saying, “Yes, you are allowed to downshift. You are meant to do that right now.” And so that really resonates with me, and it’s really helpful for me to kind of recognize that I love that and I love the solitude of that, and I’m allowed to give that to myself. And I think feeling that connection and having that be the longest part of the book shows there are all these practices that I had to offer in that section that I’ve turned to again and again to restore myself.
TS: I had a feeling you were a winter person based on the fact that it was the longest section in the book. And also I noticed the emphasis on the healing power of rest, and I thought so many of us are feeling that, especially at this time, that we need the medicine of winter right now. And I wonder what your thoughts are about that?
JS: Yeah, I think that there’s a great reckoning happening in our society and in our world about how much we are expected to output and how much productivity has become synonymous with our worth as beings. And that this sort of slowing down and this idea of focusing on rest and the healing quality that it offers is really—it’s in step with that reckoning of thinking, “Wow, I’m allowed to not always be making something. I have the permission that I’m giving myself to just not for a while.” And what does that look like and how does that translate into, “Yeah, but I still need to work, and I still need to make money and put food on the table and pay my rent,” but how can I shift my approach to what I need and what I want and what I’ve been taught and what is actually possible?
And I think there’s a lot of those questions that get answered in that space of silence and stillness and solitude, or just introspection in general where you can kind of reframe like, “Maybe I don’t need to constantly put this pressure on myself to feel like I should be doing more. Maybe I’m doing just enough, and maybe there are times in the year where I can literally do nothing, and that that’s also OK.” And I think those questions are really important, and I think it would really benefit us to answer those questions, because I think we’ll all kind of find our own rhythm with that, and it’ll take everyone a different amount of time, and there’ll be a different approach to sort of reframing. But I think once that happens—and it is happening. I can see it happening. It’s definitely part of our collective conversation, like this idea of rest and the importance of it and how it relates to so many issues that are happening in our world. I think that once people give themselves even a little bit of that, so much will be revealed.
TS: You ask this, I think, provocative question in A Year in Practice when we know we need more rest. You write, “It can be helpful to clarify what your intentions are for resting.” And I thought, “Huh, that’s useful. That’s an interesting idea.” How did that occur to you?
JS: Well, sometimes I think we think, we’re just like, rest. Just take it easy, relax. And that actually can be really vague and hard to approach, especially for people who are like, “Go, go, go, make, make, make,” and who thrive in that fast-paced, which a lot of people I know really just love to be in the high gear all the time. I think that the idea of checking in with your intention behind rest could look different for everyone. For me, sometimes it looks like I can tell my body needs to rest, so that’s way more obvious. But sometimes I’m asking myself to put on the restful hat as an experiment. What will come from my allowance of a winter of introspection? Well, what will come from that usually is a great amount of subject matter and material to work with, so that when I do return in the spring full gusto and I’m shifting upward again with my energy, I actually have done a lot of work. But it was very quiet work. It was restful work. It was different than it usually looks.
And I think that when I get clear on my intention of what to do in that space, it’s usually aligned to something for my mind or something for my body or something for my spirit, and that I kind of weave in and out of those things throughout the book. Because that usually helps me clarify an intention like, am I trying to revive my mind right now? Am I trying to let myself be quiet so that I can come to clarity about something? Or am I tending to my body because it’s tired from sitting at my desk for days and days working? Or is my spirit just asking for some space to resonate with whatever it resonates with? And how much happens when I actually allow myself to just notice that, instead of trying to do something else with it?
TS: I think the insight I’m having during this conversation is how much A Year in Practice and linking our own personal rhythm to the rhythms of the seasons is actually counter the status quo. It’s actually totally against the push.
JS: Which is so wild, because it’s so natural and makes so much sense—
TS: I know.
JS: —and it’s just totally not what we do.
TS: I know. It’s just so interesting that this could be so in a way contra where the culture is and is headed and is focused.
JS: Yeah, it’s funny. I feel like it can be seen as something that’s so simple like, “Oh, just look at the seasons, and follow the guidance of the seasons.” But actually when I’m really sitting with it, and as I wrote it, I thought, “This is actually extremely radical. It’s radical—”
TS: Exactly.
JS: “—to return to this, to remember this, to try to do this.” And I think the way into it is I tried to offer prompts and rituals and things that are not seemingly radical, but the undercurrent is. And it’s so wild to me that something that is so inherent and that lives in all of us would then have to be brought back in such a way that we’re actually, “This is a radical return.”
TS: Now, one of my favorite poems is in the winter section of the book, “Desert Bear,” and I wonder if you can read that one, share that one with us?
JS: I’d love to. “Desert Bear.”
I know how to heal myself.
In solitude, my routine
of waking up with the sun,
writing, and singing.
To memorize the names of plants.
To walk a familiar gait, softly
as not to disturb the delicate
growth that somehow withstands
wind and heat, day on end.
No one can see me.
I take many deep breaths and never hurry.
I sleep when I feel like sleeping.
What comes out of me in this buoyed state
is the voice of the sacred cosmos.
I hear it start to build
after three days in the desert.
Deep warm sand and cool stone.
They say there is an extensive aquifer
below this landscape, wetness
in the dark. There is a bear who lives
in the boulders. She is me.
Here, she is in her finest season.
TS: I—just to share personally here for a moment, Jacqueline—went through a big change in my life. And my working statement was, “Letting die what needs to die so what can be born can be born.” And I thought of that as I was working through some of the prompts in A Year in Practice, because it seems like in the annual cycle there’s this natural death and then new birth, new life that occurs, this winter kind of letting us go into deep hibernation. And I wonder how you see that in your own artistic rhythms, the hibernation and then coming back into new life?
JS: Yeah, I really tried to bring death in a lot in this book into many of the seasons. Because I think that there can be this concept, especially of spring, we’ll say, where you’re like, “Oh, it’s just all new life, and everything’s charging out.” But so many things die in the spring. There are so many attempts at life that are too soon, and then another freeze happens and all the blossoms are frozen and blown off the trees. The baby birds fall from their nest. And I talk about these things in the book of, like, there’s all these deaths, and we shouldn’t forget that there are deaths in every season and that that’s OK, that it’s part of it and actually that it’s necessary, because not everything lives.
And when I think about that as a metaphor for creativity, I think of the fact that I’m inundated with ideas and inspiration constantly. And I have this little thing that I wrote that’s up on my bulletin board that just says, “We have to let so many noes come out of us all day long.” We have to say no to an infinite amount of things all day long, which is funny because I’m quite the yes person. And to consider how this works in winter, we fold inward and everything goes silent. In fall, we’re surrounded by the trees shedding what they don’t need, and that’s a form of death and all. There’s just a cyclical nature to becoming and then pause. I think death can be talked about in a negative way, but I also feel like it’s so crucial for certain things to slough off or to be shed, and that even in summer we start shedding. It’s like there’s all these moments where we are asked to let go of so much.
And that can be terrifying. It can be painful. It can be really confusing. But then what comes from that is all this newness and space for something else. And I think especially as a creative person, I’m always very careful to welcome that space because I trust the process, and if something needs to go, it needs to go. And then what comes from that will be a new creation. And I don’t always know what that will look like. I just get little glimpses of things. And we were talking before about the experiment of everything. And I think in experiments there’s a lot of failure, and that feels like there’s so much ripeness and so much bounty. Of course, there’s going to be things that don’t work. And that’s something I think I’ve worked to accept in my practice. And then also to see that there’s some hopefulness in that. That, yeah, the things that don’t work just make room for other things that might work way better.
TS: I want to make sure right now that whoever is listening has something they can do directly after this conversation. Hard to know what hemisphere they’re in, what season they might be listening to, what we’re—this conversation. Hard to know. What would be a generalized prompt so that people could get in touch for themselves right now with how they might be able to mirror something that’s happening in the natural world?
JS: I think something that applies to all seasons and that I’ve tried out in all seasons is a list-making practice where you can reassess whatever season it is.
In winter maybe the thing you’re reassessing is, what can I put away so that I have space to just rest and be? And there might be a list of things that you could consider. Maybe there’s some projects that aren’t finished that you can ask yourself to just write down and put on the shelf and come back to when the spring emerges.
Or if it’s spring, I think it’s really important to assess your own energy. Did you have a restful winter? Can you return to your practice full force? Or maybe you want to put down on paper some steps back in that feel a little bit more attuned to your actual energetic ability at the moment.
And if it’s summer, I think that there’s a list that I love to suggest, which is just, who would you like to share your work with and how? Summer is this communal time, so maybe you can make a list of a few ways that you would want to share your work through this season and share yourself or whatever it is, your ideas, things that you’d like to make, even. It doesn’t have to be a finished product to share it, but maybe there’s someone trusted or a few people you could think of or places that you could access in your community or you could share your work.
And then in fall the list should look like a list of resources. Like what do you need to gather for your season of introspection to come? Fall is all about stockpiling and figuring out is there a stack of journals that you’d like to go through in the winter? Can you get them ready for yourself? Can you start the process of going through them and coding what it is you might want to pull from them? Or something like that with your practice—is there a resource you can gather so that once you’re in your winter cave, you can feel like you’ve given yourself what you’ve needed?
TS: When we had our previous conversation together with the publication of Every Day Is a Poem, I asked you at the end if you would be willing to share one of your improvisational poems right then and there. Because I’m so impressed that you’ve created 40,000 of them, plus. And I’m wondering if we could end this conversation, if you’d be willing, in the same way. And the request I would have would be a verse on this notion of the radicalness of actually tuning in to our body, to nature, to ourselves as the Earth, something so natural. And how is it that this seems like such a countercultural move when it’s native to us?
JS: OK. Yeah, I’m going to write on a piece of paper, and I won’t get my typewriter out.
TS: OK, very good. Let’s see what happens.
JS: OK. “Radical Nature.”
To return is to conjure the root
and the first seed. To call the body
planetary, to name it star, tree, animal
and note its infinite worth.
To remake the world is to reveal it
under the surface of skin, brilliant
imagination we all carry, liberated
and flowing now, without end.
TS: Gorgeous. I’ve been speaking with Jacqueline Suskin. She’s the author of a new book. It’s called A Year in Practice: Seasonal Rituals and Prompts to Awaken Cycles of Creative Expression. It’s a glorious companion to a full year of introspection and creation. Jacqueline, thank you so much.
JS: Thank you.
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