A Year in Practice
Embracing Creativity Through the Seasons: A Look into Jacqueline Suskin's A Year In Practice
Burnout, time pressures, or creative blocks got you down? Maybe it’s time to start paying attention to your inner rhythms!
To everything there is a season (turn! turn! turn!), and we have so many opportunities for syncing our intentions and efforts with the patterns and flows of nature.
“Energy moves, it ebbs and flows, and we can learn our own internal rhythms for sailing its currents. ”
If you're seeking a pocket-sized, guided approach to exploring your creativity through the lens of the seasons and embracing a cyclical perspective on your artistic endeavors, Jacqueline Suskin's A Year In Practice is a wonderful resource to dive into. Inside, you’ll find practices (breathwork and meditation! writing prompts! restorative movement!) for each of the seasons, organized thematically (connection! reflection! play! preparation!). By aligning with the energies of winter, spring, summer, and autumn, we can deepen our connection to our creativity, honor the natural rhythms of life, and embark on a transformative journey of self-discovery and artistic expression. As Suskin writes in their introduction:
The four seasons are a framework for our experience on earth, and they provide us with phases of creative contraction and expansion and supply us with specific moods and sensations. Each season connects us with our timeline of life… The seasons directly affect us in so many ways, but overall, it’s the character and lesson of each yearly chapter and how each phase influences me that I’m most fascinated with.
I love this approach to a contemplative creative practice for the circle of the year and it pairs so beautifully with the way I work with my coaching clients in Feed Your Flame 🕯️. Suskin’s book really spoke to me when I first picked it up last winter. Its entire premise aligns perfectly with my own creativity ethos: Energy moves, it ebbs and flows, and we can learn our own internal rhythms for sailing its currents.
This really gelled for me in my own life nearly 10 years ago when I was holding down a full-time professional job, volunteering as the Fiction Editor of a literary magazine (shoutout to the weird and wonderful Longleaf Review!), writing fiction of my own — refining my skills in one genre (microfiction and flash fiction) and embarking on my first novel (a fool’s journey! So much trial and error! I’ve learned so much!), developing my tarot practice, and volunteering as a CASA.* Add to this a personal life lived like any other in the years leading up to and out of the 2016 presidential election. It was a lot. I mean a lot.
I realized very quickly that my work — and, ultimately, it’s all work, it’s all practice — needed to be cyclical, seasonal in order to be sustainable.
I knew that when it was time to put out a new issue of the literary magazine, my own writing would have to go on the backburner — and I became really intentional about that. I planned out my year in quarters, flowing between my reading and editing work for the magazine and then focusing on my own writing and revisions and submissions once we took a pause/published at the magazine.
A lot of my work at my professional job was cyclical as well — projects moved in seasonal and yearly patterns. Once I started thinking about the entirety of my work as a series of seasonal, cyclical energetic projects, I was able to tap into my own energy flow and (at least try to) move seamlessly with it — picking up one thing and setting aside the other, then letting the energy of one project help push another that’s been idling along forward to completion.
This is easier said than done, of course.
Sometimes I know that I have a rough season ahead of me, in which there will be events beyond my control influencing my capacity (I’m looking at you, 2024 election cycle!) or competing projects that can’t be reconciled. When I see that coming up on the horizon, I may not be able to change course, but I can put strategies (like Suskin’s!) in place to help keep me from syphoning the well dry or burning the candle at both ends until it fizzles out completely.
And that’s what I like best about Suskin’s approach: it isn’t prescriptive.
We have autonomy and control over how we approach any give day — and any season — in our lives.
If we want to take on a ‘summer project’ during the slumber and quiet of winter, who are we to get in our own way?? Will we need to plan and put extra measures in place in order to ensure we’re fully supported? Yes! (Same as if we were pulling an all-nighter writing a grant proposal: is it possible? Yes. Is it gonna hurt? Probably! What can I do to prepare? Do I need a disco nap? A pot of espresso? Loud music? To do some physical exercise beforehand?).
Ultimately, that’s what Suskin’s book — and the work that I do — is all about: learning to keep your inner flame burning, through all of life’s seasons.
*If you know what a Court Appointed Special Advocate is, you know that this is no run-of-the-mill volunteer work. This is jumping head-first into a series of important, longterm relationships – within the court system, within the world of social services, and with young people trapped in impossible situations.
