Episode 165 - From Marigolds To Holy Knowing: The Wild Joy of Creative Expression with Suzi Banks Baum
It is my pleasure to introduce you to my personal Mary Poppins of imagination, swooping in with beauty, wit, and a bottomless bag of creative wonder—Suzi Banks Baum.
Suzi is, a protector of the imagination, a nurturer of attention, and a devotee to the handmade. She is my good friend, and I’m honored to share today’s Come To Your Senses conversation, in which we ponder:
What it means to create a ‘nest for your holy knowing.’
The healing power of writing our untold stories and unburdening our hearts onto the page.
Everyday portals to enchantment like marigolds, quince, and even garlic ramps
How to approach creative practice when you’re pretty sure your art supplies are judging you.
I can’t wait for you to soak in the wisdom and warmth of this conversation—a love letter to creativity, beauty, and the holy magic of looking up.
With love,
Mary
LINKS FROM THE SHOW
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Mary: 0:00
I'm so glad to have you here. We were just talking about intentions and I wanted to say I did a little writing before we got on and some of the things I wrote are that anytime I come into contact with you as a human, or your work, your writing, your art, your activism, I feel inspired in such an organic way, like the name of your work or one of the names for your work is Rising Forth and you light a fire of fascination in me with the ordinary, with the miraculous. And there are so many branches of your work art camps, bookbinding, writing, mothering, cooking but at the heart of it all is this connection between the creative and the holy. And I just want to say you do that so well, woman, like you live and embody and walk through the world as that and so welcome to Come to your Senses.
Suzi: 1:20
You inspire many layers of Come to your Senses with the way that you walk in the world and just really, really happy and excited to have you here well, thank you, and I'm really honored to join the circle of humans who you have spoken with and shared space with here, because you also ignite us in such an inclusive and gentle and fiery way. You, you know, thank you. You are soft in this moment, but you are also a blaze.
Mary: 1:55
A soft blaze. I am here for that, thank you. You're welcome and to answer your question, I wanted to kind of launch in with that. But ultimately, you know, come to your senses is about experiencing the sacred through the sensory body, and one of the things that you have on your website is that daily creative practice is an expedition into your holy knowing, and I just love that so much. And what is the holy knowing? What does that mean to you?
Suzi: 2:35
Yeah, that's a great question and it is really the heart of my work. Holy knowing comes from a lifelong whatever is deeper than hunger? To feel included and inhabited in the sacred Lutheran household and God was something outside of me that I had to earn like a merit badge, and this constant reminder that I was separate and that I was unclean and a sinner and guilty and full should be shameful. Shame was a word that was used in my household a lot growing up and in the paradigm of the organized faith practice that my family was immersed in, I always felt unworthy. I always felt a little bit off, a little dirty, a little messy, had the wrong hair. It wasn't, you know. There was always something.
Suzi: 3:52
And as I've come to really examine and inquire around that hunger, I understand that a lot of that came from the conditions of my family life, but it resulted in years of looking for a faith practice in which I felt included and seen and and in which the Holy cause I had, you know, alongside that hunger, was this instinct, maybe, or maybe an ancient memory of of being on fire with that and being absolutely ablaze in aliveness. And so, over the course of years of my work and writing and working with women especially, but working with people who have felt excluded or not a part of, or I mean artists are not all misfits, but we are, because we are in the culture but we're also looking at it and inquiring of it and looking for places that crave our particular juice, began to name what I felt daily practice had allowed me to hear, which was my own interior dialogue, but also presence of the holy. So for years of praying and supplicating and asking for, I began you know, you know me, through years of meditation and writing and yoga and lots of ways of externally trying to access this place. As I softened, really, that urgency, I began to understand that it's here and it's been here all along and it does not need a man's name or a man. It doesn't need a gender.
Suzi: 5:45
But, given the thousands of years of a gendered holiness, I call it her at times, just like I call the moon her. So that's where I came to holy, knowing, you know, since we met, the holy, ordinary has been very much in my attention and I think, if I strip that away another layer, it's that sense of life is serving it up to us on a moment to moment basis and that, if I keep looking elsewhere, I will miss what is absolutely ecstatic here in this Even if there's sadness, even if there's grief, even if there's grief, even if there's pain, even if there's difficulty, fear.
Mary: 6:29
Yeah, I simultaneously want to leap out of my seat and also just roll onto the floor like a dog onto its back, because that I completely, completely relate and and something that you do like, like you are someone who, when I think of just unbridled creativity, like you are the first one to come to mind. I mean, just even you know, for those who are listening, it's like there's, it looks like a hand stamped sweatshirt with, like, maybe, a hand dyed scarf and some marigolds hanging dried in the background amongst dozens of paintings, and just and just you know, like. I wonder if you might speak a little bit to beauty.
Suzi: 7:44
And it's almost like your daily creation of beauty in so many different forms is almost like a visual writing of Psalms of this holy presence, wow. So right now, where I'm sitting in my studio, I have, in fact, you're right brought in the marigold malas from my studio outside, because I can't, you know, I work outside of my garage for as many months as I possibly can, and it's not a car storage place, it's my art studio.
Mary: 8:09
And Susie lives in the Berkshires.
Suzi: 8:12
Yeah, in Western Massachusetts. In Western Massachusetts, yeah, on the land, I want to say, of the Stockbridge-Munsee tribe of the Mohican people. Yes, thank you, yes, thank you. And for me marigolds are. They're part of many different traditions of ceremony and it's just a flower I grew up with and the scent of them drying is really great. But I also brought a quince, because you know when I think about coming to my senses.
Suzi: 8:46
I don't know if you've, have you ever smelled a quince? I have not. Oh, you can just go find. Well, I don't know if the market's there, we'll have them right now. But it's a, you know, it's related to an apple, it's a hard fall fruit that is so fragrant and I didn't grow up with them. I learned about them from an herbalist here in the Berkshires and they were kind of exotic to me. And now, as I've gotten familiar with them, I've learned that in, especially in Europe and in the Middle East, the quince quince in the Spanish tradition, quince paste and manchego cheese is a real like oh just delicious appetizer kind of food. But anyway it's very fragrant.
Suzi: 9:30
And a friend of mine, who's czech, said to me the other day as I was fondling a quince he said oh, my grandmother used to put bowls of them in the room where the laundry was kept, because they would just spread their fragrance throughout the winter. And so the beauty, the daily creation of beauty, it really is for me derived from paying attention. And there's this poem that is one of my morning prayer practices, by this poet, annie Lightheart. It was in my newsletter the other day, so maybe you recall, but it's called Unwinter, and she writes a hundred a thousand things on the list, all while the day hangs outside, on a single silken thread. And if you look up, if you go out, all will be resolved, each salt grain dissolved the day, given freely to every early fool out in the yard, bareheaded, barefooted, and it goes on.
Suzi: 10:34
But that for me, that sense of looking up and encountering, you know so. So you know marigolds are not a big invention. I didn't invent marigolds. They're here and they're enticing. And you know there's marigold dyed fabric right here that I wanted to show you this. You know this. I mean, I know your listeners are not watching this, but this color, like the color that marigold gives you, is just. There's a generosity, I think, in nature. That is part of what really fuels my work and you notice that and I appreciate that that my writing it is deeply personal. It's very much in relationship to the natural world.
Suzi: 11:27
And going back to talking about the holy knowing part, you know, as a kid, as I sort of made my way, let's say, in my family of origin, creative acts absolutely saved me and at the time I didn't think, oh, I'm coloring, this is saving me. But it was the thing I turned to. Being outside saved me. You know those two ways of being.
Suzi: 12:02
You know, I didn't really think of myself ever as a visual artist until the last 15 years. Really, yeah, because I didn't think of sewing. I didn't think of sewing or embroidery as art. I started sewing when I was 10. And, yeah, I worked for Martha Graham. Yeah, I worked for a lot of really cool people, but I thought of myself as sort of the machine behind their vision.
Suzi: 12:33
And it wasn't until I had the sort of breakdown that led to the moment when you and I met my husband and I have a son and a daughter, and when my kids were 10 and 13,.
Suzi: 12:47
I really really couldn't stand it any longer to be the person I was in those days, which was massively overcommitted and I really had just so ground my interior voice down, so much with being committed to everyone else's well-being that I had to stop, and so I think I hope I'm not getting off track here but to answer your question about nature and beauty, it is a natural instinct for me to sort of organize a space with my hands as I move through the day. So whether it's the way I set up my desk or the way I open a journal page, the way that I teach, the way that I plan something, the way that I put together materials for a class, the books that I make, the fabrics that I dye, the way I use them, the way I stitch them, it all doesn't, you know, it doesn't feel segmented anymore, and I think part of what I'm speaking about in the times that were difficult for me is when my life was very segmented.
Mary: 14:04
Mm-hmm, and my life was very segmented, mm, hmm, I love what you said about coloring providing safe harbor.
Mary: 14:15
And I had the exact same experience, you know, growing up in a very Catholic church school home, growing up in a very Catholic church school home, and you know, school especially was really hard on my little body.
Mary: 14:33
And then I remember our art teacher. Her name was Mary Beth and she actually years later she was a family friend and she was kind of like you, spirited, beautiful, feminine, creative, and she would come in and she'd teach art to us and it was just like. You know, I always felt in school like there was just something so wrong with me and I couldn't pay attention and I barely made it through by the skin of my teeth, grade wise, I was the subject of ridicule by nuns around my stupidity, and then Mary Beth would come, oh, and it was like my fairy goddess mother, walking into the room and actually years later she told me that I made her I don't remember this, but that I made her a picture and it said Mary Beth, queen of art. And you know, this kind of brings me to one of the questions I wanted to ask, which is around like the feminine qualities of creative practice well, first off, I want to just send up a candle for marybeth, wherever she is.
Suzi: 16:03
Yeah, and andbar, do you know the work of Corita Kent? Sister Corita Kent, I don't, oh, please, you must look it up. C-o-r-i-t-a Kent. She was a really important presence for art during the 60s, but she was a nun and she was a huge political activist and her visual work she, like Mary Beth, probably knew about her.
Suzi: 16:29
I'll say that that's the thing I wonder about. So, for me, I feel that the qualities that make artists whether they're writing murder mysteries or performing Shakespeare, or writing haiku or dyeing fabric or singing or playing a saxophone, whatever it is the initial stance is curiosity, which to me is intrinsically feminine stance, and openness, a setting aside of preconditions or common knowledge. It's, it's, there's a real. What if-ness me feel womanly is. This is not to say I'm not ambitious and not to say that I don't want to succeed, but I want to get there with a sense of my inner life intact.
Suzi: 18:01
I'm thinking about the early mythology, about the female goddesses and that, and how I learned the qualities of women with appetite was all in that sort of world of myth. It was not in the Bible stories. Mary didn't have an appetite. She rode on a fucking donkey when she was about to give birth. There was no mention of snacks or pee stops or what she drank. You know, and I know, I mean it, just so for me, you know, the Greek gods and goddesses had, the goddesses had much more of a sense of fallibility. You know, they ate the golden apple, or they dropped the pomegranate seeds, or you know they they descend and they rise up, and so I have always had that curiosity around being the person I came into the plant of the planet as a very comfortable being, um, and allowing those qualities to be qualities that can succeed, because, believe me, they were not qualities that were helpful to me in my early life as a theater artist.
Mary: 19:22
No.
Suzi: 19:26
My sort of curiosity or my willingness to my femininity was something that very much got preyed upon and taken advantage of, and it was not a path to success.
Suzi: 19:41
And yet it was something that was social currency in my early life. It just didn't. It wasn't paying off, let's say, you know it wasn't getting me anywhere, and so you know it took some really difficult years. I was also in my early in my 20s. I was really struggling with living with someone who had some really terrible addiction issues, and it took my own sort of debacle during that period to pick myself up and put myself back together again therapeutically and become a little bit more comfortable with being who I was. And suddenly or maybe not suddenly I don't want to make it sound like a magic story, but but little by little I did have a sense of like oh, I'm actually okay, I'm actually beautiful, my hair is not necessarily wrong, I can be this person who has multiple skills, and if I can't succeed in regional theater in the way that I want to, I'm going to succeed somewhere else. And I began to put together a life that allowed these other parts of me to exist in somewhat of an equal standing.
Mary: 21:30
The longer I live, the more comfortable I am with being the woman that I am's. It's very surprising, deliciously surprising, to me that you did not consider yourself a visual artist until you know, the last decade and change. And one of the things that I always find a stumbling block around creative practice, especially visual creative practice, is like this identity of like. Well, I'm not an artist because I don't paint, you know, I'm not an artist because I don't really know how to do mixed media, like I do the three splotches of colors on the palette and you know, and then I throw some collage pieces, newspaper clippings in there, but I don't really know what I'm doing, you know.
Mary: 22:17
And your creativity, like I know, in your writing you're so expressive about like the sensorial majesty of the wild, like the way you speak about quints or the way you write about garlic ramps, you know, and something I just so admire about you is the wildness, the untamedness, the organicness of your creativity. And for someone who might be listening and thinking I'm not an artist, or I don't know where to start or I suck at drawing, I wonder what seeds you might scatter to draw them deeper into their true creative path, beyond just these external ideas about creativity, hmm.
Suzi: 23:11
Well, this is a really good question and I think it helps maybe to consider some historical effort here, which is at least speaking for myself. I grew up admiring paintings in museums and listening to all the church music and learning that these things were created by people who are considered geniuses, who were masters. We hear a lot about masters of technique and masters of the Impressionist era and all of these words that, to my young, developing self, implied a kind of accomplishment that lowly, old, stinky me could never approximate. And so in my life, in the theater, where I my body myself, my mind, was my tool, basically my paintbrush, there was something very comfortable Like at least I could take stage, combat class and voice lessons and speech and tame myself for the task. Though I may never be a master, but I would at least have some skills. And I absolutely am grateful, so grateful that you can appreciate the fact that, yeah, I have a whole bunch of skills, and the sort of crossing point of all of them is this sense of fiery, wild expressiveness that is informed by skill. I'm the front row student you want me in your class because I really believe in learning and expanding my skills and understanding technique.
Suzi: 25:02
But when I finally get down to it, the marks that I make, that are my own, that feel like I could identify my piece of work on a wall with 100,000 other pieces of work, is this sense of like it all goes on the page, and I don't feel this pristine lineage of, you know, color work that is derived from that. That sort of college of perfection doesn't call me, and the colleagues, the people that I work with, my close collaborators, are all people who have multiple streams of expression, who are really drawn to the wilderness, who allow for that intersectionality and value the unrefined and maybe I'm watching you nodding like refinement was such a something that I sought to as a young girl learning manners and learning the way of being a person in the world. Being refined was an attribute. That was something that you wanted to do. And today, yeah, I set a very nice table. You know the knife and the fork and the spore are in the right location. But my inquiry is much less. You know there's fewer guardrails, I think. And so to spread seeds? To spread seeds, it's that quality of beginning and being you know, being in beginner's mind, we hear about that a lot Like not having what you would think of as mixed media skills allows you to pick up a quince and say, well, what happens if I put some paint on this and then rub it on like that and it becomes your entirely unique mark.
Suzi: 27:04
You know, if we think every collage needs to look like you know, name your Instagram star. If it all has to look like that, then how boring is that? It's just not interesting to me. So I think, for me, what I encourage people to do who work with me is to allow yourself. Don't do work that looks like mine, but let yourself play with these tools that I've experimented with and let them take you somewhere.
Suzi: 27:38
And I've really watched a lot of people come to a quality of um, not contentment, like oh, I've reached this field, I'm never going to leave it, but like a quality of like comfort with their pace. Like when you're teaching yoga and you see people who are clearly not going to do a handstand in the middle of the room, who are always going to be by the wall, but man, can they nail that handstand Like? I want people to understand their, you know, a sense of I have capacity. Creativity is the holy living in each and every one of us. It is not exclusive doesn't require an MFA. Doesn't mean you're blessed. It simply means you're paying attention.
Mary: 28:27
Okay, let's just let that one settle on the breeze. Yes, yeah, it simply means you're paying attention, god, yes, and you know I've. I love the word creativity, but I know for some people just the word creativity can sound exhausting. Oh, yeah, yeah, sound exhausting. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know. And what's that Mary Oliver quote? Like our endless proper work to pay attention. That is our endless proper work.
Suzi: 29:09
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, like a needle in a haystack of light. I've gotten to know Mary Oliver's work really well and I had the opportunity this summer to walk at Blackwater Pond on the Cape. Our National Poet Laureate, ada Limon, was launching her project with the Library of Congress to commemorate an artist who was affiliated with one of our national parks and she started this project in Provincetown, at Blackwater Pond, where Mary walked nearly daily and composed many of her poems and Ada, whose work, if you don't know it, I urge you to look it up. This project is all over the United States in, I think, 12 different national parks, including one in the Smoky Mountains for Lucille Clifton. Anyway, I got to recite a poem of Mary's to Ada, just spontaneously.
Suzi: 30:15
It was, you know, it was a thing in the moment, and it was one of those moments where you're like, yeah, there are people in the world who have spoken through their creative powers in a way that touches so many different people with meaning, and maybe that's what the Bible was for a lot of people for a long time. There, I suppose, some passages of the bible that are important to me. Maybe I'm entirely suspicious of that document and I'm much more um durable like, yeah m I got you, I see where you are and you're taking me to a place that I could not have gotten had you not walked around the pond that particular morning when the fox was sipping or the turtle was rolling or whatever was happening. I'm sweet that you mentioned her Well her work.
Mary: 31:13
I sense a deep resonance between her work and your work, particularly in the sensuality of it, and you know your writing. It's like every other Saturday morning. I'm rubbing my hands together. Oh, you are so sweet. It's the Susie Banks bomb. Bomb is coming to my inbox. And that kind of leads me to my next question how does your sensuality and your sensuality as a woman, how does that cross paths with your creative practice?
Suzi: 32:21
Well, it's entirely. It of my life was both interesting and stimulating and pleasurable and exciting to me, but also was a way that I could move socially. Exciting to me, but also was a way that I could move socially. And I was confused for a very specific period of time, thinking it would move me professionally and it obviously didn't, thank God. But you know, to come to the point where I lived through that time and I sort of lived clean of that time and then met Jonathan and we had our children and, and motherhood really allowed me to feel that my sensual life and my sexual life were both meaty and important parts of me that had expression in a daily way that didn't have to include seduction or fucking we can swear right Totally and so I began to understand that my femininity, my body, was not a mistake, it wasn't currency. And to come to that really while I'm blowing the noses of my children and making dinner and doing all that for years and years, was massively comforting and allowed me to kind of inhabit it without a sense of shame or without a sense of having to be guarded because who knows what the heck is going to happen around the next corner.
Suzi: 34:09
My sensual self is every part of the way that I encounter the day. That's why I make myself really beautiful books. I no longer write in wire-bound little spiral notebooks. No way, man, I make these beautiful books. You know what they look like. You know that are a nest for my my holy knowing.
Mary: 34:33
You know it's it's, it's OK, can we just just a nest for my holy knowing. Just needed to slow that one down, make sure that pebble could skip across the lake and create some heavy ripples. Yes, a nest for my holy knowing. You know, I know so many women who have beautiful journals and don't write in them.
Suzi: 35:02
Well, that's. I mean, that is one of my main missions, mary. I have been in so many situations, in a teaching capacity or as a student, where I see people creating these gorgeous books, beautiful tons of technique, pouring themselves into the painted paper, whatever all the parts that make up the book, and then they say, well, it's too nice to write. And as I began to hear that more and more and more like I only write when I go to this conference, I don't write every day Cause I I can't do it on my own or I could never write in that book. It's too special. Well, this is the Bible of your soul. If, if I am an inhabitation of the sacred, then my expression is worthy of the finest of parchment. That there's absolutely like I am desecrating my own temple to diminish my voice, and I know exactly what I mean.
Mary: 36:11
Yes, and I have been that woman, I know you have been, and I really appreciate the encouragement to allow all parts of ourselves to be sacred and holy in that process of allowing.
Suzi: 36:35
In that process of allowing, like because, when I think about, sometimes, when I journal, I journal because I'm anxious, yeah, and I don't want to put my hairy ass Linus cell or no, not Linus pig pen, yeah On the pages of this beautiful thing and you're so right, like, if not there, where, where, you know I have worked in the country of Armenia for a number of years and you know they are the home of illuminated manuscripts, these ancient, beautiful books that contain the original well for them, the translations of the Gospels into Armenian, but these first documents of philosophy and language and village practices and all of these things medicine, science and I look at them and I admire their gorgeous gorgeousness and I wonder what else there was to say about that time. You know, and I mean this is true throughout the last say, you know, 500 years we have like zero, not zero, but we have very little evidence of women's experience. Even maybe your grandma, like, do you have letters or books? Did she write? Like there's a really beautiful summary after the book Pachinko the author's name is escaping me in the moment, but you know it's like the discussion with the author at the end of a novel and she in that book it's an incredibly researched book about South Korea and Japan during World War Two and she talked about the difficulty about writing about women's lives in that not so long ago time because there is so so little written record of women's lives. And you know, I feel like how can we really assess history and the development of our culture if we don't have an equal representation of women and men's voices. So I think there's a cultural prerogative for us to take note, and your hairy ass pig pen self is as equally welcome on the page as is your absolutely divinely delivered jewel-like tones.
Suzi: 39:06
I taught this workshop the other day to a large group of people who make really beautiful books but are, for some of them at least, reluctant to work into them, and so I taught them three or four different techniques for privacy, because one of the main things that keeps people from writing, whether it's in a spiral bound notebook or a beautifully hand bound book, is what if someone reads this, if my children read this? And there are a number of ways that cultures through time have. Women in different cultures through time have developed to obscure their writing, and it's a really helpful skill to have, because when you do get to that hairy part and you're like, oh, I can't write this, what if my I mean you know the common trespass. What if my sister opens my journal? Or what if my kids, or what you know it's in your bed stand? I mean I understand that some of that would make people's lives very difficult, if not dangerous.
Suzi: 40:09
I appreciate that, I've witnessed that. But there are ways to obscure your writing so you can have that cathartic experience of writing it, getting it out of your body, getting it out of your head I witnessed this so many times where people finally can put an experience onto a page or into a piece of work whatever and live beyond it. Because if we have to hold all that, how can we possibly move forward, how can we rise forth if we are not unburdened and you know, and allow that stuff to integrate, putting it on the page? You know there's there's a whole whole body of research around therapy, that sort of therapeutic aspect, but in my experience with it it certainly helps me, let's say, to be able to get on the page and get something out of my head.
Mary: 41:12
I love that clarity that once we put it on the page we can move beyond it, we can live, we can have a new experience. You know, when I'm doing embodiment coaching and these unfelt feelings rise to the surface and there's process where, you know, we return that feeling from stuckness to flow. It's like, oh my God, there's so much room in here now, right right, so much room for possibility.
Suzi: 41:42
Yeah, yeah, and I think that my life is evidence of that room. You know the moments, the sort of turning point moments for me as a kid, when I got into recovery in my late 20s, early 30s, when I met Jonathan, and then when my kids were 10 and 13, like those moments were times when I finally let a difficult truth out of my head, out of my body, and into the world, onto the page, into the safe space of a therapeutic setting, into the shared experience with my partner. And that's, I think, what expression is. And it's not only, you know, the raindrops on the rose paddle, but it is. This is what I saw, this is what you know, this is what I felt when I saw it, this is what I remembered when I saw that. And you know, suddenly our life begins to sing a little bit Like we have like, oh, that's not just all ballast behind me. My past is not ballast, it's information. It's information, it's reference.
Mary: 43:00
It's, you know, and it feeds the force of who I am today. Mm, hmm, I love that Clarity of what is the point of expression, and just like the significance of documenting our stories, even if nobody ever reads them, you know. And so I want to ask you if there's anything I haven't asked you yet that you would like to be asked.
Suzi: 43:28
Oh, oh Mary. What would I like to be asked? Asked, oh Mary. Well, I like to be asked. You've asked such great questions or thrown some great pebbles into the pond.
Suzi: 43:42
There's a seasonality to my work. I think seasonality is something that I'm learning more and more, is important to tend to, and I was thinking a lot about your the most recent podcast, where you were referring to when you were talking about pumpkins and, you know, acorn squash and all of that. But that has really allowed me to feel like, yeah, there's all these things that I do and I don't do them all the time, all the time. And that permission to have like the winter is my deep writing time. I don't teach in the winter, if I can help it and I feel really strongly about honoring.
Suzi: 44:23
I think that's part of what being in nature so much teaches me is that I am massively productive and happy, but I have to be fed.
Suzi: 44:35
You know, I have one of my mantras is I am an unflinching blaze, a fire that must be fed and that requires rest, it requires nourishment, it requires fireside evenings with Jonathan where we don't really talk or we binge watch the Great British Baking Show.
Suzi: 44:54
You know, whatever it is that we need and that you know, my big visual months are very much related to the sunny months and when the plant world is really out there and wanting to play with me. So, yeah, I think seasonality, because I think also something that in particular women are sensitive to is light and the dark season is. I mean, I don't know if you have a lot of Southern Hemisphere listeners, but I'm aware that in the Northern Hemisphere this time of year is especially challenging and here we are expected to be joyful and cheerful and jubilant, while our human self, our bodied self, is like quiet and wanting to burrow and be warm and be held and, you know, eat your acorn squash soup and be in this sort of quieter, more reflective place. So I think that that's, you know, that has led to my teaching of this Advent Dark Journal workshop. But I think that it really rose out of my despair around the holiday season and feeling so wrong and out of step and out.
Mary: 46:15
A total surprise to me is that I've been going to this church called Her Church and it is a goddess centric. It's a former Lutheran church, still actually in the Lutheran family, but, pastor Stacey, she's an ordained Lutheran minister and she had a spiritual awakening around the divine feminine and we start the service by confessing the sins of white supremacy and racism as a river that flows from the ocean of patriarchy. And the whole service okay, suze, the whole place you go in and it's like a regular church, but everything is the goddess. There are hundreds of sculptures and art pieces and paintings and goblets and candles, and it has changed my life.
Suzi: 47:32
Oh, I don't doubt that.
Mary: 47:34
It is like I didn't think I would live long enough to see an actual church where the goddess is not just represented but centered you know the things that I'm learning is for me, being a kid who grew up in a town of a thousand people and hightailed it to New York City as fast as I possibly could once I came of age, my relationship with nature has been I'm a lover of the great indoors, let's just say, and this experience of learning about the goddess and nature and pagans and Wiccans and the alignment with the seasons, that's kind of why I got onto this tear. You talk about winter and reducing the expectation to produce and to shine, and following that as a rhythm and aligning your body with that rhythm takes the importance of rest beyond this cerebral concept of something I should be doing for my well-being, into a joyful, therapeutic celebration and partnership with the sacred through creativity and beauty. I just really vibe with you there.
Suzi: 48:59
Oh yeah. Oh take me into that church with you when you're in there next, let me sit next to you, I would just roll over I.
Mary: 49:10
if you're ever in California, we will go. I'd love for our listeners to hear about your offerings in general and anything else you'd like to share about your beautiful community.
Suzi: 49:25
Sure, well, advent Dark Journal is really a response to the expectations that I felt as a mother, as a person in a community where church was still a part of our life at that time, and really how out of sync I felt with the season and the holiday clangy quality and the you know the holiday clangy quality, and it's a six-week online learning experience where I deliver a really beautiful, curated art packet to everyone through the mail and the lessons are released one week at a time and so there's a paced quality to it. Like you know, you don't get, you don't do everything all at once. You know you have this and each week has a theme. We totally watch the moon. The moon is one of the most prominent guiding principles or forces or presences for Advent Dark Journal and it is a way to create an oasis for yourself during a time where I think a lot of people feel the demands diminish. And the demands don't diminish the demands on you, diminish your own.
Suzi: 50:44
They certainly have diminished me, let's say, and you know if you have little kids, there's just constant sense of wanting doing, have to be here, do this, wear this, have this perfectly packaged something, and just that whole ethic of perfection and performing the holiday season, you know, in a picture perfect way, just, absolutely just, is soul crushing, and it so takes you away from what's happening in the natural world and it really is a way to kind of uh, appreciate and access the richness of the year, that it's coming to a close and turning to the new year with a sense of refreshment like, oh you, rather than dragging your ass over the finish line and and I mean, I had I had bronchitis every January for like nine years running. Wow, what is that about, right? So so that's where Advent Dark Journal comes in and it's really sweet. And then I teach in physical, in real life stuff in the summer months, my backyard art camp and things like that. So if people are interested in my work, I will encourage them to sign up for my newsletter.
Mary: 52:06
It is a gold fleck in the eye of your inbox, everybody. It is irresistible. I highly recommend it. Well, I love you and am so grateful for the magic you bring to the world and to my life and so happy to share you with my listeners. And so if you go to suzybanksbaumcom S-U-Z-I-B-A-N-K-S-B-A-U-Mcom, and of course all those links will be below the episode and thank you so much for being here.
Suzi: 52:47
I thank you. You are most welcome. It's so sweet to spend time with you.
Mary: 52:52
Same. I desire more. Thank you, Let us let it be so.