A Year In Practice
seasonal rituals and prompts to awaken cycles of creative expression
A seasonal guide of holistic practices that offer clarity, activate hope, honor nature, and inspire the creative seeker all year long.
“The seasons and cycles of nature have incredible power to affect everything in our lives—especially our creativity,” says poet Jacqueline Suskin. “The earth shows us when our creative reserves might wax and wane. When we listen and follow nature’s lead, we tune in to an inexhaustible source of imagination, inspiration, and beauty.” With A Year in Practice, Suskin shares holistic methods to help readers explore and fortify their creative practice by accessing guidance provided by the rhythms of nature.
Written in sync with the progression of the seasons, A Year in Practice is a program of holistic techniques and journaling prompts to nurture the creative seeker all year long. Four seasonally themed chapters keep you connected to natural phases of creative contraction and expansion, from the quiet hibernation of winter to the jubilant and expressive communing of summer. Used regularly, you will move through artistic blocks, deepen your capacity for self-reflection, cultivate creative routines, and find new levels of inspiration and contentment.
“It’s crucial that we spend time dreaming, crafting, and resting in a state of reverie,” says Suskin. Here, she offers practical tools and creative rituals to help you attune to the energies of each season—to enrich your creativity through awareness, emotional expression, explorative whimsy, and ever-deepening levels of imagination.
praise for a year in practice
“If you're looking to get still, turn inward, and learn to trust your voice, this is the book for you. Suskin guides us through a self-inquiry practice that is deeply resonant and beautiful.”
— Alexandra Elle, New York Times bestselling author of How We Heal.
“Using the poetry of our lives, A Year in Practice shifts our notions of time and space from linear to cyclical. By re-shaping time, we can foster acceptance and meaning by working with the seasonal tides and not against them. This book is a grounding force for any creative practice to flourish, however, you define it. A Year in Practice is an agent for connection, for expressing big feelings, for exploring the "why" and tending to your creative self.”
—Carissa Potter Carlson, artist and founder of People I’ve Loved
“For all ecstatic earth worshipers looking to partner their creative practice with the natural rhythms, this book is for you. Jacqueline has given us such a generous offering. Filled with prompts, practices, and poems, this is for the nature lover and creative looking for a reset around their work. "
—Sarah Faith Gottesdiener, author of the Moon Book.
“Jacqueline Suskin’s A Year In Practice invites us to utilize our connection to nature as seasonal beings in devotion to our creative practice with such care, nourishment, and aliveness. Filled with soulful poetry and prose, wise creative wisdom, and deeply rooted practices, this book is a balm and a lovingly-held container that allows readers to tune both outward and inward in order to create a bridge between ourselves, nature, and creativity. A Year in Practice weaves the practical and the unseen in ways that illuminate how we can relate to both the tangible actions and the mystery that hold our creative practices. The tenderness and unique approach Suskin takes is one that I know will ignite and nurture my own creative practice for years to come.”
— Lisa Olivera, author of Already Enough
“I want every artist to read this book. We’re all so exhausted and burnt out from toiling in this digital capitalist hellscape, and Suskin provides the most brilliant solution I’ve seen: Follow the earth’s lead. She reverently walks us through the seasons, pointing out the elegant natural order that already exists, and how a balanced creative practice is less like a factory and more like a tree. What a relief.”
—Hallie Bateman, author of What to Do When I’m Gone and Directions
“In our efforts to be anti capitalist we may still stall on adding rest and time to mend into our lives, and Jacqueline shows us what is truly possible if only we become better listeners to the nature that surrounds us, and lives inside us. Stillness as a way to propel, movement as a way to rest, she holds us in the nuance through every chapter and every exercise.
This book is a must read for anyone who wants to feel less resistance in their creative efforts as well as their day to day life. It is a book for our times, from one of our greatest poets. May it guide you in seasonal creation and dreaming up new worlds to live in.”
—Marlee Grace, author of How to Not Always Be Working and Getting to Center
“In reverent prose, Jacqueline Suskin's gentle call to action asks us to deepen our attention- to the constant guide of the seasons, to the creator within us all pleading for direction, to the signs within the body that urge us to contract or expand, and to the omnipresent cycles that guide our daily lives. A Year in Practice is a practical guide and a tender companion through the wisdom of the seasons. Suskin invites us to get curious about how our personal cycles can (re)align with the flow of natural rhythms. Through self-inquiry and observation with the support of generative prompts and inspired poems, we are provided an opening, an invitation and a quiet call of remembrance. Despite a severance from nature due to the demands of Capitalism, Suskin asserts that there is a greater rhythm we are asked to fall in step with- a rhythm all living things know. In this book, the holy is within reach. Magic and mysticism is deeply embedded into the very thing we've grown to view as commonplace- the structure and passage of time.”
—Giselle Buchanan, author of Incantations, Letter to Self and creator of the Written Into Being Workshop