Suleika Jaouad

Our imagination is a muscle that so easily gets atrophied as we get older, and yet it’s the thing that gives us the sustenance to keep reimagining how things can be, to have the freedom to change your mind about what’s working and what’s not, and about who you are and, and to think of your life, your survival as a kind of creative act.

Narration

When she was just 22, Suleika Jaouad was diagnosed with leukemia and given a 1 in 3 chance of surviving. From her hospital room, she started writing the New York Times column—an Emmy-winning series—“Life, Interrupted”, where she shared what it means to live at the threshold between life and death. Her story went on to become a best-selling memoir called Between Two Kingdoms. The people I’m most inspired by are the ones who have found a way to turn pain into beauty and possibility. Suleika is one of them, and I’m so excited for you to hear this conversation.

She shares insights and creative practices from her latest book, The Book of Alchemy, to help us exercise our imagination and approach life’s challenges with curiosity. My name is Willow Defebaugh, and this is The Nature Of.

Each week, we explore the nature of our world through conversations that help us reconnect with ourselves, each other, and the Earth. This week, we’re looking at the nature of imagination with Suleika Jaouad. 

Willow Defebaugh

Suleika, thank you so much for being here today. It’s an honor.

Suleika

Thank you for having me. It’s really a joy and an honor, and I’ve been looking forward to this.

Willow

Me too. So I wanted to kick things off actually with a prompt from your book, The Book of Alchemy. This one was by our mutual friend Noor Tagouri, and in her essay, she invites readers to answer the question, “If you really knew me, you would know,” blank. So I’m going to turn that one around on you.

Suleika

I love it. I’m going to give this my full vulnerability and the honesty it deserves. I am the daughter of two wonderful humans, both of whom are immigrants, both of whom have a remarkable capacity for creativity and imagination. And as is often the case, I think with first-generation Americans, I feel this immense, intense sense of largely self-imposed pressure to honor the sacrifices my parents made for me. I was with my parents last night, and we had a conversation about work and rest. And so I am in a season of undoing some of that self-imposed pressure, and the way in which I sometimes conflate work with my sense of value in the world to the people around me. And I’m learning rather than doing, to simply be, and to know that I can be of value without having to muscle through so much.

Willow

Thank you for sharing. I mean, I couldn’t agree more. We talk about how busy we are, almost as if it’s this badge of honor.

Suleika

My mom is a visual artist and taught art classes in the attic of our home every day after school. And she reflected recently to me how, as children, we have such a natural, uncomplicated relationship to our creativity. We make glorious messes with finger paintings. And at some point in our development, that pilot light of self-consciousness gets ignited. There’s an age where suddenly people are no longer making glorious messes. They’re looking over at their classmates’ artwork and trying to replicate the same stick figure. She describes it as the contagion of smileys and rainbows. Suddenly, everyone’s work looks the same.

And so I, in my own work, am always trying to tap back into that free-flowing space of play. And the irony for me is that the most important creative breakthroughs arose from a low-stakes space of experimentation where I wasn’t creating with a goal in mind, I wasn’t creating with any notion of producing something for a purpose other than just doing it because my curiosity tugged at me or something called me to do it.

So I’ll give you an example. When I first got sick at 22, I found myself stuck in this hospital room for many, many weeks, and it was a difficult age to get sick at because I wasn’t a kid. I was a year or two too old for pediatrics, but unlike many of the other adult patients in the cancer ward, I didn’t have a career. I didn’t have a family of my own. I didn’t know how to answer the question, “What do you do?” which has become synonymous with who are you, and how much do you matter?

And I really struggled. And I would watch my friends on social media starting their first jobs, traveling the world, dating, all the other big and small milestones of early adulthood, and I really felt like I no longer participated in the world. And so I started keeping a daily journal in the form of a 100-day project, and I was doing it for myself. I felt profoundly uninspired, like I didn’t really have much to offer. And in the course of doing that journal, just for myself, I started to use it as a reporter’s notebook. I would jot down overheard conversations by the nurse’s coffee station. I would write about the fellow patients I was befriending. I would write about all the things that I didn’t know how to talk about out loud, yet the sense of shame I felt around things like infertility or early menopause, which were both byproducts of my treatment, around this social awkwardness and isolation of being ill, around the feeling of guilt when you are the recipient of so much care, not by choice, but by necessity.

And by the end of that 100-day project, I realized even though they were half-formed thoughts and lists and ungrammatical entries, I had a body of work. And that ended up becoming my first actual public-facing writing project. I’d never been published before, but it turned into Life, Interrupted. But every time I allow myself to pursue something with consistency but without a goal in mind, it always ends up reorienting me on a path of creativity, whether it ends up being public-facing or it remains private for myself, that has felt most formative, most generative. So now I actively cultivate that for myself. I actively set aside time to pursue creative projects without an end goal in mind that nobody ever needs to hear about, so that I can tap into that free-flowing place of intuition and find my compass again.

Willow

There are so many threads there that I want to unravel and follow up on. One, I mean, shout out to your mom for the glorious mess. Beautiful. I mean, that is something to aspire to. And I love that you also brought in what you were seeing on social media because the contagion of smiles and rainbows, that could be the name for social media in a lot of ways, right?

Suleika

Totally.

Willow

It’s like seeing all of these other people’s successes or patterns or acts of creation, that then we feel that we must imitate in the role that that has in our own creativity.

Suleika

Well, I have two thoughts. One is that another prompt from a woman named Sky Banyes, who’s an illustrator, and she invites us to write a to-feel list before a to-do list. And I’m someone who loves my lists. I am the person who will add things to my list after I’ve done them just so I can cross them off and feel that sense of satisfaction.

Willow

Same.

Suleika

And so rather than tumbling headfirst into my to-do list and letting that carry me, I’ve started writing a to-feel list, which is a list of things that you want to feel that day, and then some ideas for how to get yourself there. And so today I wanted to feel present in this conversation rather than nervous, which is how I often feel when I’m doing an interview or anything of that nature. And so grounding myself and what I want to feel rather than what I want to accomplish, I feel like, is a return to what really matters.

Willow

That’s such a beautiful practice. You had a second thing.

Suleika

My second thing was that I wanted to ask you how you would answer Noor’s prompt. Sorry, I’m not letting you off the hook.

Willow

Okay. All right, all right, all right. If you really knew me, you would know that I love fantasy novels.

Suleika

Yes.

Willow

All of my friends know this about me. Often, what I’m reading is either books about the natural world or books about completely other worlds. In my head, it’s so connected because actually what I love about fantasy novels is the otherworldliness with which a place is described with this magical sense of splendor. If you were to describe Earth, this planet, to someone, it would sound equally fantastical, right? We live in this place where a life-giving elixir flows all around the planet. It evaporates and is turned into clouds that then give it back to the earth. I mean, it’s magic.

Suleika

Amazing.

Willow

It’s completely magical. And so it almost, like, re-enchants me with the language of how to speak about this planet in the way that I experience it.

Suleika

Enchantment is one of my favorite words.

Willow

Mine too.

Suleika

I got sick again a year ago, and it really took me by surprise. It’s my third time having leukemia. And when I got the news, I was just so snowed in by fear and overwhelmed that I spent the better part of a month in bed. And I just stopped all communication, giving myself permission to not be okay and to not explain why. And I was really grappling with how to move forward with that immense sense of uncertainty, to keep making plans, to keep allowing myself to daydream about the future without knowing if I would get to exist in that future. And I kept saying to my doctor, I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to make plans for three months from now or six months from now. I don’t know how to live with this degree of uncertainty. I don’t want to be a person who is so snowed in by fear that I can’t get out of bed.

And the thing he would always say to me, which is the thing people often say in situations like these, is “You have to live every day as if it’s your last.” And each time he would say it, I would have this intense sense of anxiety that I had to make every family dinner as meaningful as possible. I had to carpe diem the crap out of every moment. And that is just a spiritually exhausting way to live your life. And it’s very easy when inevitably a family dinner devolves into a silly family fight to feel this outside sense of I’ve squandered this moment.

And so I had to reorient to a gentler mindset that has really helped me hold the uncertainty, but shift from a fear of it to a sense of enchantment about the mystery of the world we live in and the way that our lives unfold.

And that mindset is, instead, to live every day as if it’s my first. To try to wake up with a sense of curiosity and wonder and enchantment that a little kid does, where you’re not necessarily focused on these big bucket list moments, but you’re marveling at a furry caterpillar scuttling across the grass, where you’re marveling at the turning of leaves at the magic that surrounds us that so often goes unnoticed.

And so when I think of how I define presence for myself right now, I’m reminded of Mary Oliver’s instruction, which is to pay attention. This is our constant work. And so I wear this necklace that has the word “more” on it. And the reason I wear this necklace every day is that I don’t want more of the things I don’t have. I want more attention to what’s already in front of me, to the magic that is around us at all times—but that, when we’re consumed by busyness, so often goes unnoticed.

Willow

More of what’s already around us all the time. I mean, that is re-enchantment, what you’re describing, and I don’t know if you know this, but our mission statement at Atmos is re-enchantment with nature and our shared humanity. It really occurs to me that disenchantment is, in so many ways, I think, one of the biggest things we’re up against. It’s people having forgotten how magical this planet is, how magical it is that you and I are sitting in this room together, that life has formed, and that we’re here and in this precious moment. I love the idea of living each day as if it’s your first and approaching it with a sense of curiosity because so many of our problems could be healed that way.

Suleika

One of my very favorite things to do, and this feels apt because as I look around the window we’re surrounded by these skyscrapers, is to pause and think about all the thousands of people in each of these windows and the entire worlds they inhabit and how miraculous it is to be human, to get to experience that collision of joy and sorrow and everything in between. And how extraordinary it is that within each of us, we have our own private worlds that we’re carrying.

And I’m sometimes just dizzied by this sheer force of how much each of us is carrying. And I think we are in an age of profound disenchantment. We’re all kind of drinking from a fire hose of news and overwhelm. And the U.S. Surgeon General described loneliness as an epidemic and that the toll of loneliness is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

And so to me, paying attention to the worlds within us, paying attention to the natural world around us, is a kind of nicotine patch to disenchantment. It’s the antidote, and it’s something you have to cultivate, especially when there are so many forces that shift us to a place of shutdown or feeling jaded and feeling subsumed by that sense of volatility and uncertainty that we’re living in right now.

Willow

I love that you pulled us into our surroundings here. The skyscrapers, the buildings that we’re in, they were once someone else’s imagination. The world of our cities, where many of us spend our days, all of that was once imaginal, right? And so even these structures, and if you think about it a little bit more in a metaphorical sense, the structures that we live within that are exhausting us, that are disenchanting us—they’re imaginal. They’re created. And so I think getting people in touch with imagination and our capacity to reimagine is critical in this time. And it makes me think about when you were describing when you got sick the first time, and how you were describing it being just for the sake of creating. And at the same time, I know that you’ve written and spoken before about how that was also life-sustaining for you at the time.

Suleika

To me, imagination is tantamount to hope. It’s allowing yourself to see possibility, where minutes before there wasn’t possibility. It feels like a profound act of optimism to allow yourself to dream about something that may or may not take shape. And also to surrender to the possibility of that, and I really think of my imagination as having a will of its own. I think when I’m in my most honest relationships, my imagination, it’s guiding me. I’m not forcing its trajectory.

And to return to my mother—so, she talks about glorious messes, but she also talks about happy accidents. She loves a happy accident. And three years ago, when I was undergoing a bone marrow transplant, I went into the hospital armed with a dozen notebooks, thinking to myself, I’m going to get through this next trial the same way I did the first time around. I’m going to journal my way through it. I had my personal notebook, my medical notebook, my shared journal with my husband John, my reporter’s notebook.

And very quickly, within days of arriving, I ended up having a complication that resulted in my vision being impaired and made it really challenging to write. And so I turned to watercolor. I’m not an artist. I haven’t painted since I was that 6-year-old in my mother’s attic studio. And I started keeping a visual journal each day of the literal fever dreams I was having, the kind of frightening nightmares I was having. And watercolor as a medium is one where you’re not the sole agent. You’re in a kind of aquatic dance and collaboration with the medium. And I would get really frustrated because it’s hard to control watercolor. And my mom would always say, “No, no, no. Watercolor is all about the happy accidents. It’s about letting the paint bloom and spread and following its lead.” And she said, “It’s all about the happy accidents.”

And what a perfect metaphor for life. So anytime I show her a painting and I’m like, “I made a mess here, and I accidentally dropped a giant splotch of watercolor in the area where I was actually trying to paint a face,” she tells me, she’s like, “That’s where the energy is. That’s not the mistake. That’s where the tension is. Keep working with the splotch, integrate it.”

I think our imagination is a muscle that so easily gets atrophied as we get older. And yet it’s the thing, I think, that keeps us connected to that possibility of enchantment that gives us the sustenance to keep re-imagining how things can be, to have the freedom to change your mind about what’s working and what’s not, and about who you are, and to think of your life, your survival as a kind of creative act.

Willow

I feel like I need to have some kind of buzzer for every time I bring up insect metamorphosis on this show. I’m thinking about butterflies, in particular, and how within the caterpillars there is something called the imaginal disc, which is this cluster of cells that, eventually, when it goes into the chrysalis, these are the cells that become the wings and everything else. And I love this because it shares the same root as the word imagination, and it’s the thing that was always inside the caterpillar. And I think what you’re pointing to about this muscle that gets atrophied, it’s like all kids have this innate sense. It’s like we have this imaginal disc within us.

And I love that what you’ve kind of put forward with The Book of Alchemy is a pathway for reconnecting with that.

Suleika

I also love an insect metaphor. And I think we talk about coming-of-age arcs, and there’s this false myth that when you enter adulthood, your coming-of-age arc is over, you’re on your path, you’ve picked your way. And I’ve really come to believe that life is a constant series of coming-of-age arcs. We’re constantly going into the chrysalis, we’re disintegrating into our goopiest mess. But if you can surrender to that process, it’s always astounding and awe-inspiring to watch what emerges; that you have to be willing to stay in the chrysalis for as long as it takes, and to not know.

Willow

And to surrender, which is, it’s the hardest part. I have a friend, we always joke, when will the lesson not be surrender? Is that ever going to happen?

Suleika

Totally.

Willow

But it’s a part of the creative process.

Suleika

It’s a part of the creative process.

Willow

You described the visual of feeling very snowed in. This idea of becoming enchanted with life again, that sort of pulled you out of that feeling and pulled you out of bed. What did that look like in practice for you?

Suleika

My relationship to nature changed dramatically with illness. I distinctly remember being 22 and walking. I was being treated at Mount Sinai. It was my first time spending the night in the hospital since I was born. And I remember walking the 10 blocks along Central Park to the hospital and realizing to myself, oh, I’m not going to get to go outside for at least a month. And I’ve never had such an elemental experience, probably since childhood, wanting to memorize the feeling of the breeze on the nape of my neck, wanting to record the intensity of the hues and colors of the flowers, wanting to bottle the feeling of sunlight on my skin. And in the course of that hospital stay, when you’re in the hospital, you can’t open the window. You don’t get to experience rain, you don’t get to go outside. And I felt this overpowering desperation by week three to escape from this hospital room. I actually did attempt an escape. I made it to the elevator downstairs to the crowded lobby, and then I froze and panicked.

But as a result of that experience, I crave my time in nature. I’ve made a number of changes to my life that allow me to be in nature. We live on a farm, an hour and a half from the city. And so this summer, when I had that month of being completely snowed in, of not knowing what to do with myself, of not knowing how to even take a literal step forward, I returned to that really primal experience of just trying to feel the breeze on the nape of my neck to feel the sunlight on my skin.

And I could have answered Noor’s question very differently, but if you really knew me, I have a deep love for animals. If I hadn’t been a writer, I would’ve been a veterinarian or I would’ve had a farm. And we have three dogs. And what I love most deeply about them is they are my teachers on how to love, but also how to interact with nature.

And I have a theory that wherever our dogs are happiest is where humans are happiest. If you’ve ever seen a Labrador frolicking on a beach or a little terrier running through a meadow with just pure glee and abandon—so that’s what I did. I watched my dogs. I tried to take their cues. I had no desire to go outside, but of course, when you have dogs, you have to take them outside. And I would just sit on the hammock. I would watch the three of them running about, I would watch them snuffling a dandelion, and I would just try to kind of imitate them and just try to get my body outside and to get back into my body, to get back into that sense of really simple, humble wonder at what was directly in front of me. And just kind of getting back to that most elemental way of interacting with the world and observing how it made me feel.

Willow

To see the world in a grain of sand, as William Blake put it.

Suleika

Yes. The thing I really appreciate about moments in life where it feels like the ceiling has caved in, is that there’s a real sense of clarity. And it’s fleeting clarity. Clarity about what really matters, which is to say what nourishes you and what doesn’t. And in that moment, what nourished me was not my to-do list. It wasn’t doing, it was moving toward the things that made me feel good, and the things that make us feel good are so often incredibly simple. It was more of what was already there. It was time in the hammock. It was time with friends who can hold all the parts of you, who can sit in silence with you if that’s what you need. It was time with my dogs. It was watching. We had just adopted a year ago this tiny, senior, toothless, grumpy grandmother named Lentil, and watching her swaddle herself in a very soft blanket in a patch of sun, and then thinking to myself, maybe I should do the same.

We know what we need. We don’t always trust that we know, or we sometimes forget that deep inside of us, we have that clarity that’s available to us, about who and what feeds us and what we want to feed.

Willow

And I love that you’re connecting clarity to these moments when the ceiling caves in. And it makes me think about the COVID pandemic; so many people I knew had so many life-changing kinds of wake-up moments. I mean, for me, my transition started in that time, and I think the specter of the ceiling collapsing really made me look at where I was or wasn’t living. And I know that that time also—that was in a lot of ways, alchemized the creation of this book, right?

Suleika

Absolutely.

Willow

What was the starting process in all of that?

Suleika

Strangely, so much of the pandemic felt familiar to me, the experience of having to be isolated at home. I spent many years of my early 20s in medical isolation, where even a cold could be lethal. And so the experience of moving through the world with a face mask, of trying to figure out how to feel connected to your loved ones when you can’t hug, when you can’t embrace, when you can’t see each other, of having to reimagine what your days contain when you can’t participate in a conventional sense in the world, and also the need to invoke creativity to make those changes. I had spent so much of my 20s developing a toolbox for how to navigate my own sense of isolation. And I wanted to share some of the practices that had helped me: specifically, keeping a journal.

But I wanted to do it differently because I know that for me, the value of a prompt, it really feels like a kaleidoscope. It’s like a twisting of the chamber and allowing the light to fall differently. And I like to be surprised by my own thoughts and what emerges on the page.

And so I invited some of the most creative people I know to contribute an essay and a prompt. And that’s how the Isolation Journals began on April 1, 2020, and I had maybe a couple hundred people on my newsletter list, and it exploded. Within 48 hours, we had over 40,000 people subscribed. People began sharing what emerged, and what began as an individual practice very quickly became a collective practice. I’m always amazed that when I’m dared to share what I write in the privacy of my journal, whether it’s joyful or absurd or absolutely mortifying, it always brings me closer to others. And of course, we learn that our fears, our insecurities, our foibles, we’re more alike in those than we are different. And so it was an extraordinary thing to watch unfold organically. Just having that moment each day where you can sit down, take a breath, and write your way back to yourself, which is to say back to your intuition, to what you already know is the thing that has been really the life force for me, and I know for so many others.

Willow

There’s two things that spring to mind. One is this feeling that you’re describing of understanding how much we all have in common. It really shines through when you’re reading the book. I mean, on the one hand, you get these completely, utterly unique glimpses that feel so individual. And then there’s also these common threads that emerge that really reveal how much we do share in what we think about that world. And there’s such a beautiful feeling you get when you’re like, oh, I’m not the only person who thinks about this this way. But it also, this project being born in the pandemic and you sharing about your time in the hospital, it makes me think about the role of limitations and creativity. And I think about nature, which is the great creator. Every time a species adapts for its own survival, it’s in some way a response to a challenge, an obstacle, a limitation within its environment, and then something incredibly creative is born. And so I’m curious how you think about the relationship between these things, limitation and creativity.

Suleika

That’s one of my favorite things to think about. The painting example I gave you earlier, for me, that was a real moment of feeling like I was at a crossroad. It was so tempting to feel really sorry for myself, not only because of the recurrence, but because this thing that I love to do, which is to write, was no longer available to me, and a previous version of myself would’ve clung to that sense of defeat and disappointment. But I know from having moved through these moments of loss that it’s a recipe for stagnation, for defeat, and we have to be limber in those moments, even if you have a perfect plan for how you’re going to get through something and that plan implodes. There’s an invitation to shape-shift.

I mentioned these hallucinations and fever dreams I was having, and I would go to sleep every night terrified of what my subconscious was going to serve me. And I was having these really intense dreams of 30-foot giraffes that doubled as IV poles and all kinds of things. And in the act of shifting mediums from writing to painting, I got to render those. And instead of feeling scary to me, they became interesting.

And I love the experience of defanging a fear by interacting with it. And when I do that, the thing that I fear most ends up giving me the thing I need most. And now all I want to do is paint. I may even love painting more than I like writing. To be in collaboration with whatever is happening with you, to think of it as a collaboration, as a dialogue, as a give and take has been my way of allowing myself without forcing some predetermined transformation or lesson or aha moment, but really getting curious about what’s happening, of asking questions, of interacting with it, and just seeing what comes up and trusting that all of it will be useful. I sometimes think that as a writer, things aren’t as bad for us as they are for everyone else because life’s plot twists can be made useful. Everything is material.

Willow

But I think that that idea of creative alchemy isn’t just for writers. It’s available to all of us. It’s understanding that whatever life throws your way, whether it’s beautiful or wildering or just plain impossible, you can transform into something new. And that to me is the miracle of the creative process.

Suleika

You go from having nothing to making something. And it’s why I love the word alchemy so much. That notion of transmuting something considered worthless or base, like lead, into something precious, like gold. And we get to do that whenever we want, however we want, in both small ways and big.

Willow

And the great alchemists, they were looking for this universal solvent, the thing that could transmute anything. And what you’re sharing just makes me think it really is curiosity in a lot of ways. It’s like curiosity is what can transform something from being terrifying into something interesting, as you put it.

Suleika

My friend Elizabeth Gilbert, she says, “We have to be 1% more curious than we are afraid.” And that’s such a gentler invitation than feeling like you have to find this silver lining, or you need to take your trauma and transform it into some big thing. Just 1% more curious about whatever’s happening to you, than you are afraid of it.

Willow

It makes me think of after the Big Bang, the universe theoretically would’ve been equal parts and matter, right? And those two things cancel each other out, would’ve just been left with photons and light particles. But something in that had to shift. And even if it was like 0.000000 1% matter tipped the scale just a little bit more than antimatter. From that tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny amount, the entire everything we know of was created and came into existence. So I love that, that it’s you just have to be a little bit more, a little bit more oriented toward creating, a little bit more curious.

Suleika

Yeah. One way in which I’m trying to be a tiny bit more curious and afraid is about medicine. I think cancer in particular invokes metaphors of a civil war. We love to use battle metaphors when describing illness. So-and-so lost their fight to cancer, which is my least favorite obituary headline, because it implies that they somehow didn’t fight hard enough, which we all know is not true.

But I’m learning as my illness progresses, that medicine, especially I think in cases like mine, is more of an art than a science. My oncologist likes to say that we’re operating in a data-free zone, which is always slightly blood pressure raising. But when I anchor myself back in a sense of not just curiosity about what’s happening in my marrow, but also a sense of awe at the mysterious happenings of our bodies, it immediately invokes a sense of respect and also a sense of great humility.

I’ve had two bone marrow transplants, both times with my brother, and my blood type changed to my brother’s blood type. I lost all of my childhood allergies. I now have all of his. And I used to be allergic to peanuts. I now eat peanut butter every day like it’s my job. And there’s some things so profoundly miraculous about the idea that you can wipe your marrow clean. And through chimerism, which is in Greek mythology, chimeras are these multi-headed beasts. I’m infused with my brother, and in a way that, of course, we’ve always been as siblings, but in this miraculous way where his cells have repopulated my marrow, have given me life for the last 15 years, have changed my blood type. We always joke that it would make for a great Law & Order episode where I commit a crime and he gets charged for it.

Willow

Honestly, you heard it here first. How did that first spoonful of peanut butter taste?

Suleika

Incredible.

Willow

Were you scared?

Suleika

I used to be allergic to shrimp. I have yet to test if I’m still allergic to shrimp, because every time I bring it up, my friends are like, “Not tonight. Let’s not ruin the evening.” So I wasn’t afraid, but I still have yet to sample some of my other allergies.

Willow

Yeah, I think what you’re sharing also, it really speaks to an aspect of the imagination, which is so powerful, in that it helps us digest reality or experience reality in a way that is manageable. And it’s something that we can then face even the language we use to describe things, right? To be able to see your experience as something that transformed you into something chimeric. And that’s the power of creativity. And it’s beautiful. I remember when I was just starting my physical transition, and I was very nervous about needles and everything, and I was like, I don’t know. I have no idea what’s about to happen.

And I started thinking of it as potions and blood sacrifices and just all of the things. And it really helped make this thing something that I could take the next step and the next step, and then the magic of all of it was really revealed. I was grateful for my imagination in that time.

Suleika

I love that so much. And it reminds me of getting my first blood transfusions and having this visceral feeling of disgust at the idea of this blood entering my body. And so what I did was every time I would get a new bag of platelets or hemoglobin, I would try to imagine who the donor was. And I’d wonder, are they a tarot card reader? Are they an elementary art teacher? Are they some famous actor, very chic grandmother on the yuppery side with 10 poodles all named Oscar? And once I did that, it made it fun. It made me connected to the generosity of what it means to be a person who donates blood. And I love the idea of reimagining these medications as potions to invoke the alchemical laboratory and the sense of miracle and wonder and magic, honestly, because that’s how medicine feels to me. It does feel like a form of magic. I’ve outlived my prognosis now by many years.

But I also want to say, I think part of what contributes to both the clarity we feel when the ceiling caves in, but also the sense of disenchantment that comes when we’re subsumed by busyness is an unwillingness to confront the one universal certainty, which is that we live and that we die. I think so many of us have such a fear of our own mortality. We don’t talk about it. I think there’s real power in consciously acknowledging that we’re all here for a very short period of time. Yeah.

Willow

My friend, do you know John Christian Pfeiffer?

Suleika

Yes, I do.

Willow

He runs a green burial conservation site in Tennessee called Larkspur, the green burials that they practice there. It’s really just giving our bodies back into the earth and then watching how eventually they feed and become the trees and get pulled up into flowers, and the pollen gets spread. And he has this way of talking about death that makes you understand that it is, in a lot of ways, life’s most creative act. It’s like how ingredients become other things. It’s like how we become transmuted, and life keeps itself going.

But that conversation with him really shifted something for me in seeing, okay, this can also be a form of alchemy. No less terrifying, but part of some big process of creating and un-creating.

Suleika

I’ve had the real privilege of walking a few friends across the river. I befriended a lot of young cancer patients. My first time in treatment, there was a group of 10 of us, only two of us are still alive, but the first time was with my friend Anjali, who had no family, was very much on her own. And her great fear, of course, which is, I think, a shared fear for many of us, is that she was going to die alone. And she ended up in the hospice ward here at Bellevue.

And I was 23, 24 at the time. She was 38. And it was horrifying to me as someone who had the immense privilege of having a lot of love and a lot of family support to imagine her being alone. And so I spent the whole week with her there. And the day before she died, our friend group of fellow young patients came, and she was losing her hearing, but her friend John played the guitar.

And afterward, a nurse pulled me aside and she said, “I’ve never seen that before. I’ve never seen a cancer patient who’s surrounded by other young cancer patients.” And it was so incredibly moving, and it felt so sacred to get to be in that space with her because she was someone who had been taught that the world was going to disappoint her, that the people in her life were going to leave. It was only a matter of time.

And in those last days of her death, she really returned to the Anjali I imagine she was as a child. She was as unguarded and vulnerable as I’d ever seen her. And she died on Valentine’s Day, and every time she would open her eyes, she would reach for one of us and we would hold her hand. And her last word was, “Love.” And she really, this isn’t me trying to gloss over the pain and the isolation of her illness, but she said, “I feel so happy because I know I’m not going to be alone in this.”

So I’ve become really interested in hospice work in the way that, yeah, we meet these inevitable moments in the ways in which we show up for one another and what community, not as a buzzword, but in the really elemental sense of having a village who’s there when we’re born, who’s there when we die? I talked about my dogs as my great teachers. The one downside of having dogs, of course, is that we often outlive them. But I think animals in particular teach us not just about our finitude, but our sort of never-ending capacity for love.

Three years ago, when I was in the transplant unit, my beloved dog died, and I said to my mom, I said, “I never want to have a dog again. I never want to go through something like this again.” And I think that’s so often our instinct when we lose someone we love or when we’re hurt, is to protect our heart. Because to open yourself up to new love is to inevitably open yourself up to new loss. And yet, I wouldn’t trade the pain of losing for the immense privilege of experiencing that depth of love.

So despite my proclamation to my mom of never getting another dog again, I’ve adopted three dogs in the last three years. So here we are. But yeah, I think about that relationship between loss and love a lot in the context of the people I’ve mourned, of the parts of myself that I’ve mourned, of the parts of our world that we’re mourning as a measure of the depth of the thing that we’ve loved and lost, and also as a testament to our capacity for continuing to imagine new possibilities of love.

Willow

So to bring this all full circle to a close, do you have a prompt either from the book or just that’s springing to mind right now, or a few that you might want to leave any of our listeners with, perhaps anyone who’s planning on running to the store to grab a journal after this?

Suleika

So one prompt in this book that I’ve written to many times is called “A Day in the Life of My Dreams.” It’s by Holly Jacobs, who was a pediatric hospice nurse. I’ve had a lot of trouble, like I said earlier, imagining myself in the future. The future can feel like such a scary place, and daydreaming about it can feel even scarier. It feels like the kind of exercise that can break your heart or set you up for disappointment, and you don’t know if it’s going to come to pass, which, of course, none of us do. And so, she has done this daily prompt where she writes about a perfect day, five years out in the future from the moment she wakes up until she goes to sleep, and she writes it in the present tense.

And so when I was explaining to her this challenge I’m having about daydreaming, which is one of my favorite things to do, she invited me to write to this prompt. And at first I was like, “Ugh, this sounds a little hokey. I don’t know that I want to do this.” But I’ve done it religiously now for five years. And I think one of the hardest, scariest things sometimes to articulate to ourselves is what we actually want.

And so what I love about this prompt is you begin with how you’re waking up, where you’re waking up. If you’re waking up next to someone, you move through every moment of your day in the present tense. And my answer to that prompt has changed day to day. Sometimes it changes, but what it’s done, and I’m not someone who believes in manifesting, but I really credit that prompt with so many of the things I value most in my life, with the decision to move to a place with more nature. Because every time I wrote to this prompt, I was never in a New York City skyscraper—I was always in nature.

I credit my marriage to it. I credit so many of the decisions that I feel most in integrity with, not because the writing of the entry manifested something, but it allowed me to identify what I want so that when the opportunity to make that happen presented itself. I didn’t flinch, I didn’t hesitate, I didn’t second-guess. And so that’s a prompt I love very much. Another prompt I really love is from Ash Parsons’ story. It’s called “Just 10 Images.” She had a young son who she’d adopted who was having a lot of medical problems and was in the NICU, and she was just totally overwhelmed by all that was happening. And so she forced herself to write just 10 images from the last 24 hours. And that’s something I’ve been doing, especially when I have a hard week. And it’s such a nice way of fact-checking the story.

You might be telling yourself about how things are going. Sometimes I’ll actually flip through my camera phone, and I do just 10 images from the last week, and I write into that. And I’m reminded, especially during a week like a chemo week, where I’m like, I spent the whole week in bed watching trash TV, feeling awful. But when I go through my camera phone, I realize, oh no, I actually went to the park and I had this beautiful interaction with someone on the sidewalk, or I had this delicious meal in bed with my mom sitting next to me. Or actually, I did watch a lot of trash TV, but I watched it with my friend Lizzie, and we laughed a lot.

And so I liked the simplicity of that prompt, of really noting the tiny little moments as an act of not just being present, but training your mind to want more of the moments that feel noteworthy. And that to me is a beautiful thing about journaling. When you commit it to ink, you’re more likely to commit it to memory and more likely to want to cultivate the things that nourish you.

Willow

And commit it to action.

Suleika

Yeah.

Willow

Beautiful. Okay. Everyone has their prompts now. Thank you so much. Thank you for bringing your alchemical spirit, your imagination, and all of your wisdom to the show.

Suleika

Thank you, Willow. You have fostered such an important space. You have such a way with these conversations, and I’m just so in awe of you and the work that you’re doing, and it’s a real privilege to get to sit here with you. So thank you.

Willow

Likewise. To many more conversations.

Suleika

To many more conversations.

Narration

Suleika has left us with some inspiring prompts that can hopefully serve as a catalyst for your creativity. For more resources related to this episode, head to the links in our show notes. The Nature Of, is an Atmos podcast produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Newsom of Magnificent Noise. Our production staff includes Emanuel Hapsus and Sabrina Farhi. Our sound designer is Kristen Muller. Our executive producers are me, Willow Defebaugh, Theresa Perez, Jake Sargent, and Eric Newsom. Atmos is a nonprofit that seeks to re-enchant people with our shared humanity and the earth through creative storytelling. To support our work or this podcast, see our show notes or visit atmos.earth/biome, A-T-M-O-S dot earth slash. I’m your host, Willow Defebaugh, and this is The Nature Of.