In Conversation with Susan J. Tweit
7 Questions on Writing About the Divine Feminine and Spirituality
Hello beloved reader,
I first discovered
’s gorgeous prose in her Substack:
Susan’s work is a gentle yet profound call to deepen our relationship with the natural world, find meaning in its rhythms, and nurture hope and resilience in the face of ecological challenges. Her newsletter is a heartfelt reminder that love — for the Earth, its inhabitants, and ourselves — is the guiding force that connects us all and inspires our best actions in the dance of life. A must-read for anyone seeking to practice mindfulness, deepen environmental ethics, or rediscover joy in the sacred interconnectedness of existence.
Susan is also the author of thirteen books on the nature of life and our place in it. Her latest book, Bless the Birds: Living With Love in a Time of Dying, won the Sarton Award for memoir.
The 7 Questions:
1. Why are you drawn to writing about spirituality and/or the Divine Feminine?
For most of my writing career, I explicitly didn’t write about spirituality. I am a scientist, born into a family culture of science and nature study, and trained as a botanist who studies the relationships that make up natural communities. Coming from the culture of science and especially ecological fieldwork, I absorbed the dictum that you write what you know, what you can prove; you write from your area of expertise. So my beat as a writer—the subject of the first eleven of my 13 books and most of my hundreds of feature articles and essays—is nature and what we humans can learn from the more-than-human world.
And then I began writing memoir. As soon as I considered the why of who I am and what I am drawn to write and do, the nature-based spiritual practices and beliefs I evolved over my lifetime began to creep into my writing, cautiously emerging from the shadows and edges. Spirituality and spiritual rituals permeate my every day, from the Four Directions and Gratitude prayers I speak as I do yoga first thing, to the greetings I give to the Grandmother and Grandfather plants I pass on my daily walks, to the intentions I speak out loud last thing before sleeping. My spirituality is based in nature, in my awareness of the sacred spark that animates life on this numinous earth. But all of that is personal, so it hadn’t been a part of my writing before I began examining my own life for what I had learned that might be useful to others.
Still, I didn’t deliberately begin writing about spirituality until I began my "Practicing Terraphilia" Substack newsletter a little over a year ago. Terraphilia is a word my late husband and I selected to represent what motivated our separate but related work, his abstract sculpture and my writing. We defined it as human’s innate connection to and affiliation for this planet and the web of lives we share it with. We all carry terraphilia in us, perhaps at the cellular level, but it’s not honored or encouraged in this modern world. Practicing that inborn connection, I believe, could be what saves us.
As I thought about what terraphilia means to me, and how it has imbued my life, I realized that I can’t write about humans’ inherent bond with this earth and its community of species without writing about spirituality. So I started what I call my “Year of Spiritual Thinking” project to explore my own spiritual beliefs and rituals, as well as those of my forebears, especially my Celtic and Scandinavian ancestors.
2. How does writing about spirituality affect you, in your work and/or personal life?
Writing about spirituality—especially about my own personal explorations—has helped me understand myself better, and also enlarged the audience for my work. It has allowed me to reach a deeper level of connection with this earth and my purpose in life. It gives me hope, not the blind kind of wishing, the active hope that Rebecca Solnit talks about in her book, Hope in the Dark, the kind of hope that moves us to embrace the uncertainty and fear and complexity of life, and move forward with purpose anyway.
3. What is an experience you have had that is perhaps the most mystical and unexplainable in the rational/material realm?
The poet Mary Oliver wrote that the world offers itself up to our imagination, and I have found that is not only true, but if I’m attentive, I know what is being offered before I am even aware of what I’m thinking. I’ll be hiking somewhere I’ve never been before and think, or say out loud, “I wonder if there rosy indian paintbrush grows here" (or some other unusual plant or animal), and around the next bend in the trail, there will be a dozen rosy indian paintbrush plants. That I would have no logical or rational way of knowing would be there. Or I’ll be fast asleep and suddenly wake groggily with an urge to go out and look at the stars, and just as I get out the door and look overhead, a comet will zip by. On a night without a recognized meteor shower.
One day last fall when I was living temporarily in a cabin at an RV park before the house where I live now was ready, I stopped writing mid-sentence with a strong surge to go outside. When I stepped out on the front porch, I saw a mink, a large weasel-relative, hunting the opposite bank of the river in a place where no one would expect a wild carnivore like a mink to be (behind the Target store and the Discount Tire). It’s as if there’s a nature-spirit communication channel that I can sometimes tune into, something intuitive and not at all in the realm of language or logic.
4. What is the first memory you have that there was something else besides the material realm?
When I was in grade school, my family was on one of our marathon summer camping and backpacking trips exploring the wilds of the American West. My dad was driving our homemade camper-van in southern Wyoming, on our way to Yellowstone. Mom sat next to him as chief navigator, and my brother and I sat on opposite sides of the dinette behind them. I was—as usual—engrossed in a book when the engine knocked suddenly, a hard stutter. I looked up and saw miles of silver-green sagebrush, spangled with dew from a rare June rain. The air blowing in the windows carried a sweetly medicinal smell that brought a surge of joy—Sagebrush, I thought. Home! My heart swelled with joy. I wrote in my journal that night as my dad typed trip notes on his portable typewriter, holding my stubby pencil firmly in my hand. “Today the sagebrush spoke to me. I know where I belong.”
When I found that journal years later and read those words, the hairs on the back of my neck raised: I have spent my life studying big sagebrush as a botanist and a writer. But when I wrote those words I lived a thousand miles away and hadn’t learned the names of any plants. I didn’t know I would become a botanist, much less that as an adult, big sagebrush would not only be the subject of my research and fascination, the shrub would be my heart-plant, and I would live where that characteristic fragrance scents the wind for the rest of my days.
5. What do you hope for, for your writing?
I hope that by openly writing about my earth-based spirituality, and our species’ inborn terraphilia, I will inspire my readers to a deeper relationship with the sacred that is at the heart of all of life on earth. And that cultivating that relationship will help us all heal ourselves and our communities and also help us live in a way that restores a flourishing earth.
6. Who is a writer or other creative artist who makes you feel inspired, helps you to remember we’re spiritual beings having a human experience, and perhaps makes you cherish Mother Earth just a little bit more?
So many of my fellow writers inspire me in the life of the spirit and a deeper understanding of our relationship to this animate planet! If I have to pick just one, I’d have to say Robin Wall Kimmerer, the Potawatomi botanist, author and teacher. When I read her first book, Gathering Moss, it was a revelation: she wove her ancestor’s spiritual beliefs and cultural knowledge with science in a way that I had never seen before. It completely changed the way I understood spirituality and science and my instinctive feel for the earth and my plant-relatives. Her second book, Braiding Sweetgrass was even more revelatory in showing how science and spirituality and cultural knowledge need each other to be whole. And how important they all are to our relationship with this earth.
7. What are the words of wisdom and/or spiritual principle(s) that you come back to time and time again that give you solace and uplift your heart?
On the wall of my office by my writing desk is a circular piece of calligraphy a friend penned for me decades ago, framed in a circular frame made by my sculptor late husband. The words are from the great Trancendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Our lives are an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn. That there is no end in nature, every end is a beginning.” That is a fundamental truth of life on earth, and also of the life of our spirits: Existence goes on, even as our individual lives do not. And the materials that make up what we know as “us” are disarticulated back into molecules and atoms, and recycled into new life.
BIO:
A plant ecologist by training, Susan Tweit began her career studying grizzly bear habitat—collecting and dissecting bear poop—mapping historic wildfires, and researching big sagebrush. She turned to writing after realizing that she loved the stories behind the data more than collecting those data. Tweit has written thirteen books on the nature of life and our place in it, along with hundreds of magazine articles, newspaper columns, and essays. Her latest book, Bless the Birds: Living With Love in a Time of Dying, won the Sarton Award for memoir. Tweit’s work is driven by terraphilia, and her passion for “re-storying" the human-nature bond. She lives in a small house at the edge of a big town in western Colorado, where sagebrush perfumes the air after summer rains.
You may read more at her website here.
Please also note: this series of interviews will live under the tab labeled “Alchemical Conversations” on this Substack, with the intention that the space will become a kind of resource of writers collaborating in reclaiming the Divine Feminine. Perhaps each string of words each of us writes is a thread in a vast, intricate, and beautiful tapestry we are collectively weaving—each row of this evolving fabric moving us toward an evolution of consciousness, a deeper awareness of the spiritual dimensions of our ecological crisis, and the healing needed to restore a harmonic balance with Mother Earth.
Next week, I’m also thrilled to bring you
’s responses to these 7 questions.
Susan is so very generous in this interview, I loved reading it!
Camilla, I am honored to be part of your series. Your questions led me to some deep thinking about why I am doing this often lonely and unsung work, and how much I love the connections it is bringing me, including ours. Thank you so much for including me, and for this wonderful connection. Blessings!