Our Strategic Director on the joy of planning, loving language, being more spacious in our lives and creative practice, and caring wholly.

At precisely 1:37pm, on a warm Sunday afternoon in Santa Monica, California, Kristin began her first glorious trip around the sun. She's been shining bright for 14,965 days today. Happy Birthday to our favorite virgo!

Since we first met in 2016, Kristin has blessed me daily with her words, wit, and wisdom. Whatever she sets her sails to, she does with unwavering love and commitment—it’s one of countless reasons she's my best friend, sister, and partner in this field.

She's taught me so much about language and how to nurture it. About poetry, plants, syntax, oxford commas, and birds… She stays thirsty for knowledge and knows how to quench it (hint: always ask questions).

An extremely popular opinion: to know Kristin is to love her. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of all the ways she makes life and work better (in bullets, which she loves):

an *incredible* listener
the most beautiful words, in the right order
abundant compassion in a world where it can feel scarce
infectious belly laugh
impeccable notes that read like eye candy
the best hair, so full of secrets
she says hello to every dog she sees
deep care for every living thing
don’t sleep on the world’s most loving substack
unfathomable humility

And that's just scratching the surface. Read on for more reasons to love the studio’s sound of reason and ray of unending light…

You remind me often that, like everything, writing is always a work in progress. Do you have a regular practice or routine, that grounds your writing, and helps unlearn perfectionism?

I start most mornings with my planner, writing an intention for the day: Today I would like to feel…

Then I look at the day before, review what my intention had been, and write for 1-2 minutes, typically in fragments and shorthand only I understand, reflecting on how the day actually went. It’s a nice way to wake up my brain, connect with my thoughts, and translate them into language without overthinking it. I don’t think in perfect sentences, so I try not to draft in them, at least not for morning pages. In the morning, I prefer to write more intuitively and chaotically, in my god-awful penmanship that mashes together cursive and block letters, in multi-colored gel pens. For all the meticulous planning I do, my planner is a messy, colorful map of my life. It is a testament to how easily a meticulously planned day can go awry and how imperfect language can perfectly capture a mood. Isn’t that funny, how an object like a planner, in a Virgo’s hands, can become a tool for learning to embrace imperfection? I have not been paid to say any of this by Big Planner.

Staying on the topic of language, this comes from our ever so curious pal Ariel: if you could live in a world for 16 months without language, would you? Why or why not?

Question for Ariel: What is a world without language? How do we define “a world”? Is a world not a collection of objects and energy in constant interaction? And how do we define language? Is language not a means of communication, conveying information, an engine for continuous learning, i.e. evolution, i.e. survival? Even in a world made of only rocks, wind, and me, am I not learning from the way the wind erodes the rock? Is the world not teaching me what energy does, over time? Is the wind, in this case, not a language? Or maybe you’re asking if our world was one in which we could no longer use language for 16 months, would I want to hang out there? I would, but maybe just to find a way to break the rules and make a new language.

We often ask our clients in the early discovery phase: what makes good design? Bad design is easy to spot, what in your writer's mind, poet's heart, and discerning mind's eye, makes good design?

Nothing wanted, nothing wasted. Good design, to me, is beautiful and useful. Beauty, to me, is determined by harmony—all elements responding to and uplifting the vital essence of every other. Whether it’s a website, a poem or a really good ‘fit, I love to see care for how every detail connects to the ones around it, how they clarify and complicate each other to evoke a mood or produce an idea that awakens the senses and stirs the mind. God help me, I love a harmonious system.

Some people may balk at a word like “useful”—I sometimes sense this is an overcorrection to a reductive idea of usefulness in an extractive, exploitative framework. I’m less interested in an object’s use or value in a context that prioritizes competition and profit than I am in the potential for diverse elements and entities to function, sustainably and harmoniously, in concert with those around it toward a shared purpose. How does the part serve the whole? (And vice versa.)

I also think good design reflects and responds to natural cycles of decay and regeneration; it’s built on compost, to compost it will one day return. Turkey vultures are a cool example of good design.

You asked me this before, and I'd love to boomerang it back to you: what drove you to start Field of Practice? If you could go back to 2020 when we were scheming our unnamed business, what would you do more of?

I wanted to start this business, specifically with you Nermin, to test the hypothesis that skill, smarts, love, intention and a willingness to experiment might be sufficient to make a decent living in a world that has overcomplicated just about every aspect of existence. I don’t need much, just a partner-in-crime or two and a good idea now and then. It could be a nice little life. If I could go back to 2020, I would maybe learn to use QuickBooks sooner.

What has been the most surprising part about building this practice?

You can work less and deliver more. I used to judge my own value as a worker by how many hours I put in, how many projects I could carry, how many decks and pages I could produce in a week.

Creating firmer boundaries around my hours—including through a 4-day work week—has opened up space for other projects and practices. It has helped me take better care of my mind and body, show up more wholly for my people, and spend more time with poems and poets, all of which has had a pretty cool effect on my professional work and process.

It’s so much easier, under the conditions we’ve created for ourselves, to share work in progress, to seek and integrate feedback early and often, and to co-create richer, more beautiful, useful things rather than grind in solitude to present my own idea of perfection.

Through numerous beautiful examples, you've modeled to me the imperative of speaking one's needs into existence, and authoring the life you want. A bit over a year ago, you packed up your life in Chicago, and settled in New Mexico where you intend to build your dream home and cultivate the land around it with your family. How has your recent move reshaped the creative you are today? What lesson(s) has this shift taught you?

I look at birds more. They keep me company, they keep me curious. I know the names of more native plants, I feel closer to my kin. I find ways to work and write outside, with my feet on the ground. I watch the clouds take shape and change, I can see a storm roll in—the scale and perspective of my perceivable world has shifted. I’m able to recognize, more readily in the wide open sky of northern New Mexico than I was in the thrilling density of Chicago, that most urgency is made up, that it’s almost always better to sleep on it before making an important decision, and that I don’t want to die working, too stressed to be blessed. So I try to do less, and notice more.

Who are the writers, poets, thinkers, artists, and table shakers who have shaped the wonderful writer you are today? Can you share your creative lineage with our readers?

I keep many voices on my altar: Emily Dickinson, Shel Silverstein, Pablo Neruda, Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez were among my first obsessions, followed later by Joy Harjo, June Jordan, Li-Young Lee, Diane di Prima, Jalal al-Din Rumi, John O’Donohue, Rainer Maria Rilke and Ada Limón. I am guided by peers lightyears beyond me in skill and imagination: Charif Shanahan, Paige Lewis, Shira Erlichman and the entire In Surreal Life community, Krista Franklin, Linda Abdullah, and Ariel Rudolph, who taught me the teacher only appears when the student is ready. I try to stay ready. I have spiraled in the kaleidoscopic wisdom of adrienne maree brown and Robin Wall Kimmerer. I am lucky to be alive at the same time as Beyonce, Patricia Lockwood and On Being with Krista Tippet, and I read “The Maytrees” by Annie Dillard once every 2-3 years. I listen to everything Nermin Moufti says to me and share a birthday with Janie Porche, who took me underwing thirteen years ago, softened my edges and sharpened my mind; she is married to Molly Myers, who once gave me the best advice I’ve ever received in my life: Say the most honest thing, the kindest way possible.

Top left to bottom right: Ariel Rudolph, Joy Harjo, Braiding Sweetgrass, Janie!, Space Struck, Diane Di Prima, Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, In Surreal Life.

Let’s land this note with some rapid fire questions from our friends in this field!

What is something you wish you knew at 29?

Hot skincare tip: Your face is like tofu. Be gentle with your tofu.

What do you love the most about getting older?

Having to know less.

What's one question you'd love to ask your (far-off future) self if you could?

Are there still birds?

Favorite Ram Dass quote?

Now is now. Are you going to be here or not?

Favorite scene in a movie?

Mr. Darcy’s hand flex.

Why the fascination with horses?

Because nobody seems to know what one looks like.

What poem do you find yourself going back to time and time again when you need centering or inspiration? Why?

A Map to the Next World by Joy Harjo, for the final five lines:

We were never perfect.

Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was

once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

You must make your own map.

…

This last one is from a beloved soul sister: Kristin, darling, how big is your love? Multiply that at least twice, even thrice. That's how much we love you!

Thanks for being so easy to love, dear partner.

Happy birthday!

Nermin

In Conversation: Kristin Lueke