About the SUE Speaks Podcast

Host Suzanne Taylor created the SUE Speaks podcast, Searching for Unity in Everything, to explore this question. Guests come from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplines, but they all have one thing in common: they’re all deep and original thinkers who could change the world.

Episode 10 – Richard Grossinger

Richard Grossinger

Richard Grossinger, moved from being a consultant and acquisitions editor at North Atlantic books, the press he founded with Lindy Hough in 1974, to curating his own imprint, Sacred Planet Books, at Inner Traditions. His own Inner Traditions book, Bottoming Out the Universe : Why There is Something Rather than Nothing, also came out this year. Richard received a BA from Amherst College and a PhD in anthropology from the University of Michigan. Writing with literary sensibility, he is the author of some 40 books. His writing can be divided into three overlapping categories: general experimental prose; books on science topics viewed historically, cross-culturally, epistemologically, esoterically, and in terms of pop culture; and autobiographical memoirs. The books range from long explorations of science, culture, and spirituality (The Night Sky: Soul and Cosmos, Planet Medicine, Embryogenesis: Species, Gender, and Identity), to memoirs (New Moon, Out of Babylon), to experimental prose (Book of the Earth and Sky, Spaces Wild and Tame), and science fiction (Mars: A Science Fiction Vision). He and Lindy Hough are the parents of Robin Grossinger, an environmental scientist working on urban redesign under climate change, and Miranda July, a multimedia artist and Hollywood indy director.

Richard’s mission

“I think I’m here to face the shadow-self, with an opportunity to transform something outside of time and space. More and more, I believe that life is a matter of honoring the mystery, while not knowing quite what your mission is. The trick is to stay true to it amid all the paradoxes and counterintuitive paths, and to not get swept up in any of the unintegrated realms of myth and spirit.”

Richard’s one-line message to the world

“I’m not much for one-liners of any sort, especially in a sound-bite culture, but I was thinking today that when Rodney King said, ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’ it sounded naïve, sweet, and a tad disingenuous, but now, so soon after, it sounds like a voice from another universe, and that’s not good given the challenge the universe is putting before our planet and species.”