We recently had the chance to connect with Susan Thornton and have shared our conversation below.
Susan, so good to connect and we’re excited to share your story and insights with our audience. There’s a ton to learn from your story, but let’s start with a warm up before we get into the heart of the interview. Have any recent moments made you laugh or feel proud?
Timely question for me, just this past week there was a moment that made me both laugh and feel proud; deeply proud, and grateful.
Our oldest son and his wife just bought a unique but neglected house in the Catskills, it sits on a pond and feels like a portal to heaven, surrounded by the most beautiful forest, with rock walls painting the ten-acre landscape. We went up this past week to work on the house and help sit the dogs while our son was out of the country.
My job was the front yard beds, walkway, and deck. Unwittingly, the people who built the house, (as a vacation home, then abandoned it,) foiled themselves and future owners with two mirrored Wisteria vines on either side of the front porch, that were left to their own devices – for years. I’m a gardener, it’s therapy, inspiration, and a time to let my imagination run wild; can’t tell you how many scenes have been written digging in the dirt. Not this time though, this was an epic battle, ended up cursing the vines that chocked and crisscrossed, not only the beds but the yard. Reminded me of a kudzu invasion. At the end of each day, my hands and back ached, but no way was this bully gonna win. It took the entire week, but I claimed victory.
Beyond the superficial satisfaction in my work, the deepest pride I felt was in my son’s decision to travel 29 hours and take part in a spiritual quest in the Himalayas. He lit a fire under all of us and we got an extraordinary amount of work done. Looking around at the end of the week, had to laugh at the express train we’d all just helmed, it was kind of a blur, but I was truly proud of what we accomplished.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
Guess you could call me a renegade, which is strange, have always been a by-the-book person, but playing by the rules in the entertainment industry, especially when you’re a woman of a certain age, gets you precisely nowhere. Decided I wasn’t going to be foiled by the Catch-22 of the system anymore and, as a writer/director, self-funded my first independent feature, TIME APART.
Having a career in Public Access and educational television, came with connections to artists and technicians who were interested, and willing to take on the insane schedule and grueling work of Gorilla filmmaking. We captured a complicated family drama in nine days. It certainly wasn’t optimal, and not the same movie I’d have made given time and funding, but if you have a passion for storytelling, you do whatever you can to bring those stories to life. TIME APART is currently a completed movie on the timeline, now it’s on to next steps in post, looking for a Sound Engineer and Colorist.
Great, so let’s dive into your journey a bit more. What’s a moment that really shaped how you see the world?
Hard for me to think of a moment that had more impact on how I see the world, than being with a child, I didn’t know, dying on the side of the road after being hit by a truck.
Heading home from a company picnic, driving down a back country highway, I happened on a boy, standing still on his bike, in the middle of the road, crying. Looked beyond the boy and saw why he was crying, there was a body heaped in the tall grass on the side of the road. Parked my car, helped him off his bike, and told him to go tell his friend’s mother. The truck driver yelled from a distance down the road that he’d called 911.
Then I went to the child, he was so mortally wounded, there was no CPR to offer, me moving him could have done even more damage. His bicycle was broken clean in half, his body disjointed and crooked, and the soft tissue of his head was exceeding its boundaries, he was dying. At that point, I got on my knees and prayed for mercy and help.
There were several strange interactions with people, including a young boy who came and stared at JJ, (learned his name during a brief encounter with his uncle,) then picked up one half of the bike and threw it into the field. (The detective that showed up at my house was grateful for that info, the position of the bike in the field put the truck traveling at over 70 mph.) But after all the interactions were done and I was alone with JJ for a few minutes before the EMTs arrived, still on my knees, I turned my attention to the sky and prayed again for mercy.
Suddenly an oval came into view in the sky, above his body. It was about the size of a watermelon, and the air contained in it moved like the air above a flame, only with infinitely more density and speed. I was locked onto it, couldn’t have looked away if I’d tried. It dropped down over his body and a small piece of the same kind of energy leap from him to the oval. It rose back over him, stopped for a few seconds, and was gone.
From that moment on I understood, we’re all in this life together, made of one spirit. The bodies we walk around in are just perishable containers, what truly makes us who we are is inside. Can attest, with all the earnest I possess, we are all truly created equal.
When did you last change your mind about something important?
Last changed my mind about something important when I encountered what felt to me like a deep betrayal. Stewed about it too long, felt similar to going through the stages of grief, only mine went out of order, anger came last and was sticking around. It’s a fair assessment to say, I was struggling.
A time came when I needed to spend time with one of the people involved and I was a nervous wreck. Prayed for guidance and had what felt like an epiphany, it was such a simple idea, but it changed my life. Over the years I’d given myself credit for forgiving people, but did I really? If old wounds could reignite so easily, then it wasn’t forgiveness at all, just lip service. How could it have been genuine forgiveness if wrongs could still hurt? It couldn’t.
The insight that night was clear, true forgiveness can be given, without it ever having been solicited. It sounds a little crazy, but offering forgiveness, even when the wrong still stands, is incredibly freeing.
Sure, so let’s go deeper into your values and how you think. Where are smart people getting it totally wrong today?
Where are smart people getting it wrong? How long do we have? It would be unfair to say all smart people are missing the forest for the trees, but unfortunately, way too many in positions of leadership, authority, and influence are happily stuck in the bramble of self-enrichment. They’re making themselves untouchable.
Interestingly, when you empower people to succeed, everyone ends up winning, from the bottom to the top. Commerce at its best. As smart as some people are, they fail to see that, they think persecution and intimidation are the ways to build business and government; that heavy-handedly controlling people is better than helping them thrive. That’s not just totally wrong, it’s foolish.
The smartest people know, our most valuable resources aren’t rare earth metals, oil, and gold, the most precious resource on earth is a constant wellspring, an evolution, an opportunity for love and a common human concern: children. Smart people know, by protecting children, nurturing them, and teaching them the knowledge the world has to offer, they will show us wonders of the future.
Thank you so much for all of your openness so far. Maybe we can close with a future oriented question. What do you understand deeply that most people don’t?
The answer to that question might seem a little fantastical, at the tender age of seven, I had an out-of-body experience that taught me, what I believe to be, the deepest truth. As a writer, I’ve used the episode in a fictional short story, but it’s legitimate, it really happened.
My Dad’s mom came to live with us when she was in her 70s, she brought a shipwrecked body and mind. She’d never been a nice person, and was often bitingly mean to my sweetheart of a Mom, but by the time she came to us, she’d lost the ability to speak. Still cantankerous, she spent most of her time in her room, although there was one activity she enjoyed when she ventured out, scrubbing the bottoms of my Mother’s pots and pans. Mom would set her up at the kitchen table and she would scrub her time away with a cloth cleaner you pulled from a tub.
Us four kids didn’t often venture near her, she’d sometimes carry on and no one wanted to be responsible for setting her off. One day I saw her working on her pots in the kitchen and she looked lonely, so I quietly sat down at the Formica table, picked up a small pot, pulled a piece of the cotton, and started rubbing. She gave me an approving look, then went back to work.
It wasn’t long and I was up above, watching us work, all I could see were the tops of our heads. And a voiced posed a question, it wasn’t as if it came as a sound, but more a universal understanding, “What is the meaning of life?” I said, “Love” and was immediately back in my body. Didn’t want to be, I wanted to be back up there, where there weren’t words for how comforting it felt. From that day on I got it, love is meant to be applied in all things, it’s the meaning of life.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.lasooze.org/427710482
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- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdlmaMcejqU
Image Credits
Sarah Barnes
Kevin Thornton
Tony Hooper
Sam Freundel
Michael Livingston
Susan Thornton
