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In Walking in This World Julia Cameron offers a 12-week course crammed full of practical tips on how to rejuvenate the creative life. What happens when you get stuck and can't create? What should you do when you can't solve a problem or move into the next stage of goal achievement? Take a walk. Seriously. Cameron, who has already written successfully on the science of human creativity, suggests that a weekly walk helps to clear the mind, focus the energies and re-establish the priorities. Her advice is not just for artists, writers and musicians. Everyone has areas of life where creative problem solving is required. Cameron believes that getting in touch with the deep sources of inspiration will help us solve business problems, relationship problem and become more spiritual, whole and positive as individuals.
Along with the practical suggestions, on every page there are memorable quotes from creative people that support Cameron's point. While this book is practical and inspiring, like many self-help books, it is over-written and repetitious. Cameron's advice is excellent, but she could probably have made her points in half the space. Sometimes her own creativity errs on the side of cliché and sentimental excess, but despite these criticisms, Walking in This World points a way forward for those who are seeking a more meaningful, creative and spiritual way of life. --Dwight Longenecker
From Publishers Weekly
Touted as the long-awaited sequel to The Artist's Way, Cameron's latest is so similar in look and format to the original that they could be sold in a boxed set. Previous follow-ups, including The Vein of Gold and The Right to Write and a slew of little spin-offs, here give way to a 12-week course of encouragement and exercises promoted as an intermediate level of The Artist's Way (inviting us to anticipate an advanced volume). At first and for a long way into the book, we encounter the wheel-greasing exercises that worked magic for millions, helping people discover their innate creativity by devising gentle ways around the myriad obstacles that block us (e.g., listing things we would secretly love to do.) Cameron re-introduces the basic tools the daily morning exercise of hand-writing three free-flowing pages and the weekly solitary "artist's date," designed to help us romance our inner artists and she adds the ancient practice of walking as a means of getting in touch with our deeper feelings and truer thoughts (hence the title). "When I can, I walk with friends, noting how companionable our silences become, how effortlessly deep our conversations," Cameron writes. Cameron does indeed capture the feeling of strolling and talking with an old and trusted guide. Her core insights are the same as in earlier volumes, yet her words seem to have grown wiser. She writes about the distractions of success, and about the long solitary stretches "climbing the glass mountain" it takes to bring a large-scale creative project to completion. Her latest book reveals how reaching higher also means going deeper. 10-city author tour.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
