Step into Nature
Nurturing Imagination and Spirit in Everyday Life
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Step outside your door and reconnect with nature. From the author of Writing and the Spiritual Life comes a guide that will replenish your connection to the earth and inspire you to develop and strengthen your imagination.
The natural world has inspired artists, seekers, and thinkers for millennia, but in recent times, as the pace of life has sped up, its demands have moved us indoors. Yet nature’s capacity to lead us to important truths, to invigorate and restore our imagination and equilibrium, is infinite.
Step into Nature makes nature personal again by stimulating awareness and increasing our understanding of the environment. But being in nature doesn’t mean flying off to remote, faraway places. Nature is as close as opening your front door—and opening your heart to the sky above, the miniature gardens that push their way up between the sidewalk cracks in our cities, and the small stream just down the road.
Patrice Vecchione demonstrates how nature can support and enhance your creative output, invigorate your curiosity, and restore your sense of connection to and love of the earth. Included throughout the book is “The Cabinet of Curiosities,” exercises and suggestions for practical and unexpected ways to stimulate your imagination, deepen your relationship with nature, and experience the harmony between creativity and the natural world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In exploring the nature of artistic creativity, Vecchione (Writing and the Spiritual Life) sees connections everywhere. A central conceit of this book is her energetic efforts to relate her walks in a park to the works of everyone from Georgia O'Keeffe to George Gershwin, demonstrating her knowledge of the artistic world, but also moving so swiftly from one idea to the next that few ideas seem fully developed. Vecchione, a creative writing and art teacher, may wish for readers to make their own connections, and to this end she sprinkles expansive writing exercises throughout the text. Clearly a poet first and a naturalist second, she frequently quotes E.E. Cummings, Walt Whitman, and other writers. When writing about encounters with the natural world, however, her inquiry feels more superficial. For instance, when she collects and dissects a seedpod, she marvels at the many layers within, but never ponders the plant's identity. Readers anticipating the intimacy with nature suggested by the book's title will find only fleeting instances of it. Even as Vecchione strays from her path, however, she leads the way to a wealth of ideas that will inspire artists working in all media.
