Call To Create : Celebrating Acts Of Imagination

Call To Create : Celebrating Acts Of Imagination

Linda Schierse Leonard, a renowned Jungian analyst and the best-selling author ofThe Wounded Woman andMeeting the Madwoman, shows how we can use our energies to live more creatively in all areas of our lives.In the decades Linda Schierse Leonard has spent as a Jungian analyst and teacher, she has seen that nature and creativity are healing--even necessary--tools for her clients, readers, and students. InThe Call to Create, she explores the many parallels between the cycles, moods, and landscapes of nature that foster inspiration, renewal, and hope. Leonard shows how understanding these parallels helps us move through dark times so we can be ready to receive and actualize creativity in our lives.Many people do not think of themselves as creative. Yet their everyday discoveries, work, and appreciation of families, relationships, and personal lives are creative acts. InThe Call to Create, Leonard helps us identify the characters and archetypal patterns that rise up inside us as we go about imagining a better life. These characters can be hinderers--such as the Perfectionist, the Cynic, or the Escape Artist--or they can be helpers, such as the Sower, the Adventurer, or the Celebrant.The Call to Create helps us recognize these characters within ourselves, enabling us to turn our everyday struggles into creative acts.Leonard encourages readers by showing that the obstacles preventing them from creating a better life are like those that artists confront, and that imagination can be born of frustration. By understanding how to cultivate the helpers within us--and by following the examples of well-known artists--we can develop and appreciate creativity in everything from our search for meaning to family and love relationships, from communications and business ventures to artistic endeavors.From Publishers WeeklyCreativity is an inherently tricky subject: the very attempt to define it can chase it away. Leonard (The Wounded Woman) fares no better than most in her attempt to teach readers to "discover how to recognize that call [to create], to identify the inner tendencies that sabotage your creative efforts, and to detect [your] inner helpers." She identifies a surprisingly large number of inner archetypes that hinder creativity--the Sower, the Cynic, the Celebrant and the Sluggard, to name a few--and invokes her own metaphors to convey what creativity is: "creating is like being in the wilds, surrounded by beasts"; "I experience the journey of creative transformation as moving in a continual cycle, somewhat like the seasons." Her case studies of ordinary creative people are draped with loose references to artists' experiences with and statements about creativity; her examples range from Fugard and Emerson to John Muir and Maria Callas. However, many of the quotations from famous figures are presented out of context, so that even the most beautifully rendered begin to sound flat and repetitive. To skeptical readers (perhaps too full of "the Cynic"), much of Leonard's text will sound flimsy and familiar. (Apr.)Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.From BooklistLeonard has several distinguished books on archetypal psychology to her credit. Now she applies her skills to the question of how to enhance creativity. Not restricting herself to artistic creativity, she defines creativity as the human capacity to make meaning and beauty out of life's raw materials, regardless of whether the results are finally expressed as art or as a relationship, as poetry or as spirituality. Leonard calls the inner voices inhibiting creativity the Tyrant, the Conformist, the Escape Artist, and the Star. Those that encourage it are the Witness, the Sentinel, the Adventurer, and the Artisan. Others in this inner cast are the Cynic, the Sower, the Lover, the Critic, and, finally, the whole artist, called the Celebrant. An intriguing and useful approach to a subject with perennial appeal.Patricia MonaghanFr