99 Keys to a Creative Life

April 13, 2015
Artist and psychic Harris packs a wide array of suggestions into this guidebook for soul-affirming engagement with the world. She focuses somewhat on the specific skills of the artist, but mostly offers a diverse laundry list of mindful personal practices pointed toward introspection, exploration, and individual growth. She divides her ideas evenly into three categories. “Awareness” keys include breathing, setting intentions, monitoring creative cycles, and noticing your attraction to certain colors. “Intuitive” keys include working with dreams, automatic writing, collaborating, and shifting focus. “Spiritual” keys include meditating and praying, embracing vulnerability, mentoring, and dancing. One- to two-page elaborations on each idea lean toward the bland and obvious but stay on point, keeping each capsule useful and independent. Harris doesn’t provide a plan or road map, and trying to incorporate all of her ideas into one’s life would be impractical. But when this “keychain” is read as a menu from which to pull a few appealing tools to build daily discipline or pull oneself out of a rut, or as a divination book at which one could point at random for inspiration each morning, it has an optimistic appeal.