Tending the Perennials: The Art and Spirit of a Personal Religion

In Tending the Perennials, master teacher Eric Booth provides the architecture and understandings you need to create a “personal religion” that brings greater meaning and happiness to your life. He guides readers toward engagement with the perennial truths of art and religion—truths that are grounded in the same deep human principles. Truths that can get lost in the distractions and pressures of daily life, and in the institutions of art and religion. Tending the Perennials is a successor and companion book to Booth’s 1997 bestseller The Everyday Work of Art. Both books focus on the verbs of art and spirituality, not the nouns that distract and separate us. What we do when we engage artistically is very close to what we do when we engage spiritually. By consciously practicing these behaviors, we can create a personal religion that makes us more centered and contented as we navigate life’s challenges. Tending the Perennials shows you how: Booth gets you started with specific suggestions for active involvement that you can use right away. You will meet up with powerful personal stories in these pages—and with incisive philosophical perspectives you haven’t heard before, sentences you will want to underline and copy into a journal, and simple activities you can try. You’ll spend time with a wide-ranging and ceaselessly creative mind; Booth has been named one of the 25 most influential people in the American arts. You will meet up with the Ten Commencements (not commandments), which offer ways to consciously apply the artistic and spiritual skills you already have, and with the Seven Deadly Sins, which show how we often fail to focus on the little habits that make the biggest difference. You will find entertaining digressions into etymology. (Did you know that the etymological root of the word “sin” means “misalignment”?) Beyond that, you will have the sense that your own personal experience is being shown to you in a mirror. You will receive an eloquent language for describing experiences and ideas that you didn’t have words for before. “You’ve given me a language for what I always felt and knew, but didn’t know how to say”—this is what Booth’s readers tell him, again and again. Eric Booth is America’s foremost teaching artist. His entry into that world was preceded by separate successful careers as a Broadway actor and then as an entrepreneur. He gives keynote speeches around the world, works with the world’s foremost arts institutions, and is the only artist ever to receive the nation’s highest honor in arts education. All of Booth’s work has a spiritual aspect, and his accumulated wisdom has now been distilled into a clear, cogent, inspiring book that lays out a path to greater happiness. Tending the Perennials is a “best friend book.” Read it, and you’ll want to give copies to your friends.