trying to say this/i can produce a lot of text in 20 minutes

With one foot in the ethereal and one foot in the material plane (as close as it gets in Northern California), Alice Walker has grown a great deal since her early work took on sexual assault, alternative sexualities, and life-saving political defiance. Her most recent novel is 2004’s Now is the Time to Open Your Heart, a New Age parable set in Hawaii, Mexico, and Northern California. The book narrates the midlife crisis of Kate, a wealthy writer whose boyfriend wonders why he is so drawn to her, shuddering at the thought that “she must be New Age.” Similarly, a majority of Walker’s critics ignore her interest in transcendent spirituality to dwell instead on her pathbreaking work on African American women’s empowerment in, and because of, the strength of their physical bodies .

Walker, meanwhile, has moved on, while haunting her late work with ghosts and echoes of her earlier obsessions. Now Is the Time fairly rings with the whispers of her previous works, bringing to life several previous characters in a series of vignettes that paint Kate as a spiritual elder entering the final phase of what her earthbound experience can teach. The fantasies that this journey leads her to—that her father is not her biological father, that the Grandmother Spirit told her why the poor don’t meditate on retreat, that she herself is the all-powerful Grandmother Spirit—are the most ludicrous extensions of New Age philosophy, difficult to understand, awkward in translation from the world of New Age religion to the world of contemporary literature.
As far-flung as Walker’s work has become, this procedural experience depicted in Now Is the Time is, in many particulars, identical to all of the most essential jrouneys of her past work, with one crucial difference: instead of triumphing at her characters entering their bodies, as Beyonce says, crowing “get me bodied,” Walker praises Kate and her characters for understanding their aged role as spiritual leaders, spiritual esseneces, connected through the bodies they occupy in the Spirit that is all around them.
That is, Walker’s work as a whole can be described as a livethrough philosophy, a concept that begins with her early work exploring black masculinity and black womens’ embodiment and continues through her mid- and later-career efforts to articulate how an internal spiritual healing process can build community. Her characters live through their pain and pleasure, understanding it as both a sensation of a physical frame and a way to connect with the universe (in an expansive and spiritual sense) and with other people (thus, critically, building community for political goals). Walker’s theory of moving beyond the body can be abstracted to her work as a theory of moving through the body to the spirit. This body expansion is a way to allow space to integrate her earlier work, which seems significant as a milestone for understanding embodiment and in American literature; but also as a way to push herself and her readers forward. Her 2004 text reads like a spiritual autobiography, a way to urge people to open their heart. At the end of the novel, she proposes what to do with the snake: she lays it in the Buddha’s lap (213).