Alice Walker Reflects on The Color Purple, Life

“I’m basically shifting in my life,” she says. “Shifting to much less travel, much more contemplation.”

At the moment, though, this somewhat reluctant literary lioness has emerged for a multi-city book tour, temporarily suspending that notion of “less travel” to promote a new collection of meditations, “We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness.”

There is still activism in her, still fight, but it comes in a more self-reflective and overtly spiritual package. At 62, Walker grounds her life in meditation and yoga, and she writes about things like “the root of the peace cradling me” and “the ecstatic nature of impersonal love” that bonds her with the Iraqi women and children who so concern her.

TheStateOf . . . The Color Purple. Can someone please explain to me what the significance of the book’s title meant? Seriously, I’d like to know.