The Gift of the Gift

Creativity is a gift. Too many of us refuse it unwittingly. Assaulted by self-doubt, we fail to believe that it has been put into our hands. We diminish it by insisting that we should have been child prodigies. We insist its only proof is commercial gain. But the creative is a gift to us from another realm, and it comes to us when it comes.

The creative is first and foremost for us; this is why creative people are called ‘gifted’. First, the gift is given to us. To recognise that we are gifted – that we have been given the gift of creativity – is to claim parts of ourselves too often denied. But, in order for us to be given to, to be gifted, we must be willing to receive.

Second, we are asked to nurture and develop what has been given, to make something with it. By adding to the gift, we make it more fundamentally ours, and in doing so, we are made more whole. The third part of the gift is that we must pass it on by offering a gift to others. Something is healed in us through the giving; severed parts are brought together. Exchange occurs and the world heals a little.

Some of these ideas are themselves the gift of Lewis Hyde, who wrote the remarkable book, The Gift, Imagination, and the Erotic Life of Property, in which he articulates the difference between a gift-giving and an acquisitive or consumer society. In a gift-giving society, an individual gains prestige and satisfaction by receiving, then by adding to what has been received and passing it on. The society thrives on the energy of the exchange. In a consumer society, prestige and satisfaction are gained through accumulation and acquisition. Nothing is given, nothing is passed on, no energy of exchange exists. Describing several potlatch societies, Hyde identifies artists as members of another kind of gift-giving society.

In 1939 an odd trio travelled the length of Mexico together: the great muralist Diego Rivera, the renegade revolutionary Leon Trotsky, and the king of surrealists, Andre Breton. Together they wrote a manifesto about the state of art, which Trotsky and Rivera later disclaimed and only Breton was willing to sign. In this manifesto, however, the three of them had agreed that creativity was innate in every human being and that societies were to be held responsible for crushing the creative instinct. Therefore, they reasoned, a government in the interest of the people would ensure the freedom that would allow the artist in each individual to emerge.* Fifty years later, the idea that creativity is innate in everyone is still revolutionary and is still valid.

From Writing for Your Life by Deena Metzger pub HarperSanFrancisco ISBN 0 06 250612 9

*Please note this is not to suggest that you personally should wait until the ‘day of the Revolution’ in order to be creative as one of my former AW participants eagerly leapt on this new excuse/block! You are your own revolution and your change profoundly affects those around you - Mary