Transcript: Episode 12

Hey friends, and thank you for being here for today’s episode. I’m Mary, and I hope you’re doing well whenever and wherever you’re listening.

You might have noticed that this episode is dropping on a different day than the usual last Friday of the month (which has happened before, but this time it’s not because of either finishing the episode late or because of the Thanksgiving weekend). I decided to release this December episode on the winter solstice, both because the solstice is one of my own favorite holidays in this season of wintertide celebrations, and because it aligns with the topic I’m talking about today.

I started taking note of the solstice in my psychological and spiritual calendar several years ago, and I’ve personally found that it helps me engage with winter in a different way.

I’ve lived in Minnesota for over 15 years, but I’m a Southerner by birth, and my relationship with the dark-cold-short days has been kinda rocky at best. The solstice has become a hinge in the year that gives me an appreciation for the winter dark as a space of contemplation and incubation, even when it’s not always the most comfortable. And on a mundane level it really helps to take active note of the fact that even in the midst of a Minnesota January, the hours of daylight are actually getting longer even when the nights are at their coldest.

So in honor of the solstice, the longest and deepest night of the year, this month I’m delving into the idea of storytelling as a gift that has a deep symbolic or spiritual connection to the dark.

This topic of creativity as a gift has partly been on my mind because people tend to give actual gifts during this season… but really it’s been on my mind a lot in various ways over the last year as I’ve been exploring and creating this podcast. I personally have mixed feelings about framing creative work as the result of “being gifted,” in the sense either of being naturally talented at something, or in the sense of receiving creative inspiration as some sort of unadulterated download from god or from the universe.

This came up in episode 5, on the topic of genius – and it feels a little weird to do this, but I’m going to quote myself here for a minute from that episode, because I’m actually still pretty happy with the way I phrased it the first time…

Both of the typical takes on the trope of the creative gift essentially introduce limits on creativity, instead of opening up possibility. And they encourage and feed another ubiquitous trope about creativity: the suffering artist. If you’re born a genius, you’ll struggle with your own greatness, and if you’re born a mere normie, you’ll struggle with mediocrity. Or in the divine inspiration camp, you’re faced with proving your worthiness for the gift, often through hardship; creativity is something you desperately long for and might occasionally receive, based on the judgment or whim of the divine.

This mythology of genius (or the gift) is part of what makes each story idea or writing session or draft feel like a verdict on our value and significance as people. It’s part of what makes us feel like we’re proving something with our writing instead of creating something.

Since I wrote that episode on genius, though, I’ve been taking note of other, more nuanced perspectives on creativity as a gift – you know when you start thinking about something and then suddenly it’s popping up around you everywhere all the time, like you’ve stumbled into a little patch of synchronistic conceptual mushrooms?

One of the ways the concept of the gift has come up is through a book by the philosopher, poet, and cultural critic Lewis Hyde, called (very appropriately) The Gift. Back in the September episode, I mentioned another one of Hyde’s books on the trickster archetype and creativity. I actually read The Gift first, and had planned to write about it first as well. But I think I needed a bit of extra time to let it sit, or maybe this topic just really wanted to coincide with the season of the solstice and the many celebrations that occur now in the darkest time of the year.

Hyde’s book is honestly a little hard to describe, or at least not without making it sound like some sort of theoretical economics text. The Gift explores creative work through the lens of comparing gift economies to market or capitalist economies – basically offering a model of the value of art that can act as a kind of antidote to the way contemporary, commodity-driven culture tends to chronically undervalue artistic work.

I can’t really attempt to completely summarize Hyde’s take on gift economies here; he draws on a lot of historical context about the shift from older systems into the capitalist system, and how that shift affected cultural and spiritual life. He also draws on some anthropological research about living non-capitalist cultures.

(I should say that The Gift was first published in the early eighties, so some of that anthropology definitely has a bit of a vintage whiff to it. But it’s aged a lot better than you might expect, and Hyde also made revisions to the later editions based on feedback from members of those living cultures.)

According to Hyde, in a gift economy, nothing really functions as wealth until it is, quote, “fully consumed” as a gift – or in other words, until it’s offered, received, and then recirculated in some way, back into the exchange of gifts. This abundant and constant movement is what makes a gift economy into a functioning and sustainable cycle, a cyclical and circular relationship between those who give and receive, as they have either surplus or need.

Gift economies are systems in which surplus doesn’t become personal wealth or invested capital. Instead, all surplus is seen as a gift from nature or from the community or from some form of spirit – and that gift must then be re-bestowed back into the community.

Hyde’s model of a fully fruitful and healthy gift cycle also includes the act of giving-and-receiving with the ineffable in some form, whether it’s called god, or spirit, or cultural legacy, or is simply a felt relationship with something that’s more than the sum of its parts. When gifts are received from and given back to this kind of ineffable spirit, Hyde says, quote: “The gift leaves all boundary and circles into mystery. And the passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can once a day look upon mystery, then our labor suffices.”

I think what Hyde is describing here when he talks about mystery is the act of making meaning. And in his model for the value of art, meaning-making is a literal exchange of gifts. The artist receives tangible and intangible gifts from the world around them, and then creates meaning by fully receiving and reimagining those gifts, in the form of a work of art that can then be gifted to others.

Hyde puts it this way: “A circulation of gifts nourishes those parts of our spirits that are not entirely personal, parts that derive from nature, the group, the human race, or the gods. … Although these wider spirits are a part of us, they are not ‘ours;’ they are endowments bestowed upon us. To feed them by giving away the increase they have brought to us is to accept that our participation in [these wider spirits] brings with it an obligation to preserve their vitality.”

That last sentence there is a particularly brain-cracking one, I think (in the best way). When we create art and tell stories, we are ensuring that the gifts that have come to us continue to move with increasing vitality in the world – gifts of beauty and connection and insight and aliveness. When we write, we’re doing our part to make sure that the gift stays a gift, that it continues to nourish both us and the entire circle of beings in the cycle of giving and receiving.

I think this model has a lot of implications for ways to be in relationship with our creative work as storytellers. For one thing, experiencing our writing as a gift from and to mystery could be a deep-acting antidote to creative anxieties and burnout.

To quote Hyde: “We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom. Then we know they are not a solitary egotism and they are inexhaustible. … When the gift passes out of [our] sight and then returns, we are enlivened. … It is when the world flames a bit in our peripheral vision that it brings us jubilation and not depression. We stand before a bonfire… and feel the odd release it brings, as if the trees could give the sun return for what enters them through the leaf.” (end quote)

(I’m doing a lot of quoting in this episode, but I’m going to be sharing several more because I find this book to be infinitely quotable so I had a hard time narrowing down what nuggets to share…)

There’s a second layer to Hyde’s concept of the creative gift that has equally deep possibilities for how we relate to the actual work of writing – to the parts of storytelling that are hard and unglamorous, that feel like labor.

Here’s another excerpt: “The initial gift is what is bestowed upon the self – by perception, experience, intuition, imagination, a dream, a vision, or by another work of art. … But it is rare for the initial material to be the finished work of art. We must usually labor with it. The ability to do the labor is the second gift.”

I think it’s the laboring bit that trips many of us up when we’re creating art, that takes us away from any sense of creativity as part of a cycle of gifts. Because in a capitalist economy, labor isn’t a gift. It’s an exchange of commodities with a market value: our labor for our wages. It can take a lot of willpower to convince ourselves that laboring with a creative gift is literally worth it in a capitalist economy.

But Hyde defines creative labor as an act not solely or even necessarily primarily of willpower and discipline. It’s an act of gratitude. He writes: “Gratitude [is] a labor undertaken by the soul to affect transformation after a gift has been received. … [And] passing the gift along is the act of gratitude that finishes the labor.” (end quote)

Lately I’ve been thinking about this idea of writing as a labor of gratitude, and what keeps coming to mind for me is a metaphor of apprenticeship: practicing craft as a process of learning under the guidance of our gratitude.

What’s making this idea of apprenticeship feel like such a big potential shift for me is that the apprenticeship in this metaphor isn’t really to what Hyde calls the first gift, the inspiration or creative vision. It’s to the second gift, to the gratitude that allows us to experience inspiration in the first place.

Another way of putting this is that gratitude is a measure of our ability to be moved. And that sensitivity to the world is the true creative teacher. It’s what actually allows us to perceive something as creatively inspiring. So in order to really access creative growth and transformation, we have to be willing to practice being fully moved. A gift isn’t fully realized until it’s been received – and deep gratitude is the marker and spirit of fully accepting and receiving the gift. 

To quote Hyde again, “We are only alive to the extent that we can let ourselves be moved. And when the gift circles into mystery, the liveliness stays.” (end quote)

So the gratitude of the artist and the storyteller isn’t a passive gratitude. It can’t be if it’s going to keep the creative gift alive and circulating in the great ongoing, living gift exchange of the world. We have to feel an active gratitude to our own creative aliveness – active in the sense of being both actively felt and intentionally acted upon. That’s how we allow creative gifts to transform us and move through us to others. And that movement through us is how we nurture and expand our capacity as storytellers.

As Hyde puts it: “Bestow[ing a gift] creates [an] empty place into which new energy may flow. The alternative is petrifaction, writer’s block, ‘the flow of life backed up.’”

What I’m really trying to say is, we don’t create transformative work by writing a perfectly crafted artifact, some ideal version of our short story or personal essay or sonnet series. We create transformative work by writing as if our work is a gift, even though it’s imperfect. Or maybe especially when it’s imperfect, when it’s a work-in-progress. That’s what it means to be an apprentice of gratitude, and not a master.

When we grip too tightly to our work, we don’t have any space to maneuver into mystery. Gratitude teaches us how to be more generous with both ourselves and our work, to be part of a flow of gifts that replenishes our creative energy even as we empty it out.

And on a less woo-woo level… focusing on our gratitude allows us to be fully aware of our creativity as a gift to ourselves as well as a gift to others. When we practice the craft, we’re giving ourselves the gift of being fully alive, of acting on what moves us. And that’s true even if we write things that don’t get published, or that we don’t share with anyone, or that we don’t even finish.

I mean, those things are great and all, don’t get me wrong. But valuing creativity as a gift means that it’s a gift whenever it’s gratefully bestowed, even when we’re only bestowing it to ourselves.

Earlier in the episode I mentioned that I felt like this topic of the gift is aligned with this time of year not just because we may be giving tangible gifts during the holidays, but also because it’s the winter solstice – the darkest point of the year. At first glance, darkness may not seem to have a lot to do with creative gifts. But writing in relation to darkness was a topic at a recent writers’ circle I took part in, and I found it to be a really fruitful theme for contemplation.

Writing is in some ways always the act of chasing an edge – the edge where what you’ve written meets what hasn’t been written yet, the story that’s still unmanifest. The story that’s in darkness. Maybe the writing is a gift offered at that bright, sharp edge. An offering to the dark horizon.

And across that threshold, the dark beyond the page is full of shining visions you can never fully describe. Sometimes that’s intimidating or frustrating. But it’s also the source of the enlivened electricity you feel as you journey continuously at the horizon where the existing words end. Your words are an artifact of an encounter that remains still fundamentally mysterious. So there’s always more to discover whenever you allow yourself to be moved as you move through the world – and whenever you allow yourself to write about it.

There’s a deep wellspring of abundant darkness in each story that comes to us for the telling. Our calling as storytellers is to keep going out to meet it, patiently and persistently. The words you craft at the edge are the gift you discover in your hand when you open it fully to the dark – both the gift you receive and the gift you bestow.

So, may we be true apprentices of our gratitude, by doing our work with hands that are empty, but cunning – genuinely open to the mystery of the gift, but always ready to grasp it with skill and care. Hands that know how to receive and how to bestow, in faith that what we create and give will be fully received in its turn.

 

As the suggested writing praxis for this episode, I’m not sharing the usual exercise or resource that typically goes out to members of the podcast newsletter. Solstice season is an ideal time for rest, in whatever way we can find it… but it’s not always easy to find it. So I figured even a quick creative exercise might be sort of the last thing people need this month.

Instead, I’m going to close by asking you a question that I was actually asked at that writers’ circle I mentioned. If your writer self could receive a gift from this season of darkness, what gift would they like to receive? And can you give it to them?

 

If the gift your writer self wants to receive in this busy season is actually a collection of intuitive, inspirited writing exercises – then good news, there are a bunch of those on the pod website for this year’s past episodes. To get access to those member-only practices and resources, scroll down in the mobile show notes and hit the link to join the newsletter. Or, head to www.inspiritedword.com/contact and look for the peacock green button that says “Join the newsletter.”

As a final note this month, I want to give a hat tip to the Eye of The Heart Center, which organizes the writers’ circle mentioned in this episode. Eye of the Heart offers programs and community for creatives looking to explore spiritual practices within their creative craft. They run offerings both online and in-person in the Twin Cities area, and you can check out their work at eyeoftheheartcenter.org (linked in the show notes).

To members of the Gathering writers’ circle who might be tuning in, thank you for shaping this episode with your insights and supportive presence. And to everybody listening, thank you, truly, for being part of the first year of the Inspirited Word podcast. It’s an honor to give and receive creative inspiration with you. I hope you and your loved ones find rest and celebration this solstice season.

And as always, keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.