If you read my blog with any regularity you know that I am a champion of creativity and creative types, offering encouragement to all manner of artists, whether they are writers, painters, poets, dancers, sculptors, et al, or people whose creativity (or inner artist) has not yet found an outlet.

Below is an excerpt from a book I am currently reading by Lewis Hyde entitled The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. See if it resonates with you.  

The art that matters to us—which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience—that work is received by us as a gift is received. Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with the price. I went to see a landscape painter’s works, and that evening, walking among pine trees near my home, I could see the shapes and colors I had not seen the day before. The spirit of an artist’s gifts can wake our own….Our sense of harmony can hear the harmonies that Mozart heard. We may not have the power to profess our gifts as the artist does, and yet we come to recognize, and in a sense to receive the endowments of our being through the agency of his/her creation. We feel fortunate, even redeemed…the gift revives the soul. When we are moved by art we are grateful that the artist lived, thankful that she labored in the service of her gifts.

Are you laboring in the service of your gifts? Have you experienced art lately that revived your soul, delighted your senses, or offered you courage for living? If so, I’d love to hear from you.

Where is the economic stimulus for writers and artists? One of the main stories in the New York Times for the last few days is about how A.I.G. is giving out millions of dollars in bonuses to the failed businessmen and women responsible in part to A.I.G.’s demise. Millions in bonuses!

I could live for years on what one of these failed businessmen at A.I.G. get as a bonus for, duh, failing. Of course some would say that I am a failed writer. I haven’t, as yet, been able to support myself by writing and selling books, even though that’s what I feel compelled to do. I’ve been told I have talent, that I have the ability to inspire people with my writing. So why isn’t someone throwing a little bailout money my way so they don’t lose my “talent?”

William Blake said, “Nations decay when the arts decay.” And I read somewhere (I wish I could remember where) that you can judge the vibrancy and sustainability of a culture by how they treat their artists. If this is the case, I think we’re in big trouble.

From where I sit, the world is upside down. Most of our poets, writers, artists, and musicians live like paupers instead of princes and princesses. However, we are the paupers who carry the substance of the culture.

In The Gift by Lewis Hyde, he states:

…every modern artist who has chosen to labor with a gift must sooner or later wonder how he or she is to survive in a society dominated by market exchange. And if the fruits of a gift are gifts themselves, how is the artist to nourish himself, spiritually as well as materially, in an age whose values are market values and whose commerce consists almost exclusively in the purchase and sale of commodities?…

…The mythology of a market society reverses the picture: getting rather than giving is the mark of a substantial person, and the hero is “self-possessed,” “self-made.” So long as these assumptions rule, a disquieting sense of triviality, of worthlessness even, will nag the man or woman who labors in the service of a gift and whose products are not adequately described as commodities. Where we reckon our substance by our acquisitions, the gifts of the gifted man [and woman] are powerless to make him [or her] substantial.

Are artists wrong to want bailout money, too? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

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P.S. My first novel, Seeking Sara Summers , is available on Kindle, as well as iBooks and Barnes and Noble (on the Nook).