I pointed to the crudely carved animal and asked the elderly vendor what it was. “Jaguar” she said. “¿Cuánto?” I said.
She answered, and I paid her what she asked. As I handed over the cash, the vendors around her in the local craft market in the Peruvian Amazon, mostly younger men, stopped to watch. It felt to me like a moment that hung in between the making of sense. Time paused to reflect on itself.
The jaguar was crudely carved, especially in contrast to the many beautiful items offered by this vendor and the other vendors all around. I imagined that maybe someone elderly who had lost their mobility had carved it – maybe the vendor herself — or maybe a child who wanted to be an artist. Maybe it was created by someone who just liked jaguars and felt the need to do their best to honor the beast with a likeness. Whatever the case, it didn’t matter to me because I could feel in the little carved figure a sweetness and an intention from the heart. Someone wanted to make a little jaguar, and they did what they knew how to do. That is what mattered to me.
A few years later, at a small gift shop somewhere in the middle of a rural tourist district in New York state, I was browsing the various crafts and trinkets that were for sale. As I wandered through the offerings, I didn’t know why, but I was filled with sadness. Soon tears began fall. Time stopped again, though this time I was lost in a moment of heartbreak. Confused by this sudden swelling of emotion, I inquired inside to ask myself where the tears came from. After a few moments of silence, the answer came. As I took in the creative items around me, it appeared to me that all of the little items set out for sale were things that people had made because they thought other people would buy them. I could not feel any heart in them. Not comfortable crying in the middle of the retail shop, I took note of the strangeness of the moment, and then walked out in a haze of sadness and mild embarrassment.
The relation between these events revealed itself to me recently while I was ruminating about a piece I was writing. I was looking to the shelves and walls in my office for inspiration when I noticed that nearly every piece of art on display was something that someone I knew had made or given to me, or it was purchased in a local artist’s gift shop from one trip or another that I had taken. I hadn’t done this consciously. How did it happen?
I thought about the people who had made the objects that surrounded me. Many of them were made by my friends who are artists who have made concessions to financial or family needs to take on some career other than the one that calls them. Many of them don’t know each other, and yet from so many, I remembered having heard the same story. It was generally some variation on, “I wish I could do art full time, but I’ll never be good enough. Besides, I’m not really a salesperson.”
When I asked to see some of their work, it was unfailingly highly skilled and beautiful. When I told them so, my friends generally denied their talent.
I wondered, how many times does someone have to be dismissed before they start dismissing themselves? How many creative people does the world throw away because it values something else more? For those paying attention to current events, there is so much to despair about and so much creativity needed to find our way through. How can we spare the development of even one creative heart? We don’t have the right to throw them away.
When approached with authenticity, creative development can deepen over an entire lifetime, requiring skill refinement and ongoing personal development. When allowed to flourish, this development deepens personal insight and maturity, and it broadens its applicability. For every answer to the question of what keeps us from our creative selves, there is a need for decades, even lifetimes of experience and wisdom to meet that challenge with compassion. When any heart stumbles in the futility of its own being, we lose.
My home is filled with the handicrafts of those who love what they create because I value the hearts that created them. Nothing is superfluous. No effort, no creativity fulfilled, no matter how small, is futile. A painting here, a global movement there: it all matters. Every heartbeat that drums, valued and open, plays a song that creates courage in other hearts. You don’t have to hear it. You feel it.