All Gift: Writing, Reciprocity, and the Web of Life
By Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew
My family occasionally prays down by the Mississippi River with the Nibi walkers, a group of Indigenous women and water-tenders. Water is life, so we plant our feet in the sand and offer thanks. One morning, the Anishinaabe elder Sharon Day translated her prayer for us: “Great Spirit, Gitchi Manitou, have pity on us.” At her feet was a quilt, a copper bowl of river water, a shell cupping burnt sage. Behind her the river eddied and flowed. “All of creation existed without us,” she explained, “and will exist after us. We are dependent on creation. We’re dependent on the web of life. It is not dependent on us.” Humans are mighty, yes, but also small and helpless, and remembering this is good.
As I launch my latest book about the gifts in writing, The Release: Creativity and Freedom After the Writing is Done, I’ve been pondering what it might mean to bring a posture of humility and an awareness of interdependence into my writing studio. Life is a gift. Every breath is a gift, as are our bodies, however broken, as is the miraculously spinning planet. We have not earned life, nor have we generated it, although we are responsible for what we do with it. Likewise with the creative impulse; it originates in a source beyond our own agency or ego, and, once we’re done making, slips around the corner where we can’t see the consequences. We writers are so dependent! Remembering this is good.
When I talk about the gifts in writing, I don’t mean a “special gift” like talent or genius bestowed on the lucky few. I mean the gifts that appear in every dimension of the writing process: how the books we’ve read since childhood whisper in our subconscious; how our ancestors nudge us to heal intergenerational wounds; how our teachers, the word processor developers, the babysitters, the thesaurus compilers, not to mention our writing groups and readers, support us—as do the trees that become the our paper, as do the strangers who maintain the internet’s infrastructure or the publishing industry, as do infinite others. Our drive, stamina, curiosity, and bravery are hard-earned, perhaps, but also sourced from an unnamed wellspring. Of course, we labor, sweat, exercise agency, and make something. But even our capacity for toil is a gift. “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me,” D. H. Lawrence sang. What about inspiration, literally meaning breathed upon? What about spirit?
If humans are dependent on creation, we creators are especially so. I’m curious about how writers’ relationship to writing could change if we remember this. What would happen if we recognized the wondrous movement of gifts in and through our effort? What if we responded, not with blithe dismissal or ambition or a burdened sense of responsibility, but with gratitude?
I’m afraid that the insidious values of American capitalism have snaked their way into writers’ psyches. We think we’ve pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps: I wrote this! We presume ownership—this is MY creation!—and ownership’s consequent entitlement—I deserve recognition and reward for my labor! We believe product is all and process serves product. When I asked a dear friend why she wasn’t writing the book she longed to write, she answered, “But what would I do with it?” Without a reliable, productive outcome, she aborted the entire process. We assume only attention or money or results validate our efforts.
No wonder writing feels hard and so many writers abandon it. The initial love that ignited us, for language, for discovery, for story or beauty or healing, has been steamrolled by the expectation of an external, measurable result.
These days I dismantle the destructive messages that insinuate their way into my psyche by following the gift culture teachings of Indigenous women. Robin Wall Kimmerer is my favorite. Essayist, environmental biologist, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer offers a model of gift economy in the native serviceberry, which competes with surrounding trees for light, water, and nitrogen while also lifting up fruit to the birds, who then digest and scatter the seeds. “Security is ensured by nurturing the bonds of reciprocity,” she observes. Referencing the story of an anthropologist who was puzzled when a successful hunter held a feast for his village rather than preserving the meat for the long winter, Kimmerer says, “You can store your meat in your own pantry or in the belly of your brother. Both have the result of keeping hunger at bay but with very different consequences.”
Kimmerer’s story highlights the power of orienting ourselves to the gift. True wealth and security come not from an illusion of self-sufficiency but from the quality of our relationships. Yes, Kimmerer continues, the farmer who shares her serviceberries with the neighbors despite her loss in profit, and even the serviceberry itself putting energy into fruit for the birds, “have to pay the bills and are part of the market economy. But with every commodity traded, they add something that cannot be commodified and is therefore even more valuable.” This added quality—gratitude, respect, meaningful connection, love—is what makes berries a gift. “To name the world as gift is to feel one’s membership in the web of reciprocity,” Kimmerer writes. “It makes you happy, and it makes you accountable.”
Of course, to enter this web of reciprocity, we have to recognize our interdependence. At my writing desk these days, I practice noticing how much of what transpires on the page is not me. Sure, I contribute. But everything I do happens in relationship. I rely on others, seen and unseen, dead and alive, human and nonhuman, the words emerging through me from this stream of connections. Whenever I catch myself fretting about the quality of my prose or whether it will impact any readers, I reorient my heart to these gifts. Gratitude doesn’t always come naturally. Who feels grateful for feedback that revision is necessary? Or for yet another rejection letter? But the practice of gratitude shifts my attention, away from my bruised ego to the gift moving, subtly and surely, in my writing. Gratitude nurtures my relationship with an invisible stream of gifts. It keeps my heart aligned to the source of life.
What if we writers began each writing session by sinking our toes into the sands of humility? What if we looked out over inspiration’s river, flowing beside, in, and through us, and paused in gratitude? We are dependent on the web of creation. Remembering this is good.