It’s our human nature to be a maker

“I’m not creative like you are…”

Oh, how I can count the times that I’ve heard these words spoken to me.

And it hurts me to think of all the women walking around this Earth, telling themselves they’re not creative.

And it’s simply not true.

We are all creative. It’s our human nature to be creative. It’s our human nature to be a maker.

Watch on YouTube

We’ve simply forgotten this, lost sight of it. As our world became industrialized and commercialized. As making and producing got relegated to companies and corporations. As we went to work for them, specializing in one subtask in the larger line of production.

As we redefined what it meant to be creative, consigning creativity to the select few, natural-born artists and creatives – those who had enough skill, could offer enough value on their own to get paid for their creative work. Creative specialists.

But what did creativity mean to those who came before? Did the idea of creativity even exist? Or was it simply a way of life?

Back to the days when we hunted and gathered or produced our own food, prepared our own meals, made our own clothes, concocted our own medicines, received babies with our very own hands, and recorded our own experiences in the form of art and language. Making and producing were what we did to live.

And we don’t have to go back to those days. Not specifically. But we also don’t have to live in this way where everything is made for us, produced for us, where we’ve forgotten what it’s like to work with our hands, to provide for ourselves – outside of the monetary sense.

We get to remember the tasks that we use to use our hands for. After all, we’re all just a bunch of fucking animals. What sets us apart from other mammals is a brain that can process more complex ideas, communicate those ideas with art and language, and the hands – the fucking hands to create what we want to create!

We get to find our sacred work, what we’re called to create, not for money, but because it gives meaning to our life, gives us a sense of purpose, of sovereignty, of what it means to be a human being in this body and on this earth. We get to choose how that integrates into our life – whether we choose it as a paid profession or whether we choose it as how we seek meaning as a human being.

We get to take back our human nature as makers and producers from the companies and corporations that don’t have our best interest in mind, as workers or as consumers, that don’t have Mother Earth’s best interest in mind. We don’t have to take it all back from them ourselves. We get to choose what’s ours to make. What’s ours to produce. And that is how we reclaim our creativity. With our minds, with our hands, and by making what only we can make as human beings.

If you were inspired by this post, sign up for our Tend the Fire weekly ritual newsletter to keep the fire alive: https://www.thehouseoflostarts.com/tend-the-fire-sign-up/.