Reclaiming Creativity is essentially a home for my curiosity about creativity. I plan to gather resources I’ve found meaningful and share my musings in the hopes of starting a conversation.

What's in a name? 

Describing our relationship to creativity is not straightforward, so I hunted for a word that was expansive enough. When I saw the etymology of ‘reclaim’, I knew I had found my word.

What does it mean to reclaim? 

early 14c., "call back a hawk to the glove," from Old French reclamer "to call upon, invoke; claim; seduce; to call back a hawk" (12c.) and directly from Latin reclamare "cry out against, contradict, protest, appeal."

The dictionary gives us this definition:

1. Retrieve or recover (something previously lost, given, or paid); obtain the return of.

2. Bring (waste land or land formerly under water) under cultivation.

I love all four of these images and each metaphor yields new layers of insight about how we relate to creativity.

First, the hawk. If you’ve read H is for Hawk you’ll have an easier time empathizing with my delight when I discovered the etymological origins. There is something magical, magnetic and mysterious about the fragile partnership between a human and a wild animal. The falconer must develop and maintain the relationship in a dynamic and delicate balance. This metaphor of creativity as a partnership between humans and a wild life form echoes Elizabeth Gilbert’s discussion in her TED talk of how the ancient Greeks called the “divine attendant spirits of creativity”, daemons.

Second, the protest/ crying out against. The first thing I thought of was the iconic scene from the film Network (1976) where Peter Finch shouts, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!” That society has somehow managed to separate the majority of individuals from their creativity (a kind of mass-intercision), is an outrage. Or at least I experience it as such. Too many of us accept it as ‘just the way things are’, shrug our shoulders and proclaim defeatedly, ‘I’m just not creative’. Inherent in creativity is a kind of protest, a subtext that some aspect of the world is broken or insufficient. Perhaps that’s why oppressive regimes feel the need to imprison poets, and the powers that be need to convince us we’re not creative.

Third, the lost item. We’ve all felt the strangulating horror when we realize we’ve lost something valuable. We might offer rewards to anyone who might help us retrieve the precious item. But the important thing is that it was ours to lose. Creativity is a birthright. No child lacks a creative instinct. Conceiving of creativity as something we simply lost or misplaced along they way holds open the possibility that it might be returned to its rightful home.

Fourth, the wasteland. (cue ominous music) A land where nothing grows. Barren. Desolate. Grey. Inhospitable to life. Pretty much sounds like a life without creativity. The wisdom in this metaphor is that reclaiming a former wasteland requires patience, persistence and possibility perception. If you can’t even envision a future where the desert blooms, it’s hard to even get started. When cultivating land we are in partnership with nature. We have limited control over the outcome and must shift our focus to the integrity of the process. A core element of the creative mindset.

As someone who LOVES metaphors, I knew that reclaim was the right verb with not one but four powerful images embedded within it.

Yet, I faced a final decision: to use the imperative ‘reclaim’ or the gerund ‘reclaiming’. (If you’re a language nerd like me and curious to geek out about the distinction between gerunds and participles you can check this out). Because reclaiming is more of an ongoing continuous process, this decision was straightforward.