A Creators’ Bill of Rights and Responsibilities

by lori | Jun 5, 2017 | Creating, Culture, Essays, Unapologetically Odd, Writing

1. Right to lose our way often. Creators have the right to wander, wend, and get lost as often as possible. To support each other in being lost, we listen first and at least as twice as long as we speak, and we share each other’s work and stories with the world. If we are asked to speak by another creator or world citizen who is struggling with being lost (not all do), we offer clues—not answers—as gifts for each other to find. Answers aren’t as interesting or useful as clues. Most days. We deeply love getting lost, finding our way, and offering clues for other wanders to find.
2. Right to play. Creators can play whenever, wherever, however, and with whomever we choose, as long as we accept the responsibility to 1) invite all those that we impact to join us and 2) change the game together, on the fly, to suit the players and neighbors present with us.[1] As Bernie says, “The players are more important than the game.” Earthlings deeply love play and improvisation and imagination and experimenting. All our children know this.
3. Right to bask within difference. Creators are encouraged and supported in celebrating the different, the odd, the strange, the weird, the curious, the queer, the unexplainable, the horrible, the unshaken wonder within, and the outcast within ourselves and each other. We creators succeed in life in direct proportion to our ever-expanding and contracting ability to do this, and most of us set up daily and weekly rituals to practice doing just this. We deeply love curiosity and difference and outcasts and oddness, because we are all of that. As we stay with it, together, we come to love all of it. All of us.
4. Right to trust humanity. Creators assume the best of humans and offer the benefit of the doubt to other humans without fear of being lied to, injured, taken advantage of, or killed. When we find that we cannot do this on our own, then we ask for help, accept help, and we help each other find people among whom we can try again. And we keep on practicing. We deeply love feeling safe in the presence of other human beings—particularly with those remarkably different from us—because this helps us feel safe when we’re alone and when we create and more confident and humble wherever we go.
5. Right to be yourself and be celebrated. Earthlings are celebrated for being here, and being exactly who we are, from birth to death and in all the spaces in between. This is true whether we can see it and feel it yet or not and whether the humans physically present around us opt to participate or not. Trees, birds, soil, wind, stars, ancestors, and elders, for example, celebrate us all. When we aren’t able to be ourselves and feel celebrated, we tend to move and go get lost for a while. Or, to celebrate others to learn celebration skills. We deeply love to celebrate and be celebrated. Celebration eases the pain of loss, loneliness, illness, and death that are part of this beautiful life too. We deeply love all forms of celebration, even those that look and sound nothing like our own, and we love finding new holidays and learning new ways to celebrate.
6. Right to receive an almost overwhelming amount of help from the place you live. Creators listen to the voice of a whole place before taking action. This means listening to the sounds and beings that your ears can hear when you’re outside, ideally walking or sitting on the ground, or inside with several windows open. For example, to change your part of town, listen to the people who show up; the birds, insects, and animals that show up; the sounds of the wind, plants, buildings, bodies of water, stars, vehicles, music, and any other sounds present; the ancestors now part of the ground and the sky; and then listen to the interactions between these things. Strive to be connected enough to learn from other whole places and beings taking or considering similar action. We deeply love this place we call home. She loves us back: which we can only figure out fully when we slow down and listen fully.
7. Right to be a complete mess. It is not uncommon to see creators making complete fools of ourselves. We learn to proudly, openly share our works in progress, work that didn’t quite work, work that REALLY didn’t work, and work we’re stuck on and cannot proceed further on without help. We visibly ask for forgiveness when our fear accidentally hurts others. Proudly, openly ask for other perspectives and help. Proudly, openly share our difficulties, and our gifts, with our world, no matter how different or painful or odd they seem to ourselves or others. Proudly, openly weep and laugh. We deeply love earthlings, being earthlings, and all the messiness that attends us. Feeling broken? Emotional? Completely lost? Bring it on, baby! Creators can handle the mess because we love the mess and share the load as friends and community. We learn young here: there is so much art within the mess!
8. Right to forgiveness. Creators make mistakes, try again, make amends, and receive forgiveness everywhere we go. We love spending time with new people and trying new things: both result in mistakes being made. Mistakes are part of our process. We learn to love being wrong or partly wrong as much as we love being right, because we—and those touched by our work and our selves—learn more (or perhaps we just remember better and longer?) when we’re wrong than when we’re right. This wouldn’t be possible without forgiveness and strong, generous, connected, wise, and wildly different communities. We deeply love living in a world so committed to experimenting, learning, growing, community, celebration of difference, and forgiveness.
9. Right to not feel the need to receive apologies. Creators rarely expect others to apologize for being themselves, because we have the ability to move away (and we love to move), to imagine ourselves as others (and we love to imagine), and to create and believe rich, complex back stories (and we love to create). See #5. Creators prefer to focus on our creations and ourselves—looking inward to ourselves, our muses, our work, our nature (hello tree, my old friend), and our creator groups for solace and sense-making most days. We also know that we’ll mess up on this one because we’re human (fortunately, see #6, #7, and #8). Humans have expectations of others, and it often takes much of an individual lifetime of practice to let go of that need. Plants, animals, birds, insects, plants, stars, and soil are all far better at this one. Watch and listen to them to learn this.[2] To show our respect for world citizens who differ from us on this, we apologize to those who need our apologies to feel whole. We seek to learn from those who differ from us on this.
10. Right of shared space and home space. Creators respect our shared spaces, including the field of imagination, by treating them as our home: welcoming, comfortable, natural, and sacred within their messiness. Over time, we tend to blend what we believe to be shared (what citizens call public) space—blurring boundaries every chance we get—and what we believe to be home (what citizens call private) space for ourselves. And even when they overlap entirely, we honor both. We respect other people’s private space as private and our own need sometimes to return home. Just because we often experience this whole planet and universe as shared, and also as home, doesn’t mean all other earthlings can, or do, or want to, or even that we want to all the time. See #16 and #17. We deeply love our shared space and home spaces.
11. Right to pilot your own friend ship. Creator friendships cross all imagined boundaries and last beyond individual lifetimes. Creators don’t attempt to be whole on their own (most days) and instead draw friends to them whose ways of being and skills and talents and lifestyles and struggles complement and stretch/expand their own. With certain people, our mutual energy expands exponentially. These are the friends we typically create with. Creation requires ample energy, so we move away from people when an energy drain is felt—even away from people we love, aware that movement back is always a possibility. Today, many of us are accustomed to being told that this way of being is wrong, so it’s become a right of passage into maturity for a creator to find peace with being who they are and contentment within being considered wrong by many world citizens. Friendships teach us to honor all energy. We deeply love friendships.
12. Responsibility to own and evolve our own labels and titles. Creators have a right to experience ourselves as creators and co-creators instead of as a consumer, user, customer, planet destroyer, deplorable, snowflake, troll, wuss, woo woo, or any other lame-ass label human fear tries to force onto us. And. We have the responsibility to visibly live the labels and titles that we create. For example, creators create, barter, trade, swap, repurpose, recycle, grow, make, share, patch, mend, fix, gift, learn to love the old and the broken, forage, find, and live without what we don’t really need anyway, first. Then, we create some more for good measure. Only then do we buy. When we buy, we respect the seasons, respect the place we live, respect the earthlings around us, respect our bodies, and give thanks for what we’ve purchased and to all the makers who made it possible. As we can, we buy and sell with people who live nearby, with kind people, and directly with other creators, makers, artists, neighbors, small farmers, and other close community members who could use our support. Before we buy physical goods from a long distance, creators get a second opinion: we talk to an old tree or old animal first. We listen. If the tree/animal thinks it’s a good idea, then we proceed. Sometimes we get a second tree or animal’s opinion, but usually just for the fun of it. When our labels and titles lose energy, we have the responsibility to experiment, change, and create new ones as visibly as possible. Because we can, and so many others can’t, we accept this responsibility gratefully and we take it seriously in the way a two-year-old takes a toy seriously.
13. Responsibility to walk in wonder, silliness, and gratitude. Earthlings are living, breathing, adorable, fluffy balls of gratitude, wonder, and silliness when we’re are born. Creators become more so as we gain experience and as we age. We are utterly surrounded by these things as we enter, as we walk in, and as we leave this world. We deeply love gratitude, wonder, and silliness—at all stages of life. Our responsibility is to learn how to stay with these core earthling traits no matter what (animals, creator ancestors, children, and true human elders are the ones to watch) and then to demonstrate them to others, particularly when people’s lives and worlds are falling apart.
14. Responsibility of bees to make honey. Creators make things, grow things, and create their art or craft as if the whole world depended on it and as if their whole self does. We have the right to create/make/grow without explanation or apology for who we are, when we listen to the whole place we’re in and feel at our core that being who we really are is vitally important—even when we don’t know why yet (which, frankly, is most of the time). Deeply listening humans can trust their intuition. We are allowed to tell anyone who questions our value, including ourselves, to walk out into a field or the woods, find a bee hive, and talk directly to the bees about why they make honey. The bees will explain it better. We deeply love to make, grow, and create and to share our creations with others. That deep love of creation, and others, is enough. As with all these rights, to fully claim this right as our own, creators must experience this right as an innate right of all earthlings, not just humans. And of all world citizens, not just creators.
15. Responsibility to work on your own—and walk away from others’—total bullshit. We stay present, listen, fight fairly, and fight for each other, instead of against one another. If this is our thing to work on, this is what we do. We are far too connected, and practical, for that work-against-each-other bullshit that some world citizen humans try. For creators, fighting against each other means fighting against ourselves—this flat out doesn’t work for creators. Ask literally any creator ancestor living or dead, human, plant, insect, or animal. Fighting yourself can be a teacher, yes. And still it’s one that you have to let go of to create interesting, new, or curiosity peaking work. Becoming a creator means letting go of the violence and the silencing within us in favor of creating. Again and again and again: this is a life-long daily practice. Humans who believe and do otherwise—who believe in violence and silencing as useful answers—are free to leave our presence as they wish: with our blessings. And we are free to leave their presence: as groups and as individuals. We commit to staying when we can stay—when it is our fight to fight—and to moving away or asking for more help before contempt builds a nest and sets up home within us. We move to regroup and rest and learn and grow and often because we see that it’s not our fight to fight to fight anymore or that with the help of others a fight can be reimagined into a spark and into flow. Those who allow violence and silencing of others to grow and fester within themselves cannot be recognized as leaders by creators. The violence and the silencing plugs their ears so they can’t hear the whole place that they’re in. Cut off from the world herself, they become isolated, predictable, and unable to move in interesting new ways, let alone in wise old ways, with others. Don’t be that guy. 😉 And when you are, forgive yourself, ask for forgiveness, and move on together.
16. Right to cede your power to a government or organization and still be respected and loved. At the moment, world citizens who don’t claim these inalienable creators’ rights for themselves and their closest others—and who don’t own the responsibilities that attend this much freedom—cede their innate power to their national and state government constitutions and to their employers’ Human Resources policies. Creators who do accept these rights have the responsibility to treat world citizens with kindness and respect even when we don’t receive it in return. Especially when we don’t receive it in return. Because we don’t need to receive kindness and respect to have it—it lives within our communities, our work, our selves, and our home neighborhood, planet, and universe. Some believe that our art is for world citizens more than it is for ourselves. Whether that’s true for you or not (it doesn’t have to be), respecting the place we live means respecting those around us who don’t live, love, work, move, act, think, and worship like we do. We deeply love this place we live, which means loving all people here with us, even those who piss us off to no end, and not just other creators. Respect and kindness is how we demonstrate our love of this place. Many of us most enjoy the presence of other creators, because they allow us to be our whole weird and wild selves. The freest creators among us—elder creators—learn how to learn as much from world citizens who aren’t creators as those who are. Fully free creators can find the creator, and the citizen, in all earthlings. And love us all.
17. Right to impact the whole world in a positive, lasting way. When we fully enjoy these rights ourselves, we dedicate our lives and our work to supporting those who want to, but can’t, fully enjoy them yet. We deeply love unleashing new creators and new work on the world. If we seek to impact the whole world in a positive way, then this is the direction we creators take. It’s not just about creating new work. Creators create more creators. Creator groups create more creator groups. Creator communities create more creator communities. Now try saying or singing that fast three times. 😉
18. Responsibility to learn from everyone. This doesn’t mean you have to listen to everyone: we learn a lot by reflecting on who we listen to, who we don’t listen to, and why. This instead reflects the fact that creators can cross more imagined boundaries than other world citizens because of our deep love of doing so. We know that we are as likely to make our next vital connection and breakthrough talking with the woman driving the bus in The Netherlands or dancing with the man who washes dishes in Nigeria or playing with the local street musician on the road side as we are by talking to the tuxedo-wearing keynote speaker at a prestigious event or putting a resume into the hands of “the right people.” Those who can cross old, imagined boundaries to learn have a responsibility to do so. When we do, we open new possibility doors in our world. Creators deeply love the possibility of learning something new, or finding nuance within the known, from everyone.
19. Right to receive what we need. From ourselves. Creators don’t require others’ minds to be open, for example, before moving forward. The question we typically ask ourselves is this: “Is my mind open?” We don’t require others to be creative, for example, either. Instead we ask ourselves: “Am I being as creative as I can be right now?” This tendency of ours supports internally felt freedom regardless of where we are or who we are or what is happening. That said, our experience of “self” is fluid. We are co-creators. Our self might be an individual, a small group, a community, a forest, flock of birds, or an ocean, for example, at any given point. Because the limits of our imagination rarely stop at our individual selves, our rights—and the responsibilities of deep listening, deep kindness, deep fun, and deep respect—rarely stop at our individual selves. Huh. Wow. This is so cool! Damn it feels good to be a creator.
20. Responsibility to move through ideas and beliefs as a community and to let go of things—including our old ideas and selves—when they no longer serve the greater good. Without our creators’ love of doing this, and our love of continuing to learn to do this better with friends and community members, future humanity will be uniform, dry, depressed, and dull as shit. Not that I believe that will happen. Not with Mother Earth at our backs and more people waking up every day now. Just be aware that doing this work often pisses off other creators, not only other world citizens. Evolving beliefs and ideas and selves isn’t easy for most humans. At this moment. But that’s going to change in this century. Watch for it. Practice it. Dance it. Paint it. Draw it. Play it. And you’ll see.

After 20. This space has been intentionally blank for the purposes of creation. Please finish this list for your community, as often as is needed by the community as a whole…

[1] This is known as the Bernie DeKoven Principle.

[2] If you’re a creator committed to a particular human, social justice, or environmental cause, partner with a few world citizens who you create energy with and who don’t define themselves primarily as creators like you do—people interested in (and who are dedicating their lives and careers to) social amends, conflict resolution, pulling forth awareness or heart-felt apologies, and social or environmental justice. Creators aren’t experts on justice: we’re experts at falling deeply in love with the world/ourselves/simply what is. So we need to partner with world citizens such as wonderful and open-minded attorneys, judges, social workers, cops, activists, educators, conflict specialists, librarians, community-center employees, scientists, government employees, spiritual directors, and even the best politicians—not just animals, birds, fish, and trees—to foster change in human culture if we want to witness culture changes in our lifetimes. Well-informed citizens like these tend to have strong answers and cross-community connections. Creators tend to ask new and forgotten questions and arrive with a presence, and with work, that helps citizens imagine themselves as part of something larger than they previously imagined. Partnering with these people is a good match, because we teach each other and help each other not take ourselves too seriously. We remind each other of our core-deep curiosity and core-deep abilities to shift, reimagine, and play.