True Gifts

I was once asked, “What are your true gifts?” I responded by saying that we are all gifted beyond measure.

Here are excerpts from some fine essays that express it so well:

“…the body, the physical body we all have, is the material, corresponding to the painter’s canvas, the sculptor’s wood or stone or clay, the musician’s violin or flute, the singer’s vocal cords. And everything that is attached to the body, such as the hands, the feet, the trunk of the body, the head, the viscera, the nerves, the cells, thoughts, feelings, senses—everything, indeed, that goes to make up the whole personality—is both the material on which and the instruments with which the person molds his creative genius into conduct, into behavior, into all forms of action, indeed to life itself.”
- D.T. Suzuki

“To be creative does not mean that we must paint pictures or write poems and become famous. That is not creativeness - it is merely the capacity to express an idea, which the public applauds or disregards. Capacity and creativeness should not be confused. Capacity is not creativeness. Creativeness is quite a different state of being, is it not? It is a state in which the self is absent, in which the mind is no longer a focus of our experiences, our ambitions, our pursuits and our desires. Creativeness is not a continuous state, it is new from moment to moment, it is a movement in which there is not the `me', the `mine', in which the thought is not focused on any particular experience, ambition, achievement, purpose and motive. It is only when the self is not that there is creativeness - that state of being in which alone there can be reality, the creator of all things. But that state cannot be conceived or imagined, it cannot be formulated or copied, it cannot be attained through any system, through any philosophy, through any discipline; on the contrary, it comes into being only through understanding the total process of oneself.”
-J Krishnamurti

“How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god?”
- Alan Watts

Gifted

I cannot grow an ambrosial garden,
But I take time to smell the fragrant flower.

I could not master a musical instrument,
But divine sounds I hear each day, every hour.

I tried and failed at becoming a healer,
But I so fully feel all that I touch.

I never learned to be a gourmet chef,
But I savor food and fine wine oh, so much.

And I could never paint or draw worth a damn.
See the art God has sculpted!

How gifted I am. *

* From The Wonderful Whimsy of Haz