Art is a Basic Need

• DateJune 5, 2014
• AuthorMary Heather
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• Discussion1 Comment

So.  The Nature of Words, the organization to which I’ve given a significant amount of my time and attention — especially over the past eighteen months — is closing its doors.

Understated as it may sound, I’m sad.  We’re all sad, even though we are lucky to have a willing recipient (the Deschutes Public Library) to take some of NOW’s creative writing programs and carry them forward within their own program structure, to align with their own strategic goals.  Even with what I truly believe is an important and beneficial consolidation, I’m still feeling sad.  Because like it or not, NOW’s closing doors say something about this community, about what is happening here.

One thing I know for sure is that within this primordial stew of needs and ideas and blood and sweat and money and tears and everything else that exists within a community of passionate people — within this primordial stew, there are usually a few things around which we can coalesce.  For a while, at least when I first moved here, I thought that one of those organizing principles in Bend was the idea that art is a basic need.  That creative self expression is as necessary to human life as air, as food, as water.   Ask the residents of The Shepherd’s House homeless shelter, for whom The Nature of Words provided creative writing residencies as part of their healing and empowerment process.  I think they might agree.

But recently, I can’t help but wonder whether people do believe that art is a basic need.  I can’t help but notice that this feels more like a stressed ecosystem — where the culture part of our habitat is being leached to such a degree that a student’s first exposure to the personal essay might be on a college application.  Or that the occasional instruction of “Art-in-a-Box” at school has become an acceptable form of art education.  This cannot be the new standard for exploring creativity.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the parent volunteers who teach it, but I have to confess: Art-in-a-Box as a concept makes me die a little inside.

Here’s the thing: art is what connects us as human beings.  The arts are the means by which we inhabit one another’s experiences.  We become more human when we share our stories — and the truth is, as Brian Doyle would say, stories are our food.  Whether they’re written stories, spoken stories, painted, sculpted, and acted stories, or stories that are musically composed.  Culture is part of our habitat.  A basic need.  Necessary for us to thrive.

These needs are provided by a great many local organizations — The Nature of Words was among them, and is again lucky to have a partner who is capable of continuing to meet that need.  But what about the others?  What would happen if they went away?  How would we all get fed?

I think it’s easy for us to become complacent about the importance of the arts — until we’ve suffered a loss that reminds us of that particular nutritional need.  Example: how many Facebook posts of Dr. Maya Angelou did you read upon her recent passing?  And what would our habitat be like if she hadn’t shared her words?

I hope the vacancy left by The Nature of Words will be felt in this community, and that it will motivate all of us to ask ourselves how much we value our arts and culture organizations.  Not just appreciate, but value.  The distinction is important.

Photo credit: World of Paris Blog, http://worldofparis.wordpress.com/tag/art-is-a-basic-need/

About Mary Heather

I am an East-coaster and a West-coaster. I am an academic and a creative spirit. I am an environmental scientist who always wanted to write, and a writer with a nagging nostalgia for the complexities of environmental science. Above all, I am a mother — so whether I’m writing about the natural world, family, or place, I like to consider my work as environmental advocacy in the broadest sense.