It’s the season of giving and joy, but what does it mean for us to give and how do we feel about it?

It surely is a form of self-actualization and agreeable social behavior from one hand. We were all raised to give and to share from our earliest childhood in our families. Those forms of giving could be sometimes regarded as broad or restricted being socially, culturally or anthropologically shaped, specified, defined to some particular form, season or even the sense and immediate purpose of giving or its more transcendent reflection. In this way giving is considered to be more than simple sharing and it rises among the first human actions reflecting the awareness of the God, as giving known as the sacrifice of food, animal or even other human for the sake of other projected entities, values and things – the future, the crops, success in war or some area of life or as a whole. It may be said that the broadest connotation of giving include the act of giving as the expression of humble service or, what’s the most important, keeping through the generations the continuity of the recognizable pattern of the ritual alive, even if keeping at the same time reasons for it mystically hidden from any further explanations to human mind.

In our individual and more ordinary observations of the act of giving, if it is not matter just of politeness and mere affectionless duty, it is always connected with the personal feeling of joy and happiness of those ones to whom our gifts are dedicated spreading on ourselves through the anticipation connecting us to that moment in time when the gifts will be received, the packages opened and communication that was temped inside the gift revealed to flow freely and directly between the two who are exchanging gifts. The joy of the others, of those ones that we want to make feel happy and loved, at least for that moment, is what makes us so happy in searching, creating, preparing and even in packaging our gifts, the joy that we share with them in advance, feeling it as our personal or mutually shared. It’s making us not only think of those ones who we love and want to surprise by a gift, but also to experience in our minds fully all the other moments of sharing for so many times before in all their sweetness, feeling of happiness, fulfillment and completion of some very important deed, which is in fact very simple. Maybe that is why the “art of giving” is so rewarding in any place of the world, any epoch, any age?

Thinking of giving as the form of the art and about the art as one of the forms of eternal giving I can’t help feeling that all art started from, and might still be considered as driven by, some form of transcending or obvious but in any case intensely deep dedication, the dedication to give and share something with someone, and to show something to someone, in most cases that “something” is revealed to the eye of its own creator only after the work is accomplished, but all the time giving to its creator, in each of the phases of its completion, the strong impression of living being having been created to give or witness life itself. If individual giving we could mostly associate with sharing the feeling of Love in its richest variations, the artistic way of giving could possibly be described as the sharing of Life in its most exciting, calming, abstract or realistic, but in any case versatile meaning. The form of pro-creation of life by each artistic act is that giving, and that’s what it gives to its author in return.

The nature has its cycles of giving at least those we have learned t recognize so far, being the youngest species on our planet, still behaving as the babies in the dawn of civilization we adore so easily as we misuse, despise or even sometimes are disguised with not much understanding of those what we usually name as “the gifts of the nature”. The old rituals civilizations celebrating the season of the ripe fruit, or harvest time, the traditional poetry speaking of the beauty of the cherries in full bloom trough some form of human expression are getting so ephemeral and unrecognized today. Mostly they can appear in the form of the action, ecology movement or individual artistic inclination, only surviving in forms of traditional holidays as Thanksgiving in America and some others known in other cultures. Nonetheless, the nature teaches us about giving and sharing, about the inevitability of the cycles of growth and decline following the laws of mutual exchange, co-dependency and fight for survival. But what have we learnt so far?

Finally, there is a form of giving which is associated to or derived from the feeling of mercy and which is mostly related with the spirit of Christmas, when growing activities of charities become hectic highlighting the impossibility of putting all our humanitarian impulses in one season, so we often find to ask ourselves could the gifts for poor would be distributed equally through the course of the year? In those moments, separating from the things that we loved, we can’t help feeling sentimental ourselves and thinking how much joy those toys or clothes or books gave to us when we got them first and I believe that our joy travels to the recipient, even unknown one, attached in some form of subtle energy or explicit message to those things that have besides the humanitarian, also high emotional and sentimental value for us. Knowing that somewhere, someone will take and feel it, we give gladly feeling that it is good thing to do from the bottom of our hearts.

Some of creative works published at TIG can find their place also at the BURNING LEAF

"Burning Leaf is a literary website featuring original fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, critical essays, photography and art."

http://euphrates.wpunj.edu/faculty/parrasj/BurningLeaf/BurningLeafMain.html

"John Parras received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Fiction Writing in 2004. He studied Creative Writing at Carnegie-Mellon University and received his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University with the dissertation Modern Poetic Prose: Lyricism, Narrative, and the Social Implications of Genre. He has been the recipient of a Columbia University President's Fellowship, the Pauline B. Adamson Award for Fiction, and the Maurice Robinson Award for Professional Writing.


His critical work has appeared in the Literary Encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, the Filipino Reporter and other publications. Stories and poems of his were published in Salt Hill, CrossConnect, Oasis, the Dominion Review, Fuel, Hanging Loose, Gulf Stream and other literary journals. His novel, Fire on Mount Maggiore, is represented by International Creative Management.


Currently Dr. Parras is an Associate Professor of Critical and Creative Writing in the English Department at William Paterson University, where he helps coordinate the annual Spring Writer's Conference. He can be reached at parrasj@wpunj.edu. "

Some of creative works published at TIG can find their place also at the BURNING LEAF

"Burning Leaf is a literary website featuring original fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, critical essays, photography and art."

http://euphrates.wpunj.edu/faculty/parrasj/BurningLeaf/BurningLeafMain.html

"John Parras received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Fiction Writing in 2004. He studied Creative Writing at Carnegie-Mellon University and received his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University with the dissertation Modern Poetic Prose: Lyricism, Narrative, and the Social Implications of Genre. He has been the recipient of a Columbia University President's Fellowship, the Pauline B. Adamson Award for Fiction, and the Maurice Robinson Award for Professional Writing.


His critical work has appeared in the Literary Encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, the Filipino Reporter and other publications. Stories and poems of his were published in Salt Hill, CrossConnect, Oasis, the Dominion Review, Fuel, Hanging Loose, Gulf Stream and other literary journals. His novel, Fire on Mount Maggiore, is represented by International Creative Management.


Currently Dr. Parras is an Associate Professor of Critical and Creative Writing in the English Department at William Paterson University, where he helps coordinate the annual Spring Writer's Conference. He can be reached at parrasj@wpunj.edu. "