The art that matters to us -- which moves the heart, or revives the soul,or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience -- that work is recieved by us as a gift is received . . . .The exploitation of the arts which we find in the twentieth century is without precedent. The particular manner in which radio, television, the movies and the recording industry have commercialized song and drama is wholly new . . . . I still believe that the primary commerce of art is a gift exchange, that unless the work is the realization of the artist's gift and we the audience can feel the gift it carries, there is no art . . . (Lewis Hyde, The Gift)

There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one's gift to those one loves most. . . . The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up . (May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude)

 

Hunting and gathering, sewing and reaping, the ancestors died that I might live. They killed with respect for their brother and sister animals, and knew that power was in the flesh they ate; it was the body and blood that gave them life eternal. They knew their mother, whose body they furrowed to plant their food; it was sacred, and the source of all life, the source to which they would return when they died. Magic and mystery are the names we have come to give to their respective ways of imagining the world. But there is magic in mystery and mystery in magic. The bread and wine become the body and blood, the body and blood the bread and wine. Faced with life and death, and their knowledge of it, they sang life in the face of death. I seek to sing with them and of them. Hear first this.

SONG.