A brilliant
review titled
Keep the Channel Open by the
poet Jared
Carter of a biography of Martha
Graham by Agnes de Mille is on his excellent
new blog on books and
literature: Rushing
the Growler . His review
covers so much ground, so profoundly,
that it's enough for me even if I never
read de Mille's book. I was never a fan
of Martha Graham but the quote below
(from advice Martha gave to her friend
Agnes when the latter was plagued by
self-doubt) is so inspirational that
I'm going to put it up on the wall where
I can see it daily:
There is a vitality,
a life force, an energy, a quickening
that is translated through you into action,
and because there is only one of you
in all of time, this expression is unique.
And if you block it, it will never exist
through any other medium and it will
be lost. The world will not have it.
It is not your business to determine
how good it is nor how valuable nor how
it compares with other expressions. It
is your business to keep it yours clearly
and directly, to keep the channel open.
You do not even have to believe in yourself
or your work. You have to keep yourself
open and aware to the urges that motivate
you. Keep the channel open. As for you,
Agnes, you have a peculiar and unusual
gift, and you have so far used about
one third of your talent.
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The thoughtful comments to the last
post here and at my main blog are forcing me to look further into this murky topic.
Having established that what my own particular guilt-harpy
keeps harping about is that I'm guilty of Squandering
My Gifts and Not
Living Up to My Potential the logical next question is:
what exactly are these gifts or potential which I'm supposedly
not living up to? Do they exist at all or are they yet another
mirage? Another false concept plugged into my brain by the
competitive, egocentric, celebrity-obsessed culture we live
in?
Well, you know, maybe.
But I don't think so. What I think, what I know gut-wise,
is that I really do have gifts I'm not using. It's not
vanity or arrogance to say so because gifts are gifts
and the real reason why the exasperating little
guilt-bug keeps buzzing around me is because it knows that
I know that I'm built to fly but settle for crawling - I
crawl very well but that ain't flying - and I'm designed
to burn bright but settle for flickering, a flicker flicker
here, a flicker there.
You may say ah, but that's what we
are: crawling, flickering creatures, doing our best against
all the odds. Well if that's what you'll say, I'll have to
disagree. Because what I really know down in my deepest
of deep guts is that many of us have a locked cellar full
of unused gifts - or maybe just one unused gift. It's not
a thing, not even a talent, but a degree of feeling. It
doesn't necessarily mean achievement or success in worldly
terms. It means being willing to risk flying, Icarus-like.
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