Martha Graham:
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.
Cited by Rosamund and Ben Zander in The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life. The inspired giver, dancer, poet is but the channel kept open. The gift can be measured and managed up to a point, but it has its own life, an urgency. In that spirit Wm. Blake wrote, "The cistern contains, the fountain overflows." Among gift advisors, the poet H. Peter Karoff well understood philanthropy as an art form, as private as art and as public. So, too, Amy Kass in her Giving Well, Doing Good: Readings for Thoughtful Philanthropists, put the three graces on the cover. "It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares...." How stange Martha Graham's words sound in the world of metrics, but not that of meter, or measured dance steps.
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