It would seem as if it were a very difficult thing to explain in words, but when I stood before my class of even the smallest and poorest children and said: 'Listen to the music with your soul. Now, while listening, do you not feel an inner self awakening deep within you -- that it is by its strength that your head is lifted, that your arms are raised, that you are walking slowly toward the light?' they understood. This awakening is the first step in the dance, as I conceive it.
-- Isadora Duncan
A woman is singing in the valley. The shadows falling blot her out, but her song spreads over the fields. . . .
Her song, as pure as water filled with light, cleanses the plain and rinses the mean air of day in which men hate. From the throat of the woman who keeps on singing, day rises nobly evaporating toward the stars.
-- Gabriela Mistral (translation by Langston Hughes)
Singing is breath that is larger than yourself, so it joins you with space, with community, with other realms and our deepest inside places. You are joining your strand to everyone else's, weaving something with the whole, and this extends the community outward into a force bigger than itself.
-- Ann Lamott
