Gratitude and the gift exchange are perhaps best expressed by Lewis Hyde in his book The Gift: Imagination andthe Erotic Life of Property (now in its 25th anniversary edition with a new title) and where he wisely tells us:
“[T]he true commerce of art is a gift exchange, and where that commerce can proceed on its own terms we shall be heirs to the fruits of a gift exchange: in this case, to a creative spirit whose fertility is not exhausted in use, to the sense of plenitude which is the mark of all erotic exchange, to a storehouse of works that can serve as agents of transformation, and to a sense of an inhabitable world—an awareness, that is, of our solidarity with whatever we take to be the source of our gifts, be it the community or the race, nature, or the gods.” (pp. 158-9)
On Christmas Eve while I was away, Michael Czyzniewieski, former editor of Mid-American Review and now Story366 gave me an incredible gift that I hope you will check out and where you will find so much more in stories he's discovered and brought alive by giving them a chance to be seen.
Here's a photo of his hand in front of his laptop, holding The Woman Who Never Cooked:
Mike defines what Lewis Hyde so eloquently explains.
I close this with gratitude and hope for all who invent, who try, who leap, despite the failures and losses that so often accompany the risk,
My father’s eyes were brown like mine. I saw them full of light from the sun that angled through the window. I saw the green and yellow—the colors of my mother’s hazel eyes—there inside the brown. I remembered my dream after my mother died. In a haze of yellow light, my mother in a flowered housedress. I couldn’t tell the color of her hair—pure white when she died. But it must be dark—around her face in finger-placed waves, how it was when I could still fit beneath her arm, lean against her curve of breast. Then an empty chair. An elegant, suited man on the sidewalk. My mother, on the stoop of their row house. Her arm raised high in dance position. No one stands inside her hold. She leans to unheard sound. She turns round. A fox-trot circle. My father threads eight-millimeter film through the projector, on the wheel. A home movie. Overexposed. My mother. Like the whiteness of a leafing tree against night sky.
“Why are you crying?” my father said. “This won’t be the last time you see me.”
“It’s what I do. I cry, easily, often.”
“So do I,” he said. “It’s inherited.”