Learn to Receive
A dear friend learned I was taking weaving classes—it has been a lifelong dream of mine to weave—and she gave me her loom. But not just any loom. A big, amazing, floor loom that I could never afford on my own. “I want to pass it along to you,” she said. I am unsure if she understood what a gift this really was, that it touched a deep longing I had been sitting with for most of my life.
When I often traveled internationally years ago with my job, I sought out textile artists wherever I went, to support their work, to touch the work they had done, to imagine a day when I might do that myself. Several years ago, I contemplated entering a well-known textiles program at a community college about an hour from here to finally address this longing, but in the end, I didn’t because my work had me traveling so much.
I have just started a weaving class at a local heritage guild and was so excited while warping my weft (I’m unsure those are the right terms), that I started dancing as I was doing it, standing in front of a wooden set of pegs on the wall and swaying with every round of the yarn on the pegs. “You are dancing!,” the instructor said as she entered the room. “THIS IS SO EXCITING!” I said in response.
This loom. This act of amazing generosity by my friend Nancy MacDonald stopped me. There is the giving and there is the receiving. I am a much more gracious giver than receiver. Why is that?
Once I was aware of the monetary value of the loom, I tried to convince Nancy to sell it instead. It felt too big, too much, as if I were taking advantage of a gift when she could make money on it. But she offered it willingly. There was nothing for me to do in return but accept it. And use it, to honor the spirit and reality of the gift.
Receiving is often a vulnerable act, even when we have not asked for help. Am I worthy of this gift? Am I able to accept that the giver is a grown-ass adult who wouldn’t have offered if they didn’t want me to accept? Will I prove myself a capable recipient? What if I simply said “thank you” in response without listening to the tiny transactional voice in my head that says, “I need to reciprocate in kind, but I don’t have anything this valuable to give.”
And then I realized that Nancy doesn’t see the world in transactional terms, but in transformational terms, instead. She is a woman who played “fairy” to two little girls for a long time, leaving fairy gifts for them to find without knowing she was the fairy. She creates magic wherever she goes—her garden, in lakes and rivers she derives such joy from, from her fingertips when she is engaged in her massage therapy work. She is the person who saved me when I was in such pain from a pinched nerve that I was crying out and vomiting from the pain. It was Nancy’s touch that healed me. When someone is creating magic in the world, with a spirit of generosity and fairy dust, the very least we can do is accept the magic.
Nancy has made what I call a Strong Offer, an offer without attachment to a story, without strings, and with detachment from the outcome. One of the tenets in my book, Life is a Verb, is “be generous.” If I were writing that book again now, I would add: “be vulnerable enough to accept the magic that is offered to you.”
Nancy, I love you. You are a fairy, a sprite, a most magical human.
