Held.

The Gift of Giving and Receiving.

What sustains us is not only what we hold, but what allows us to be held.

“Until we can receive with an open heart, we are never really giving with an open heart.”

(Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection)

There are weeks when life seems to give us everything at once.

Celebrations and responsibilities. Joy and difficult conversations. Opportunities arriving and possibilities departing.

An evening dancing among the trees, celebrating love and the simple pleasure of being alive.

An early morning shared with someone we love. The discipline of caring for our bodies. Breakfast together before the world begins asking for our attention.

Conversations that deepen our sense of belonging. Others that ask us to remember what we stand for, what we are prepared to give, and what we must sometimes refuse.

Through it all, life keeps offering its gifts.

Some we recognise immediately, wrapped in joy. Others are harder to receive, arriving through uncertainty, disappointment, or the discomfort of speaking truths we would rather avoid.

Yet what makes something a gift?

In The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer invites us to remember a different understanding of abundance.

The berries nourish the birds. The birds carry the seeds onward. What sustains one life also helps sustain another.

An abundance that flows through relationships of reciprocity, rather than being measured solely by what we accumulate.

A gift received becomes an invitation to respond.

Not because we owe a debt that must be settled, but because we belong to something larger than ourselves.

And perhaps this is where responsibility begins.

Not in what we own, what we achieve, or even what we know, but in how we respond to what has been entrusted to our care.

We are born into relationships. Sustained by others. Nourished by gifts we could never have created for ourselves.

And so, we serve.

Sometimes through generosity.

Sometimes through discipline.

Sometimes through the courage to say no.

But service also asks something more difficult.

To recognise when our giving has become another way of controlling.

When our responsibility has become an inability to surrender.

When the hands that have learned to hold everything have forgotten how to open.

Perhaps the gift is not only what we offer, but also what we allow ourselves to receive.

As another week approaches its end, beneath the noise, I hear an invitation.

To return to the circle.

To soften.

To remember that even those who spend their lives holding others need to be held.

Un apapacho al alma.

The gift keeps moving.

And we belong to the circle, not because we possess what passes through our hands, but because we participate in its giving and receiving.

May we notice the abundance flowing through our lives.

May those who serve also learn to be served.

May those who hold allow themselves to be held.

Yo lo Creo / I believe, and so it is.