Gifts

I am the friend who will forget your birthday. I hate Christmas shopping. I  forget my own wedding anniversary.  Thankfully, I married a man with a sense of humor and the same  off-kilter understanding of sentiment and ceremony.  So in the traditional sense of gift giving I am an almost total failure.

However, I have learned to be a gracious receiver of gifts. Running a non profit will do that even to the most reluctant gift exchanger such as myself.

And you don’t know where the gifts are coming from and you can’t know how powerful they will be.

And then you learn to share the gifts. You learn to pass them on and pay them forward.

And it’s beautiful.

Today’s gift is a poem.  It came wrapped in a ribbon with a letter about the person who wrote the poem and how that poem saved the sanity of the receiver who paid it forward to us. The poem’s author, as I understand it,didn’t survive. Her life was short and hard and unfair. The gift she left behind is a gift of humanity in a dose not easy to swallow.

I’m paying this forward to everyone who knows what it’s like to be a Square Peg, to feel like a Square Peg, to be raising or loving a Square Peg.  But mostly it’s a tribute to our instructors who know grace and who dare to know that love has nothing to do with pity.