Don’t take it for granted, your capacity to give and receive love.
Do you know what a learned skill it is? To be vulnerable before another? To accept (wholly) the tangled heap of another’s humanity? Do you know how difficult it is to be gentle in the face of our faults?
Love may be as essential to our nature as thirst, but the giving and receiving of it? This is as learned a skill as the building of fire.
What I’m saying is you can get better at it.
I’m also saying it’s a precious thing, easily broken and ravaged and passed down the generations.
And if this is your legacy (as it was mine), I’m saying you can repair it.
It will take more time than you want to give it (years, years, years). It will be your most difficult feat. You will need to ask for help. You will need to be humble in the face of your ignorance. And the worst of it, you will need to accept that the better at this you become, the more alien and threatening you will be to the ones who still live with the broken and ravaged thing.
You may need to let them go.
It’s OK.
It’s OK.
I promise, it’s OK.
Because now you have this skill, this loving. And it pulls all the loving things toward it. Eventually, (again, it will take years, years, years) your life will be filled with it, brimming.
I’m saying it’s worth it. I’m saying be fearless. I’m saying you should give it your everything.
Want to make your own amigurumi octopus? This guy was made with Kate E. Hancock of Patchwork Moose’s Claude the Octopus pattern, which can be found here.
Want to see more of my work? Find me on Instagram: @handcraftingalife or on Etsy: etsy.com/shop/lascosaschiquitas.
Handcrafting a Life 