*Circles of Generosity | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | August 14, 2026*
Lately, I’ve become addicted to the Instagram page of a guy who mows lawns. Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like. He shows up at people’s homes and mows their lawns. His videos are long - this isn’t the quick before-and-after we’re used to seeing. He mows and mows and mows, cuts back the occasional unruly branch, then mows some more. Meanwhile, shrubs take shape. He clears out junk. And sometimes he even uncovers paved walkways. That, by the way, is my favorite part. There’s nothing like paving emerging from beneath an overgrown yard.
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But none of that is why I scroll through his videos, one neglected yard after another. I do it because he mows all these yards for free. He simply sees a neglected house, knocks on the door, and asks if it would be okay for him to mow their lawn.
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At first I told myself this must be someone with some serious OCD, and this is how he takes care of himself. Then I thought maybe he was someone who’d made a fortune selling a company and now had nothing to do with all the time on his hands as a millionaire. But then one day, this guy, whose name is Spencer, approached a woman, a single mother with an enormous and particularly overgrown yard, and she recognized him immediately.
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How did she recognize him? I glanced up at the top of his page - my lawn-mowing Spencer has more than 5.5 million followers!! Oh my God, now it all made sense. Those 5.5 million followers bring him 3 billion views a year, which makes it financially possible for him to offer himself - his time and services - for free to whomever he chooses.
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That was the moment I got hooked. I realized I wasn’t just enjoying these strange, endless videos of yards being mowed in Kansas, but also the knowledge that every time I watch, I’m enabling Spencer to help another family. Or a disabled veteran. Or a widower. Or that elderly woman whose yard his followers saw, and then discovered that she couldn’t afford dental care, and within a single day donated $380,000 to her. You have to see her standing there on her freshly mowed lawn, asking with heartbreaking astonishment: For me? They donated all of this for me? Why? They don’t know me!
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Spencer’s community model is ingenious: he takes the advertising and sponsorship revenue generated by the millions of views he gets from helping one person, and uses it to help another. And so each yard funds the next yard, and his ability to give of himself.
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In other words, he has built an economy in which the more successful he becomes, the more he can give - and the more he gives, the more successful he becomes.
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There are all kinds of models for generous communities around the world - in England, instead of going to the gym, some people get their exercise by running back and forth to help someone who needs, for example, a heavy armchair moved, through a project called GoodGym. In India, the Aravind network of hospitals operates so efficiently that it is able to use income from paying patients to fund treatment for those who cannot afford it. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of treatments a year provided free of charge.
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These communities aren’t simply made up of good people helping one another. They are models that organize generosity. In the name of generosity, people exercise in the streets, receive medical care, or watch an endless lawn-mowing video all the way to the end - and other people get what they need.
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And this interests me because it breaks with the story we’ve grown accustomed to, the one that says there are only two possibilities: either you sell someone a product, or you give it away. But these communities reveal another possibility - a kind of generosity that doesn’t exhaust itself, and in which sometimes it is precisely the sale, the view, the sponsorship, and the payment that allow the mechanism of generosity to keep going.
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And so each such community is a self-sustaining circle of generosity and giving.
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I think about this a lot in the context of my Seasons of Inspiration - this community numbers hundreds of writers, and altogether thousands of people who, for the past year, have made their way through this difficult time together, through shared learning, writing, and reflection. At the same time, this community has managed to include hundreds of writers free of charge this year, and they are precisely those who clung to our meetings like an oxygen mask: families of wounded IDF soldiers joining the Zoom from beside a hospital bed in rehabilitation, IDF widows, bereaved mothers, mothers whose children or partners were serving in the reserves, as well as single mothers and people who, because of the war, lost their livelihood and stability in life.
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So there may not be millions of views here, but we have managed to create an ecology of generosity: every time someone signs up for a Season of Inspiration, her money, of course, buysr the meetings for her, along with the exercises, and participation in the community, but it also allows others who need it so badly to participate, and allows this community to continue. And there is a great deal happening behind the scenes in a system like this: administrators and helpers, technology, and many hours of preparation and thought.
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And so every season begins not only with a reading of poetry and art and inspiration exercises, but also with the question that occupies me and the women who help me along the way: How do we want to live together? How can my payment for something bringe not only the product I bought into life, but also the existence of a space larger than myself?
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So although there are all kinds of models for communities of generosity, the idea behind them is similar: you don’t have to give something up in order to give to someone else. You can give generously and receive at the same time.
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And I imagine that one day our entire economy will be based on a model like this. After all, we run our homes and families in a similar way. Out of generosity and an attempt to grow and flourish together. That, to me, is the definition of a feminist economy.
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If you sign up for a Season of Inspiration, of course you’re signing up first and foremost for yourself. And I want it to be worth every shekel you pay. But I also want you to remember that from the moment you sign up, you enter the circle I’ve described here. A circle of creativity and generosity. You are one of the women who make it possible for this thing to continue to exist: this column, which is always sent free of charge; the writing sessions that allow those who cannot afford to pay right now to write too; and the next season, which will be born out of this one.
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Our first season was born out of the war, out of the shelter and the fear. But in ordinary times, it has grown into a system I want to exist in the world. One I want there to be more of. Each in its own field - in writing, food, medicine, or mowing lawns.
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All year long, I am grateful for my audience, but in this column especially, I want to thank each and every one of you who are here. Those who read. Those who pass it on. Those who sign up and those who show up. Together, we are managing to sustain something here that is greater than the sum of what each of us receives from it.
We are holding the circle.
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Wishing all of us Shabbat Shalom and many acts of generosity an chesed,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*