فصل 27

Section IV

The Business of Surrender

27

A Company Is Born

In December of 1976, the next event took place that epitomized the essence of my surrender experiment. Just as the direction of my life had changed by my reluctantly surrendering to tutoring Alan Robertson, teaching at Santa Fe, and inviting Baba to Gainesville, so I was about to again be asked to do something that seemed askew from my chosen path but ended up perfectly aligned with my life’s destiny.

I had just come home from teaching at Santa Fe and was taking a quiet walk in the woods. I turned down the narrow path that led in front of the Temple, and what I saw made me stop in my tracks. A sheriff’s patrol car was parked right in front of the Temple building. It was quite intimidating, as was the fully uniformed deputy standing by the car. In all these years, I had never seen law enforcement out here. The deputy called out to me, “Are you in charge here?” The voice in my head was frantically trying to figure out what was going on. Why is a deputy here? Is something wrong? Did he look in the Temple and see all the strange religious icons? This is north-central Florida; am I in trouble?

Despite all this internal noise, I managed to utter a fairly normal sounding, “Yes, sir, I am in charge. How may I help you?” Pointing to the Temple, Deputy Knowles asked me if I had built the building. When I told him that I had, he asked if I would consider building an addition onto his house. It seemed he loved the rustic cedar look of the Temple and was impressed with the quality of the carpentry. He had been looking for a builder to enclose and remodel his garage into living space.

I was dumbfounded. I had never even thought of such a thing. Sure, I had built a few buildings on my own land, but I had never thought of building for someone else—not to mention someone official, like a sheriff’s deputy. I stood there for a moment as two contrasting responses went on inside my head. First, the voice was saying, No way, I don’t want to do this. I’m busy. I have my job at Santa Fe, and I’m not a builder, anyway. Second, there was a quiet, peaceful sense of awareness that didn’t have to say a word. It simply knew that my vow of surrender to life required me to see where this would lead. I took a breath, looked up at the officer, and said, “Yes, I would be glad to help out with your project.” There—it was said, just like the other times. Now I would get to see what magical rabbit hole this new act of surrender would lead me down.

Deputy Knowles was the perfect person for my first construction job. He knew just what he wanted, and he allowed me to do the job on a cost-plus basis. That was essential since I was in no position to give him a firm bid or pay for the materials myself. Given what I was accustomed to earning in those days, I’m sure I did the job for far less than anyone else would have. I would need an assistant, and Radha, one of our new Temple residents, volunteered. She was on her Christmas break from the university, and she assured me that she could handle a hammer and carry her load. We strapped on aprons and drove into town to do some building.

That job, completely unasked for and unexpected, became the start of my construction company, Built with Love. Officer Knowles was so pleased with the job that he passed the word around. In no time at all, I was doing numerous home improvement jobs for officers and staff at the Alachua County Sheriff’s Department. I still had my ponytail, and always worked in sandals, but no one seemed to mind. Radha could only help part-time, so I did some of the jobs by myself. I put in fireplaces, closed in a few garages, and added a number of porches. I treated each job as if the universe itself had given it to me—because it had. Just as the retreats had taught me to serve, so doing home improvement work for all these wonderful people became part of my spiritual practices. I was given the opportunity to bring joy into the lives of people I didn’t even know. I really liked that aspect of the work, and I would have gladly done the jobs for free. But that was not what was happening. I was going to have to learn to deal with accepting money and running a business. Life was making me let go of my spiritual self-concept, and I was staying very conscious about not replacing it with yet another one. I simply put my whole heart into whatever I was doing. There was no difference between teaching my classes at Santa Fe, meeting with people for morning and evening services at the Temple, running spiritual retreats, or doing a construction job. All these tasks had one thing in common: they had all been given to me by surrendering to life’s incomprehensible flow.