فصل 39

Section VII

When Dark Clouds Become Rainbows

39

A Touch of Magic

My birth sign is Taurus, and my nature has always been to just settle in and do my work. I wasn’t the type of person who was always looking for change. I enjoyed the repetition of a stable lifestyle and gradual, sustainable growth. Both the business and the Temple went through natural stages in their growth. I always thought each stage would become the steady state.

By the early 1990s, I certainly felt that we were done with our rapid growth. Personalized Programming was in phenomenal shape. We were up to twenty employees, and the bottom line was netting a few million dollars a year. I still had not changed my personal lifestyle, so I continued using the money to build up an endowment for the Temple and to support various charities. At that time, Barb was living in my house, and I was in a small guest accommodation in the building the Temple used for dinners. This building had a long wooden boardwalk stretching across a wetlands area connecting it with Personalized Programming’s office. That walk was my commute to work. Those of us living at the Temple were all working hard and keeping morning and evening services together. People from the Gainesville community were coming out regularly for my Monday and Thursday night talks, and a large crowd always found their way out on Sunday mornings. Things were good, and I thought the period of crazy growth was over. Apparently, I was wrong.

To understand the next wave of growth, it is important to understand what was going on inside of me at that time. All the events that had unfolded so far in my experiment with surrender had shown me that the more I was willing to let go of the inner noise created by my personal likes and dislikes, the more I could see subtle synchronicities in what was unfolding around me. These unexpected concurrences of events were like messages from life gently nudging me in the direction she was going. I listened to these subtle nudges instead of listening to the not-so-subtle mental and emotional reactions caused by my personal preferences. This is how I practiced surrender in everyday life, and the purpose of all these stories is to share with you the perfection of the journey that unfolded.

Take the case of the Temple property. As I’ve already mentioned, we had no interest in owning a lot of land. Yet, over the years, the Temple would end up with an enormous amount of property, and each purchase along the way seemed to have something magical about it. Such was the case in October of 1990 when I received a call regarding a piece of property that had come up for sale in our area. The Realtor said it was eighty-five acres of combined woods and field, and it was considered one of the most beautiful pieces of land in Alachua County. I told him that I doubted we would be interested since our primary interest was in land that bordered the Temple property. He insisted on giving me a tour, and we were both very surprised when we discovered that this exquisite piece of land actually did border directly on the Temple’s leased land. That was enough of a nudge for me. I put out a minimal amount of effort, and the purchase just seemed to fall into place by itself.

I considered that land a gift from the universe. It came to us completely unexpectedly, and I was speechless seeing how these properties were lining up like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It was just three months later when the golfer, Tom Jenkins, called to say they were going to move, and we realized that his property was practically surrounded by our new purchase. This would mean that the Temple would now own 170 acres of contiguous land. We couldn’t have done better if we had bought it all as one piece of property to begin with. It was as though each piece waited until we could afford it. The perfection of what had unfolded was stunning, but we weren’t done yet.

After we closed on the Jenkins property, Radha moved into that house. At the time, she mentioned to me that I should have a better place to live than that space behind the kitchen building. The room was very small and had almost no privacy because everyone kept coming in and out of the main house day and night. I told her that I was fine, and I liked waiting for the flow of life to make things happen. She challenged me by saying that the flow had given us plenty of land and sufficient money. What did I expect—that the universe would call me on the phone one day and tell me to build a house? I told her that if I was meant to have a house, something would happen that would make it perfectly clear. In the meantime, I was fine with where I was living.

It was only two weeks later when I got a call from one of our neighbors informing me that he was about to put his house up for sale. The only lot lying between his land and my original ten acres had been purchased by the Temple years earlier. This meant that his property directly bordered Temple property. Because of the conversation I had with Radha just a few weeks earlier, I paid special attention to what my neighbor had to say. He told me that he had spent many years building a very special house, and he would like to show it to me. I played it cool on the phone, but I literally got shivers up my spine realizing what was about to happen. I called Radha and told her that she should probably come along with me to see this place—just in case this turned out to be the call from the universe regarding a house for me.

As we pulled up the long winding driveway, a beautiful chalet-style home awaited us on the back side of the property. My first impression was that there was something very special about this house. It turned out that my neighbor was a boat-level carpenter. He had spent twelve years handcrafting the house like some people would build a high-end yacht or sailboat.

The house was not large, only about eighteen hundred square feet. It sat on a twelve-acre piece of land that was so well kept that it felt like a park. Once I looked around inside, I realized that I could not have designed a more perfect house for myself if I had tried. Though every bit of the house had its own special character, there was something magical about the small third story that sat above the kitchen area. As I climbed up the steep open staircase, I felt like I was going up into a tree house. But what I found was the most perfect space for a meditation room I could imagine. The top floor was a single ten-by-twelve-foot room with every inch handcrafted into an artisan’s dream. All four walls were wrapped with antique leaded glass windows that had been saved from a centuries-old admiral’s house in Boston when it was taken down. The result was so exquisite that standing there you felt like you had been transported back to the eighteenth century. As if that were not enough, when I looked up, I realized that the top floor was covered with a cupola. Its exposed beams came to a high peak in the center of the room, making it feel as though you were standing inside a pyramid. The space was so exquisite that the mind became quiet just being there.

Needless to say, I purchased the house and have lived there ever since. The magic of how all these properties joined together came to a crescendo with this latest purchase. My neighbor had always entered his property using his front driveway. It only took a moment of exploration to realize that the back side of the property directly bordered the field we had leased from Wilbur. Once we cut an opening in the trees behind the house, I could drive or walk to the Temple without leaving Temple property. Amazingly, this one field now seamlessly tied together all the properties we had purchased over the past twenty years into one contiguous block. No one planned it; it just unfolded that way. To say I was humbled by what life had done this time would be an understatement.

I built a wooden boardwalk that connected my new house to the Temple’s existing boardwalk, and this became my new commute to work. Some time later Mataji came to visit, and I showed her the house. In her quiet voice she said, “So God called you one day and said, ‘Mickey, your house is ready.’ ” I think that pretty much sums it up.