Morning after

I lay in bed Sunday morning basking in a warm feeling of gratitude. Our Summer House Soaps Grand Opening yesterday was truly grand, in the British sense of “A cup of tea? That would be grand.”

I’m grateful for all the people who emailed or turned out to wish us well. I’m grateful to my husband, John, for all his support, including racing around with me at the last minute finding rugs for the showroom. (Rain was expected, and we visualized people toppling like bowling pins on the wet, slippery floor.)

I’m grateful to Debbie and Priscilla and Jill for helping out at the checkout area, and for the forbearance of customers who waited because our system was a little rough around the edges (it was our first day, after all). I’m grateful to Bill, our landlord, for his help and creative carpentry, to Joslyn for her beautiful cookies, and to so many others, including many who offered help but I was too overwhelmed to articulate what might be helpful.

Most of all I’m grateful to Julie and Betsy for moving the whole operation and getting it set up in less than a week, all the while keeping the orders flowing with barely a hiccup. Amazing.

The morning of the opening I was really, really tired and achy, and wondered how I would get through the day. It was helpful to reflect on the grand wave of collaborative energy that has gotten the project to this point, and to realize that I might trust in it.

This is a shift in perspective for me, who tends to think that everything depends on me all the time. It’s not true of course, and what’s more, it’s a burden to carry around the idea that you have to make things happen. I have to do my part, of course. But from a Buddhist perspective, things arise out of conditions, not from my efforts.

This morning on the online Tricycle email, there was this fitting quote from Stephen Batchelor:

Every moment of experience is contingent on a vast complex of myriad conditions…To recognize this emptiness is not to negate things but to glimpse what enables anything to happen at all.