Here’s a deep bow of gratitude to you, all of our readers and supporters.
You see, in the past year we’ve received two very generous anonymous donations. Since they were anonymous, we can’t thank the particular people who gave the money. This is a little frustrating for us, because we are very grateful and we’d like to thank someone. So you’re all just gonna have to do.
In reflecting upon these donations, it occurred to me that an anonymous gift gives several times: it gives to us at the Shambhala Sun Foundation so we can do things we couldn’t otherwise afford with our very tight, nonprofit budget. It gives to you too, since you are the intended beneficiaries of all that these donations allow us to do.
Thirdly—and there’s an interesting way it connects us to meditation practice here—it gives us the experience of a gap in our habitual thinking, a break from the cycle of projections and expectations that can occur between a nonprofit and a donor: Will they give again? Will they give more? Do we treat them differently now? The energy that’s freed up from those patterns can be applied to bringing benefit to the community we serve.
The surprise was nice too. Each of the last two years we’ve come back after our December holiday break to find sizable gifts in our mailbox. (Semi-full disclosure: sizable here means an amount in the mid-five figures.) Both times these gifts made a very big positive impact on us, and both came at just the right time.
As a small nonprofit mission-oriented media company, we have always been very pleased that we’ve been able to sustain ourselves through good business practices and without relying on donations. But nowadays market forces, industry changes, and currency exchange rates are making this much tougher to do. It’s becoming clear that as time goes on we’ll have to rely more on the generosity of others, both anonymous and known.
And that brings up one more way that these gifts connect us to practice: through the act of expressing gratitude. Being grateful to everyone is an important practice in itself, and we welcome the opportunity to make that gesture. So, a bow to all of you for allowing us the privilege of serving this community: Thank you for this gift.
