This week's Awakin reading was about Love. An ordinary home in Santa Clara is where I had the good fortune to attend the Awakin circle. There are too many people and too many small acts that convert this ordinary home to the extraordinary Kindness Temple for anyone to describe it all but a couple of things that make magic happen are consistency and care.



This home has welcomed complete strangers every Wednesday, to come join the Awakin circle, for twenty one years. This consistency is remarkable, if not unparalleled. No excuses and no reason is great enough to break the weekly hosting practice. Earlier this year, as I presented the ServiceSpace story at a conference, Barry Schwartz in the audience confessed that although he was really pessimistic, hearing about the 21 years of unbroken Awakin circles had given him reason to be hopeful. Not many can sustain their efforts this long.



Food is the other four letter word that means love in many cultures. The homemade meal eaten in silence is pure love, cooked up every week, for 50-100 people by Harshida Didi and Dinesh Bhai. The sacrament of breaking bread together aside, this is an experience in being nurtured with unconditional and abundant love. The meal is always delicious and sumptuous, often including home-grown vegetables. Each plate is offered with a smile and personal touch, with a quick adjustment of the contents as per the receiver's tastes and preferences.



As people sit down to eat, second helpings are served up generously right where we sit. Food is also packed to go away with some. The preparation and cooking is mind-boggling, and that it happens so smoothly with such patience and love is incredible. In most other places, gatherings of much smaller size often rely on catered food or plastic and paper disposable plates and cutlery. That never happens here. A 100 people fed inside an hour, in silence, is simply amazing. This is definitely up there on how the ordinary is made extraordinary, with consistency and care.



There is an open-book shelf and smile card stuffing that also happens along with hugs and heartfelt conversations, but like I said, too much goes on for anyone to write about it all.