- Jul 24, 2004
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Part 1:
This afternoon, after finishing a late lunch, my routine laundry and dishes, essential parts of my domestic portfolio in these middle years(65-75) of late adulthood as I head for old age(80++), if I last that long, I bathed my feet in a solution of vinegar and water for ten minutes. Such an exercise, I was told by my wife and as I confirmed on the googling-internet, is supposed to help remove the fungus on my toes that has gathered there in the ten years since I retired from full-time employment or, perhaps, in just the five year since I gave up part-time and volunteer work. I turned on the TV to help pass the time while I sat in a comfortable lounge-room chair soaking my feet with my remote button poised for action.
I chanced upon the following program: The Thirties in Colour: The End of An Era, on SBS TV. It was being screened from 2:35 to 3:30 p.m. this day, 25 January 2010, the eve of Australia Day Downunder. As I watched the programs film footage, taken by several American amateur photographers in the summer of 1937 in Europe two years before the outbreak of WW2, I thought of the first months of the Bahá'í Seven Year Plan(1937-1944) which took place in that same summer of 1937. It was the beginning of a Plan I have now been associated with, in one way or another, for nearly sixty years. I felt moved, as a result of this coincidental association, this synchronicity, to write this prose-poem. -Ron Price, 25 January 2010.
Part 2:
They had embarked upon an historic mission
that spring and summer of 1937 having heard
Freddie Shopflocher read his message on the
way to the end of the first century of this new
Era. Little did they know of those sacrifices
which would be poured out on that sublime
mission releasing potentialities generously &
mysteriously endowed by Him Who was the
Author of that Plan lending it brilliant lustre
like that possessed by those immortal deeds
which had signalised the heroic age both for
this Cause and in that new American Republic
in previous decades perhaps as far back as the
lives of John Adams and Shaykh Ahmad in the
late 18th and early 19th century in this new era.(1)
(1) John Adams was the second President of the United States (17971801) and the first Vice-President (17891797). Shaykh Ahmad was the founder of what became the Shaykhi school of the Ithna-Ashariyyih sect of Shiah Islam. Babism was a heterodox and seemingly negligible offshoot of that school in the 1840s in Iran. Both John Adams and Shaykh Ahmad died in 1826, the year the first photograph was taken. Both men laid foundations for intellectual, moral and spiritual edifices which have yet to be fully understood or appreciated by their spiritual descendants, descendants in an American democracy and in an embryonic democratic theocracy.
Ron Price 25 January 2010
This afternoon, after finishing a late lunch, my routine laundry and dishes, essential parts of my domestic portfolio in these middle years(65-75) of late adulthood as I head for old age(80++), if I last that long, I bathed my feet in a solution of vinegar and water for ten minutes. Such an exercise, I was told by my wife and as I confirmed on the googling-internet, is supposed to help remove the fungus on my toes that has gathered there in the ten years since I retired from full-time employment or, perhaps, in just the five year since I gave up part-time and volunteer work. I turned on the TV to help pass the time while I sat in a comfortable lounge-room chair soaking my feet with my remote button poised for action.
I chanced upon the following program: The Thirties in Colour: The End of An Era, on SBS TV. It was being screened from 2:35 to 3:30 p.m. this day, 25 January 2010, the eve of Australia Day Downunder. As I watched the programs film footage, taken by several American amateur photographers in the summer of 1937 in Europe two years before the outbreak of WW2, I thought of the first months of the Bahá'í Seven Year Plan(1937-1944) which took place in that same summer of 1937. It was the beginning of a Plan I have now been associated with, in one way or another, for nearly sixty years. I felt moved, as a result of this coincidental association, this synchronicity, to write this prose-poem. -Ron Price, 25 January 2010.
Part 2:
They had embarked upon an historic mission
that spring and summer of 1937 having heard
Freddie Shopflocher read his message on the
way to the end of the first century of this new
Era. Little did they know of those sacrifices
which would be poured out on that sublime
mission releasing potentialities generously &
mysteriously endowed by Him Who was the
Author of that Plan lending it brilliant lustre
like that possessed by those immortal deeds
which had signalised the heroic age both for
this Cause and in that new American Republic
in previous decades perhaps as far back as the
lives of John Adams and Shaykh Ahmad in the
late 18th and early 19th century in this new era.(1)
(1) John Adams was the second President of the United States (17971801) and the first Vice-President (17891797). Shaykh Ahmad was the founder of what became the Shaykhi school of the Ithna-Ashariyyih sect of Shiah Islam. Babism was a heterodox and seemingly negligible offshoot of that school in the 1840s in Iran. Both John Adams and Shaykh Ahmad died in 1826, the year the first photograph was taken. Both men laid foundations for intellectual, moral and spiritual edifices which have yet to be fully understood or appreciated by their spiritual descendants, descendants in an American democracy and in an embryonic democratic theocracy.
Ron Price 25 January 2010
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