Ripen in the Dark

As Price’s pioneering life moved on from place to place he taught children, adolescents and then adults, from age 3 to 63, and an incredible array of subjects, mostly self-taught: sociology, history, psychology, human relations, behavioural studies, the history of ideas, social sciences, English literature, politics, ancient history, welfare studies, communication studies, media studies, management studies, philosophy, anthropology, and on and on. Yes, it was solitary work, but the teaching of it was inevitably social, interactive, always spurred on by his desire to sew divine seeds for future harvests and, by the fourth epoch, a certain other-worldly ambition. Although many of his students came to be close to him few, except in 1972, acquired this new loyalty. Although his faith was shaken severely on two, perhaps three, occasions, it weathered the storms, the tempest, that was harrowing up the souls of mankind. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript.

As need and curiosity prompted, Shaw taught himself shorthand and bookkeeping, penmanship and public speaking, economics and etiquette, score-reading and dialogue writing-most of it solitary work spurred on by a kind of other-worldly ambition...Shaw never had disciples...He added to his information or shifted his batteries, but his faith has been the same since its first stilted expression in the early fiction. -Jacques Barzun, The Energies of Art: Studies of Authors Classic and Modern, Harper and Brothers, NY, 1956, p.251.

So much of what we do and think
has unknown origins and goes
toward unknown destinations,
has nothing to do with the moral,
but is simply part of the vague,
multiform spectacle of human life,
where tendencies are so various,
circumstances too complex,
for a single definition.

Then, there are those moments
when we are alone, deeply,
on a summer day with the sky
lonely and blue, pure,
and I am not running,
thrust into the maelstrom,
the busyness of it all.
This presence of God
vanishes with others
unless I keep remembering:

Enter thou among My servants,
And enter thou My paradise.

I ripen all that I write in the dark,
waiting for the death of self,
that I may be nothing
and walk,untrapped by mind,
my heart made ready
for the descent of heavenly grace.*

Ron Price
15 September 1995

*Baha’u’llah, Seven Valleys, USA, 1952, p. 51.