"I should not talk about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well."

-Henry David Thoreau, 1844(ca)

"Turn thy sight unto thyself that thou mayest find Me standing within thee, mighty, powerful and self-subsisting."

-Baha'u'llah, Hidden Words.

-Ron Price drawing on the words of ¹’Abdu’l-Baha in The Secret ofDivine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970(1928), p.3.

This website is not an exercise in self-publicity in the tradition of artists like Salvadore Dali and the massive autobiography industry of the last 150 years, inspite of appearances, perhaps, to the contrary. I'm sure some readers will find what self-portraiture there is here to be too revealing; for others it will not be revealing enough. What is intended in this autobiographical excursion is an integration of a life, a religion and a society into some kind of meaningful whole, a whole that is meaningful to me and hopefully to readers who cross this path.

This autobiographical study has other central purposes than examining my family history as far back as it is possible. What autobiography there is does not assume much significance for the purposes of this web site and its contents until at least the first phase of the implementation of 'Abdu'l-Baha's divine plan in the years 1937 to 1944, when the pieces were coming together for the matrix that formed the setting for my birth. At the beginning of that Seven Year Plan, in 1937, my grandmother and grandfather on my mother's side, Emma and Alfred Cornfield, lived in Hamilton Ontario. Alfred had just retired at age 65, after a chequered and difficult employment history in Canada going back to his arrival from England in 1900. Emma, his wife, would be dead by the end of 1939 from cancer, just as WW2 broke out. As far as I know, my mother and father had not yet met. This meeting would take place some time in the next three years by 1942. It is in this milieux, just before and during WW2, that my autobiography begins.

The poetry which deals with this milieux, this embryo, this first part of my life and the years of early childhood, say, my birth to age five, 1944 to 1949, and what are clearly autobiographical concerns-deal with aspects of my family life & a certain synchronicity with events in Baha’i history at the time and in the secular history of the wider society. This first phase of my autobiographical poetry, then, comes from the years after 1936 when 'Abdu'l-Baha's Divine Plan, as outlined in his immortal Tablets, was finally implemented in an organized Plan of teaching. The earliest phase of the implementation of His Plan, 1937-1944, synchronized--and I might add somewhat parenthetically--serendipitously--with the first meeting, the engagement and the marriage of my mother and father in 1943. Three months after this Plan ended I was born, the day, 23 July 1944.

Father and son(1945), at the end of the first epoch of the Formative Age, after the completion of the first Seven Year Plan(1937-1944), the first Plan in which the term 'pioneer' gained wide usage. There were about 100 Baha'is in Canada at the time.

My poetry takes in a much wider ambit than the personal, the inner, life. It also takes in aspects of all of phenomenal existence, insofar as that existence is a part of my imagination, my memory and my intellect. Memory is, as existential psychologist Rollo May once put it,"the keeper of all that is meaningful." (Man's Search For Himself, 1953, p.220) Features of history, the present and the future, and much that is meaningful across a wide cross-section of subject matter--as is evident from even a short perusal of the contents of my poetry and its 43 categories as listed in the index--come into my poetry. To the extent that I can find synthesis and unity in multipicity, is the extent to which there has been some coming together around a centre, a centre which has held and which came into my life and the life of my family back in 1953. That centre was the Baha'i Faith. I see all of this poetry as autobiographical in the wider sense that all writing can be seen as autobiographical, although I'm sure many readers will be hard put to call much of my material autobiographical. They may prefer the term 'personal.' I find my own identity over a lifetime is so changeable and fragmented, so fluid and so much a process, that I prefer to see the Baha'i Faith, its literature and its community as the centre, the synthesizing, unifying agent, in this poetic statement. This is the raison d'etre of this website. To put this concept of centre and periphery another way, there is a continuous rendezvous of myself and this faith, each moving in relation to the other and never in any static or fixed position.

Virtually everything is up-for-grabs, fodder, for my poetic mill, so to speak. Although all of life is up-for-grabs, as I say, there is a great deal that does not come into the narrow compass of my life. For we are all selective out of necessity and out of interest. And there is the wider ambit of life, of existence, that we try to take in, that we want to take in and make part of some intelligible whole. For each of us, though, only part of that whole 'grabs-us.' This website tells of some of the stuff that grabbed me, that became part of my memory, my imagination and intellect and which is found here as a sort of reminiscence, as Plato once described the process of discovering truth.

Autobiography's traditional search, by way of writing, is for a significant personal past, a self as life-story, as personal narrative. Essays and poems, interviews and books have immersed this writer in the pleasures and doubts of the writing process. These genres of writing also possess a fragmentariness and a provisionality that scale down the amplitude of autobiography by narrowing the retrospective gaze to single experiences and certain life-themes. One can not take everything in in one poem, one piece of writing or, indeed, in one’s entire corpus of writing or living for that matter. This seems only obvious. One touches the surface of existence and takes away an infinitessimal portion of the whole. One of my small portions is found here.

The study of a life, any life, is in some ways a religious act, a devotional exercise. "Look within thee", as Baha'u'llah says, "and thou wilt find Me standing within Thee mighty, powerful and self-subsistent." Many things are involved in this process of recreation, partly an invention and a defining of the self, partly a molding and remolding of myself and my world, partly a moving back and forth between the interiority of the self and the exteriority of the world. Had it not been for my life commitment for the last 48 years to the teachings, the philosophy, the spiritual principles, of this emerging world religion, I am inclined to think that this autobiographical poetry in all its forms would not have come into existence. This global Faith is the catalyst, the leaven, the enzyme, that has given rise to all that is found here. For me, as it was for the psychologist Alfred Adler, a sense of community is a primary index of mental health and the term 'community' for me has a host of meanings, as does the term mental health. Readers, it is hoped, will feel that my struggles, my triumphs, my failures and glories are, at least in part, their own. As the American poet Kenneth Koch said in a recent interview: when you read a poem, the poet's experience becomes, in a way, your own. People can experience what Richard Hutch calls "inner empathetic rehearsals"¹, experiments in imagining similarities and contrasts with their own lives when they read the poetry of others. The comparisons and contrasts with the lives of others provide a potentially fertile field for understanding our own lives. Even comparisons and contrasts with those who have passed away can provide heuristic insights in this imaginative, subjective sense. I write occasionally about those who have passed on and inevitably, of course, I and my readers will also pass on. In mysterious and enigmatic ways we are all one, all one community: past, present and future.

We come to understand ourselves in many ways. Autobiography and biography, examining the lives of others, is but one way. Hopefully, some of the readers who seriously examine this material will find clarifications and understandings of their own lives spinning off, sometimes serendipitously, sometimes easily and freely, quite consciously. This, of course, was what the sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote about in his now-famous The Sociological Imagination.²

Mother and son(1945)...Hamilton Ontario Canada...We come into this world and assume a form that befits our mortal life...and we go on to another world and assume a form that befits our immortality. Eight years after this picture was taken my mother attended a Baha'i fireside and became one of the first few hundred Baha'is in Canada....and at the end of that second epoch of the Formative Age, in September 1962, my parents and I pioneered to the next town.

Autobiography, then, has the potential to provide, for those reading it, well-researched historical comparisons and contrasts with their own lives, with the view to assisting in the moral and psychological empowerment of readers. Surely this is part, an aspect, of the metaphorical nature of Baha'i history and the empowering potential of Baha'i saints, heroes and prominent figures down through the epochs and ages. In this way autobiography, even of the ordinary person, becomes part of a process that helps to create human solidarity. I see my autobiographical poetry and prose, indeed all that I write: essays, interviews, reviews, narrative, inter alia, in this wider context, as but one more contribution to human solidarity on this earth. For the very definition of a person, as I see it, includes the wider world in which we move and have our being, in which we participate, which we construct. Some sociologists call this wider view and its affect on us as 'the social construction of reality.' Some psychologists call it an existential view of the person. Whatever you call it, I draw on a very wide view of the person, of society and of religion, in my poetry.³

For those not having any particular interest in the Baha'i Faith you may find something useful here at this site. My more optimistic muse says readers can find useful insights here whatever their background. My more pessimistic muse, as it advised readers earlier in this extended essay on autobiography, does not think there is something here for everyone. There is obviously a very special relationship in my poetry with Baha'i history and teachings, but it is not essential for the reader to be familiar with the Baha'i story. Many of the writers, the authors, from the first century and a half of Baha'i experience have become my 'friends' due to what is now a long acquaintance with them through books and I draw on them somewhat spontaneously in my poetry. I draw on this literature because I think this literature matters and because it offers an enormous wealth of insight into the whole range of human experience. But I also draw on what might be called 'secular literature' in my poetry and, in the process, I like to think I make it more relevant to a wider audience.

My autobiography, poetry, history and a wide range of my essays I hope, then, will appeal to your interests, read reader who has ventured this far into a labyrinth of another life than your own particular labyrinthine experience. If what you read has not turned you on by now or in a short span of time, just click me off and my special labyrinth can be placed into non-existence as quick as the twinkling of an eye. There is so much print available in today's world that you can go where your heart fancies. If what I write here does not catch your fancy--such is life.

As the famous poet W.H. Auden once wrote: 'poetry makes nothing happen.' While I think this is true for the most part in the big, wide, macro world, in the personal, the interior, the hidden world of my affective life, poetry has a curiously deep and renewing function. So, if a particular reader finds my writing irrelevant, if what I write has no affect on international relations, that will not affect the personal, private value this poetry has for me and-hopefully-some of my readers.

Studying lives, writing them, biography and autobiography, is one of many possible guides for living together, for understanding your life and society. It fortifies the sense of the unique and irreplaceable worth of the individual. People can be united in solidarity, in the immediacy of empathy, by studying something that outlasts life. A text, a written record, a life-a writer's, an autobiographer's, can be useful for generations. I think many get their sense of beauty, meaning, purpose, whatever, from the big-screen, from musical expression, from one of a multitude of creative forms, from gardening to cooking stuff and eating it, from sexual expression, et cetera, et cetera. We all try to put it all together in our own unique ways.

What Heinz Kohut calls "vicarious introspection", the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person and, at the same time, remain an objective observer, is essential for the autobiographical poet like myself and for readers. This autobiography is inevitably about ‘the other’: the significant other, as psychologists call special people in our lives others; and the insignificant other--as much as it is about myself; reader and self blend and fold together, as does self and world.

In some ways I see myself as someone who puts the facts of my own life and the lives of others into different contexts, structures and shapes while maintaining my basic integrity and honesty--and others. At least I try. The writer Gail Mandell says that writing is like surfing: "you get on a wave and you say 'Hey, this really feels good. This is terrific.'" Writers tell it as they see it and it is usually so much more than they can ever say to people. I feel the need to say, to write, what I have seen, felt and thought over these several epochs. I was right there on the spot for the evening news of my generation, so to speak. As the reader, you may get news flashes from this newsreader, this reporter, that will be useful to you. I hope so. And if you do not, perhaps generations to come may find news reports from this news reader of this generation, of these four epochs, of some use, some value. Perhaps.

My Baha'i experience over half a century, forty-five years of which involve pioneering, I like to think has some relevance to those who will follow me in the generations to come. This website is part of my effort to provide some of that relevance. At the very least the exercise of putting this site together has given me pleasure. I hope the site provides, as I say above, some pleasure for you.

I often put the story, the event, the inner reaction, the core of a poem in a framework of ideology, convictions, beliefs, attitudes and values. That is part of the pleasure, the depth, the inner, the introspective side of things. I experience a deep sense of entering into another's life, my own and society's as well. This is part of the pleasure of autobiographical and biographical writing. The observer, though, should keep in mind that the act of writing takes place in a room, one person by himself hour after hour. The excitement that is the writer's is an inner thing not an adventure in the normal sense of the word, out there, doing things that you talk about on Monday morning. Most of our lives we spend with ourselves, in our own head, in a private world. This is especially true of someone who writes and writes a great deal. This document, this website, translates some of this inner experience, this inner solitude, into form.

Writing a life is about a need, a search, for wholeness amidst fragmentation, division, tension and troubles. Only parts of one's life at best ever seem to be whole, unified, one. Fragmentation, conflict, disorder, incompleteness and failure all exist amidst whatever spiritual and material successes, whatever sense of unity, one achieves in one's inner or outer worlds. One’s writing also exists, in a very important sense, in the mind of each reader in his or her own way. Some see Frederick Nietzsche's autobiography of 1888, for example, as serene and triumphant; others see it as confused and mendacious. It was completed only weeks away from his own breakdown. As I say, there are many ways to view a body of writing. This will be no less true of what is here. There is no right way to write a diary, a journal, an autobiography, poetic or otherwise; and there is no right way to read it.

Some will find what they see here useless to them; others will find it of value. The great majority of humanity will never read it or even know of its existence, but that is probably true to virtually all that has ever been written in the past or in the present. The exception, perhaps, are some of what have come to be called Holy Books,but even then much that was once considered Holy has lost credence, credibility, meaning in the modern world. That is the way it is with the writing of all authors and I do not hold out high hopes for what I write here. I write here largely out of some mysterious inner need, drive, desire. If it is of somevale well and good and if it is not, such is life, as the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly said in 1880 on the way to the gallows.

Whatever sense of fancifulness, what some call conceit, whatever empathetic responsiveness and emotional relatedness I exhibit or achieve, and I did in my relationships as a teacher, a parent, a member of a community, et cetera over many a year, decades, I do not find I do so to anything like the same extent all the time. This is, of course, true of all of us. For there is, as I have already said, fragmentation, diversity and conflict, incompleteness and dissatisfaction in all our walks of life. I have had a sense of wholeness in much of life's personal journey, but this is not always the case in relationships, in all the journey.

This, too, is part of Baha'i experience not only for me but for virtually everyone. It is part of the inevitable ups-and-downs of life that we all have in and out of community. Here lies the story of one person's understandings, activities and patterns, one person's world. It is a story which mirrors its time, its age. It is a story that arises out of the ineluctable interconnectedness of self and world. It's all part of that Oneness of life, of humanity, of religion, of reality, at the core of the Baha'i teachings.

This photo of my first wife, Judy, and I was taken on January 1st 1968, five years after the apex of the Baha'i Administrative model was put in place, six months before the institution of the Continental Board of Counsellors was established and five years after the third epoch had begun. It was also at the outset of the 'dark heart of the age of transition' as the Universal House of Justice characterized the period of pioneering I had just entered, in August 1967, among the Inuit or the Eskimo people as they used to be called.

The shared vision and the common good, seems to be something I have talked about within the Baha'i community and out for many, many years. I feel as if I have talked about these and other concepts so many times that I am repeating a language, sentences, words, that have been worked to death. This experience of seemingly endless repetition was part of what led to my writing poetry. During the writing of this river of poetry I have discovered a rebirth of language, a recrudescence which has led to a new lease on life. My spiritual quest has gone on; my trajectory of personal realisation, my efforts at self-forgetfulness, have continued on their arc of ascent. And I have often felt the sense of descent, decline, loss and failure.

In the process, as some coherent character continued to evolve during my years of pioneering, I began to record the living fabric of my life partly in a conscious way in the form of letters which I began to collect in the 1960s, early in the tenth stage of history, to use one of the many Baha’i paradigms. Readers wanting to pursue some of my thoughts on letter writing and an analysis of my archive, my collection, can do so in section 6 below, in the link on 'Abdu'l-Baha to whom that archive is dedicated or they can go to the website: "Bahá’í Library Online>Personal Letters>Ron Price: 1957-2007.

The first letter that I have, then, comes from the very outset of the 'dark heart of the age of transition' in 1967 as the House of Justice described the nature of the period we are still traversing. The first letter I wrote was in 1957 to a Japanese Baha’i youth, but the letter is lost. I trust there evolves, in the midst of the poems, essays and interviews which followed in the next four decades of this 'dark heart' some insights into how best to live, to survive, to cope, to endure, to love and to experience joy. The insights come from one who is still working it out, still plodding along on the slow and stony path with its pleasures and joys, for all is not tortuous and difficult. I can not tell you how to work it out. We all work it out in our own way, hopefully with a little help from others, from those we call friends, companions and loved ones. Surely that is part of what community is all about.

If readers see that I found my journey to the goal difficult it is, I think, more likely to help them with theirs. My recipe, my system of understanding, whatever I have achieved, has been through the matrix and the organizational form of the Baha'i Faith and its teachings. Is there something useful to others in my interpretation, my hermeneutics; in the nature of my understanding of the future changes; in how I experience the present and my view of the past? I do not have to wait until that future comes. The change seems to happen even while I anticipate that future.

But this website is no self-help guide. There are plenty of these guides on the book shelves and have been for decades, books that approach the personal, the interpersonal, the spiritual, in a more organized, a more sequential way. The self-help industry is massive. I do not see my website as part of this industry, although others may assign me a place therein.

Many readers who come to this web site will not be joiners; they will not be affiliated to any religion or political party. And they will stay that way for their entire lives. They may have joined the tennis club or contribute to Amnesty International or the Lions Club. They may not even see themselves as necessarily spiritual or interested in spiritual questions. These people work their paths out essentially as individuals without joining in some cause for the common good. For the thrust, the accent, the philosophy of individualism, born as it has been from the forces of Protestantism and democracy in previous centuries, has continued into our time, into these epochs of the growth of this emerging world religion. Alternatively, people who have affiliated with other religions may find something useful here. And then, inevitably, there will be the Baha'is. What a wonderful mix they are, too: enough to test the patience of Job and the wisdom of Solomon. I should think, hope, that some of these millions of souls will find something of value here.

For Baha'is, though, this website is no self-help manual; there have appeared in the years since the teaching Plan was initiated in 1937 a wide range of self-help books that cater to many individual and community needs, both within the body of Baha’i literature and in the vast secular presses that have churned out hundreds of such books. There seems to be something for everyone now. Why then do I bother putting pen to paper to create yet another literary mix? This website is, I like to think, unique. It occupies a space by itself. It is still, for me, at an early stage of its development. It is an experiment. There is honesty here but, as that perceptive twentieth century thinker A. Mencken once wrote, no man can bring himself to reveal his true character in all its darknesses; therefore "honest autobiography is a contradiction in terms."⁴

I feel strongly that these times are times for beginnings, small and faint of outline, but matters of great moment will come from them. This thought motivates much of my writing. These are days at the beginning of community in our age, community which will become a source of strength and delight as the decades and centuries go on.

This website is a sort of microscopic writing which highlights a unity of my recollected past, my unfolding present and my anticipated future. It also highlights a struggle, a struggle that is both mine and my community's. It reconstructs both my own life and that of my community, my religious community, through the process of an ongoing self-interpretation and self-understanding. For without such reconstruction, reevaluation, we all become trapped in "the already given."⁵ With it, we reinvent, transform, our lives. For the realities we are examining: our lives, our societies and our religion, must be seen metaphorically, in terms of psychological, inner, processes, not something external to ourselves. This is the key to our understanding. This is what I try to unfold in this collection of writings I have called: 'Pioneering Over Four Epochs.'

There is something addictive about the process of writing. I started this poetry on a small scale twenty seven years ago and then, bingo, here I sit with over six thousand of poems, four hundred essays, five thousand letters and emails as well as some 30,000 words of interviews. From the millions of words in my files I have put down, perhaps more than a million on this site, 3000 pages of A-4 paper, the equivalent of perhaps five substantial books. It is a beginning, part of that "befitting cresendo to the achievements of a century...a period that will have left traces which shall last forever."⁶

This photo of my second wife, Chris, and I was taken in 1992 some thirty years after the beginning of my pioneering days. The year 1992 was also designated a Holy Year, a commemoration of Baha'u'llah's passing in 1892. This was also the year that I began to write poetry more seriously than I had in the previous dozen years. 1992 also marked the end of a forty year period, between Holy Years: 1952-1992, during which I had been associated in different ways with the Baha'i Faith. I now see this writing of poetry, beginning in 1992, as a spin-off of a forty year journey, a forty year period between the holy years, when I was associated with a religion that was claiming to be the emerging world religion on the planet, when it continued its rise, in some ways meteor-like, from obscurity.

My life possesses, as any reading of it can easily reveal, what Erik Erikson calls 'a synthesising trend.'⁷ There is a line of continuity between events, what Henry Murray calls 'unity-themes' which go right back to 1953 when my mother first heard of the Baha'i Faith. After 109 years in this New Era(1844-1953), my family finally came into contact with this emerging world religion, this new global force. It is this thread that gives the fullest possible meaning to the eventfulness of the life I have lived in all its massive, chaotic and sometimes, I feel in my sadder moments, meaningless and tragic detail. To interpret my life is to address its meaning in the present. This is precisely what each poem does in a multitude of different ways. For joy and sorrow make up the texture of life, feelings of failure and feelings of success.

My meaning is found in (i) recurring themes, (ii) continuities and (iii) one grand unitary theme. The entire corpus could be called what some refer to as a meganarrative. Others might call it simply the life of the mind or 'thinking out loud' as one correspondent of mine who teaches culture and the arts at an American university describes my poetry. Whatever you call it, essays like this one on this website provide a context for the poetry which follows. I have always felt the need for background material when I read the poetry of various artists. And so I provide it here for others should they find it useful. If they don’t, of course, they can simply ignore it.

Erikson says that the autobiographer should deal with what is unique in his or her own individual life. I certainly do that. The widest and deepest river of inquiry into my life, within which the narrower and shallower streams of character portrayal and drama take place, can also be described drawing on several models of human development in psychology. I find Erik Erikson's model the most heuristic to analyse, to see, my life. His model uses an eight stage process of psychosocial development. I have always found this model a helpful and explanatory pattern within which to examine my own development as a person.

These eight stages help to flesh out the portrait of my life within a framework, to provide a circumscribed picture, with a basis for essential traits that suggests a life behind, beneath and far below, the surface of the everyday. In the end a pattern unfolds behind all the apparent chaos of seemingly unrelated events in life. We all must work out our own patterns and psychology provides a plethora of material, of theory, of ideas, for the questing seeker to help him work out that pattern.

Without going into great detail here, my life within the Baha'i community could be seen as occupying four stages: identity, intimacy, generativity and integrity. Anyone familiar with Erik Erikson's model of psychosocial development will be able to identify these stages easily. Generally they are associated with the years from puberty to old age. Between the time I first contacted this Cause and the time I joined it, 1953 to 1959, I went through puberty and its immediate aftermath. Old age, or at least late adulthood, 60 to 80 years of age as one model of human development outlines the process, has begun and will occupy the immediate future for the next 18 years. Old age, according to the major stage model of human development, begins at 80. If I last that long, I may edit this site many more times.

It took me some time before both the intimacy stage and the generativity stage could be said to have worked themselves out in any kind of satisfactory way. Inevitably, though, as Erikson argues, the crises of life, the stages, are present throughout life and development throughout life becomes more and more complex. Some battles we fight over and over again. There were certainly crises associated with both of these stages. But I won't go into them here. That is the purpose of my autobiographical narrative which, as I have indicated, can be accessed at the end of my index page on this website and all its 750 pages or at other locations as I have indicated above.

All I wanted to do here is suggest a framework for describing my life, my experience in or out of the Baha'i community and make some general autobiographical comments to give a context, a texture, for this website. Human development theorists have developed increasingly refined models during the last half century, my years of association with the Baha'i Faith and my pioneering years. These theorists place individual lives, any life, into some kind of helpful framework, some pattern of development, to help people understand their lives. In my experience, though, it seems to take some time, some study, to really put these models to some kind of personal use.

I pursue the application of the insights that relate to my development and, by implication, the development of my readers, in my autobiographical narrative which I advise readers to examine.⁸ Frameworks to understand the life journey can also be found in the Baha'i writings. The one I find most attractive is in the introduction to Shoghi Effendi's God Passes by. In addition, Baha'u'llah's Seven Valleys and Four Valleys provides another framework for the individual soul. An understanding of this framework is essential since it is the major schema Baha'u'llah has left us. The best analysis I know of this model is that of Nader Saiedi in Logos and Civilization where he devotes over thirty pages to its analysis. An interesting analysis of the Seven Valleys can also be found at the website, Planet Baha'i. Some of my poetry on mysticism is also found there. I may pursue these models, secular and sacred, in more detail at a later date.

Intimacy was eventually established, to use the label from Erikson’s model, and I was married at 23 after a complex and somewhat stormy adolescence; the years from 23 to 63, my present age, have been characterized by generativity. This would be true, of course, of any person who joined this Cause in his teens, eventually married successfully or even unsuccessfully and pursued a career, or a creative path of some kind. Generativity can be so variously and subjectively defined. My poetry has been written in this generativity stage, over 6500 poems from 1980 to 2007, from my mid-thirties to my early sixties. Raising a family and following a career were two other aspects of this generativity, again described in general terms in my narrative.

There is an implicit panegyric of self in my writing and there is what could be seen as a portait painting that shows a life that is far, far, from perfect. Life's actualities and lived experience determine, help to construct, life's major configurations that define the texture and content of the painting that is one's life. They help me to describe the forces inherent in my existence, to establish what might be called a horizon of realisation and a horizon of failure. One can not win them all. One fails some tests and one passes others.

The everyday is far from trivial, although in a lifetime much of our doings often seem so. The horizon of my life, its deeds and thoughts, I see now as my text. Some of the text is here. Anyone reading this poetry contacts this text, this life, in a way that seems to me quite different than contacting me in person. Readers will also contact this text in the same way as they contact me, should we ever meet. What they see, what they experience on meeting me, will also be different than what they read. There is, paradoxically, sameness and difference. The sheer quantity of words here I'm sure will put some people off. Others will be put off by the content. Others will be enthusiastic.⁸

My writing defines my life in quite a different way than the external self in conversation. Indeed, conversation defines the self in a multitude of ways, depending on who one talks to, when and how one is feeling on the day. In some ways there are a multitude of selves. There is an inevitability in this. In a very real sense, of course, my life is much more, something else, mysterious, indescribable. So is this true of everyone. Each of us is more than one simple self. Writing puts one, perhaps many, of these selves on paper.

My wife had two daughters from her first marriage: Vivienne above at the age of 30 and Angela below also at the age of 30. These are photographs of these two step-daughters: Vivienne Wells and Angela Armstrong. Vivienne has with her her son Tobias; Angela has both Tobias(7) and Kelsey(4) Wells, my two step-grandchildren. The ages I have indicated are in the year 2000. These photos capture, as all photos do, a moment in time, in the long story.

I have not included photos of many others, both inside and outside my family, who have been critical influences in my life. Perhaps a future edition of this poetic autobiography will see some additional photographs included. My autobiography has, in its chapter six, a section about photographs going back to the last decade of the Heroic age. But I have included only a very small handful of actual photos on this site. There is in that chapter six an extensive analysis of photography and photographs and their contribution to an autobiography. 

Life is in part a point of convergence of larger historical vectors or themes. The historian Dilthey expressed it this way. My life converged with the following vectors: what Shoghi Effendi, the then leader of the Baha'i community, called the beginning of 'the Kingdom of God on Earth'(1953); the beginning of 'Abdu'l-Baha's divine plan(1937); the close of the eighth(1921-1953) and ninth(1953-1963) stages of history; the first half century of the tenth (1963-2013) stage of history, to use Shoghi Effendi's historical paradigm; and the time when the trustees of the global undertaking set in motion by Baha'u'llah more than one hundred years ago were elected, established and put in place at the apex of the Baha'i administrative Order(1963) in what one writer called "a unique victory" hardly yet understood by my generation of the half light.

Other vectors and processes of some significance that played their part in the backdrop tp my life included the following: the population of the world tripled--two billion to six billion from my birth in 1944 to my present age in 2007; the size of the Baha'i community went from 150,000(ca) to six million (1944-2003) and the West's attitude to indigenous peoples, women and children was transformed, among a host of other historical shifts like the several waves of developments in science, technology and the social sciences. A good history book of the years since WW2 will tell more of the tale and it is not my purpose here to do so in any detail. These vectors and processes dance around the pages of my poetry in a host of different ways.

There is a fit and often a misfit between individual development and historical tides, processes, waves, the stage on which we enact our lives. The Baha'i community has multiplied forty times globally in my lifetime, thus far, but in most of the places I have lived the growth has been slow, indeed infinitessimal, some might say 'discouragingly meagre.' For the most part the generations that have grown up in the West after WW2 have only showed a mild interest in this Movement which captured my interest in the late 1950s and early 1960s after six years of informal contact in the years of my late childhood and early adolescence, 1953-1959.

I am confident the time will come when the formal contribution that the Baha'i Faith will make to the unifying tendencies of the planet will be significant, at least significantly more than they do at present, although that story had changed markedly, out of sight as they say, in my lifetime. Indeed I hope I live to see this Cause, just now in the last two decades emerging from an obscurity which has enshrouded its history for a century and a half, become a force of more than a little magnitude before I pass from this mortal coil. In some ways I see this website as a historical document for use in that time, a time that has not yet arrived.

This poetry and this document on the WWW contain a story of beginnings. The process of entry-by-troops began in my part of the world, in Canada, just after I joined the Cause in October of 1959. Entry-by-troops is a process which had its beginnings in my experience in western Canada among the Indian peoples and has been observed in its complex and subtle patterns for nearly fifty years, although one could argue it is a process built into the very history of the Babi-Baha’i Faith right back to 1844. The future influence of this Cause is as great, Baha'is believe, as it is inevitable and the vision of its future greatness motivates this writing.

The pattern in which a life can be seen comes from within and without. Experience only becomes insight into a life if understanding leads us from narrowness and subjectivity to the whole and the general. Then a unique self is found and it is found when the inner and the outer find relationship, meaning, balance. Autobiography is the literary expression of the individual's reflection on life, so Wilhelm Dilthey put it.⁹ The identity one creates or builds is hard work; it takes more than a little reflection and analysis. But it is also pleasureable. It is also rewarding and far removed from the trivial and the mundane, although the trivial and the mundane are part of the process, for they are an essential part of life.

There are times when I find the task of defining self and identity and life itself a source of sorrow and despondency. These more negative emotions enter during the inevitable periods of gloom and anxiety that life brings to all of us, except perhaps those rare souls whom William James describes in his Varieties of Religious Experience as having temperaments consistently and persistently 'weighted on the side of cheer.'

Everything worthwhile involves struggle. I have had to deal with ill-health, periods associated with mood swings and the residue of a bi-polar tendency in my years of middle and late adulthood. I have suffered these swings since the earliest years of my Baha'i experience, in late adolescence, although they are largely contained now and despondency, an emotion that plagued me during the years 1962 to 2002, has been at last significantly contained. I have also had my share of marital, financial and interpersonal difficulties. These lows are part of the polarity of life. Polarity is one of life's major mysteries, as Guy Murchie informs us in his book 'The Seven Mysteries of Life.' And this polarity, like the other six mysteries he discusses, and like the historical vectors mentioned above, are part of my poetic voice, poetic narrative.

Part of my task as both poet and autobiographer, indeed as a person and as a Baha'i living in the last half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first, it would appear, is to historicize therapeutically. Historicism is an historical view that sees the essence of society and culture as dynamic and developmental.This involves watching the times closely, interpreting events and finding new resolve from the analysis of the historical process so as to make as much sense of the picture of life as possible. One must be vigilant in and sensitive to the spiritual quest, a quest that has many facets of which historical analysis is only one. At the core of the problem is the multiplicity of views, the articulate nature and apparently contradictory nature of these views and the relative—and it seems to me especially as I have grown into the evening of my life—understandable indifference of the great majority of humanity to the resolution of the paradoxes and complexities involved in examining these views. Bewildered, agonized and often helpless, millions, nay billions now, watch the world, as the Guardian says, as they would watch a great and mighty wind deranging the world’s foundations but they can not perceive its origins orplumb its significance.

In examining, recapitulating, the past, I render, surrender, it to the judgement of the future. For one day I shall be gone and these works, these poems and essays, these interviews and reviews, among other genres here, will be all there is left of me and my story. The process of examining and surrendering is one of adaptation. Nothing in life is meaningless, suffering least of all. And vision is essential in the process of adaptation. Vision has been a major spin-off, for me, from over forty years of work as a pioneer within the Baha'i community. A sense of vision inspires this poetry.

The developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget, gives names to this process of adapting and adjusting to life as he outlines his model of learning. Indeed psychology, as a field, applies a whole language and literature to the articulation of this process. But it is not my purpose here to apply and elaborate these languages. I like to think, with Erikson and Piaget, that I create vistas of imagination in the service of adaptation. I try to resolve ambiguity and create deeper bases for peace both now and in the future for myself and the society in which I live and move. This is part of the function of my poetry.

But we are, to some extent at least, subject to existential forces often beyond our control. We can only do so much with our lives. There are inevitable constraints, things we can not change, the struggles of our generation, our time, our age. In the past and even today, these constraints are sometimes called: fate, predestination, the limits imposed by the socializing process on our lives and, indeed, our own needs and wants. Writing becomes a way of lending our lives and ourselves coherence and identity, of defining ourselves, of accepting, of defining these constraints, these beginning-and-end-games, the socio-historical process in which our lives are embedded. Writing is not the only way, but it is my major, my main, way.

The basis of autobiography in all of this is the human heart, the emotions and the mind. Ideally, they work as one, although this is not always, perhaps rarely, the case. Since so much of the really interesting battles of life are inner ones, autobiographies that are based on a discussion of what is often an intensely guarded privacy, are the richer ones, in my view, with conclusions left to the reader to draw. Sometimes answers are better left out or provided only obliquely.

My autobiographical journey, though, is not strongly confessional. Although it will be characterized by the frequent spontaneous acknowledgement of error or weakness, I do not put all my dirty laundry on the line. Some of my warts are here but not all. Indeed I have too many warts and to include them all would be an act of confession that would embarrass me and not be particularly edifying to readers. A precoccupation with one’s hind-quarters, one’s nether regions and an intimate revelation of all one’s sins of commission and omission does not necessarily make for a good autobiography. It seems to me that a moderate confessionalism is wisest and this is the parth I have taken. For some readers, of course, I will have gone too far; for others, I will not have gone far enough in this confessional mode.

Shakespeare captures some of the lower-end of my confessional tone in his words about prayer in the Tempest: "my ending is despair/Unless I be relieved by prayer/Which pierces so that it assaults/Mercy itself and frees from faults." And at the upper-end from King Henry the Eighth: "I feel within me a peace above all/earthly dignities, a still and quiet conscience." And I hope, with the long passage of time and life, that "Hereafter and in a better world than this/I shall desire more love and knowledge of you."(Henry VI, Part 3) Shakespeare has built, as John Milton notes, "a long-lived monument." His honoured bones, his words of astonishment and wonder, capture the confessional tone at least for me and in some basic ways. Shakespeare’s language has become, sadly, archaic and irrelevant for most of the new generations of our time. But for me, his words and the words of many other writers and thinkers express a confessional tone and an approach to the failings in one’s life that I have found useful. and so it is that I borrow often and from many a writer here at this site and elsewhere in my writings.

I trust in the process of writing this diffuse array of material, that I can integrate its apparently unrelated features into some perceptible whole. Essays such as this, the introductions to my poems, my narrative, letters and diary should all provide a basis for some future biographer to bring it all together into some continuing form, should that ever be desired. Although this future possible role my writing might play interests me more than a little, it is only one of a galaxy of motivations, some of which I am hardly aware of as I write. For now, I trust that the dynamic interaction between my personal experiences and the historical milieux I live in and have lived in will be made alive, given a living presence, through this writing, this poetry. Hopefully this life, set out here and in other places, will be of use to my fellow human beings, my successors, my epigone, as the historian Arnold Toynbee often calls the generations to come in his Study of History, an eleven volume work that has inspired me since beginning this pioneering venture in the early sixties. If the function of inspiration does not come to characterize my work, 'c'est la vie,' as the French say.

For many, I'm sure, most of this will be seen as a simple and extended exercise in navel gazing. A writer can not win them all. I seem to have a strong desire to tell a story; I'm sure many people will not feel any need to read or to hear my story, at least not at the present time. Again, 'c'est la vie.' Perhaps as history takes its course and those mysterious dispensations of Providence play their often insinuating and seductive tunes, the need will arise for the kind of material found on this website. I have had a third edition of this website for four years and been sending out my poetry to friends and groups for ten. I am confident that more and more people will draw on the material here, even if it is not in my lifetime. The basis of my confidence lies in the belief, that all Baha'is have, in the inevitability of the ultimate triumph of their Faith. I will, over time, capture what you might call a niche market. It may always be a very small niche! And, of course, as T.S.Eliot emphasizes, one must live with the possibility that one will capture no niche at all.

Here is a life lived at perhaps the beginning of the darkest period of recorded history from a Baha'i perspective: the ninth and the first four decades of the tenth stage of history, to use a Baha'i paradigm. What I write here at the very least is something, perhaps, for the burgeoning archives of the Baha'i community around the world. I'm impressed with how little we seem to know about each other and even ourselves; perhaps that is partly a function of the very difficult times we live in; perhaps, too, this is for me a function of my moving around so much. But I am impressed, too, by the deepening channels of investigation and perception, the explosion of knowledge, as it is taking place around the world. In so many ways we are at the beginning of both community building, depth in interpersonal relationships and coming into a true understanding of our history as a species.

I became very conscious of people's disinclination to write about their lives or the lives of others when I wrote two to three dozen short biographies of Baha'is in Australia back in the years 1982-1992, the decade preceding my serious entry into poetry. There was even a strong inclination among many people I interviewed to remain totally unknown. I can understand this sentiment. Having taught interpersonal skills and human relations off-and-on for more than thirty years in post-secondary educational institutions(1974-2005) I am more than a little aware of many people's desire that their lives remain a closed shop, at least in print. The leave me alone attitude, the drop out, the withdrawal, from society is, as Douglas Martin often said, is deafening—if one could hear its trenchant , subtle and obscure sound.

This autobiography will provide enough details for my life in some kind of depth, some traces for a future age. It might contribute toward the growth of a cultivated readership for both autobiography and biography. There is little doubt that the field of autobiography and biography is opening up a fascinating world for students of these disciplines and passers-by who just want to dabble.

You have here, dear reader, an amateur archivist, essayist, poet, biographer, and autobiographer, sociologist, psychologist, among many academic labels I could add, combining and providing an integrated perspective, at least as integrated as I can make it, to say something that is I hope of some use and value, especially to people working in the administration of the Baha'i community, but also to others with other commitments in other walks of life. Time will tell how much use what I write here is, in the end. I will address these issues, come back to these themes, much like Wordsworth did who came back to his poetry, especially to his poem 'The Prelude' in the years 1805-1850, revising and altering.¹⁰ For this website is, in many ways, a first statement, an initial plunge even after the passing of a decade of its existence on the WWW. If those mysterious dispensations of Providence allow me many more years of living, I may write forth and fifth editions of this website which I have entitled: 'Pioneering Over Four Epochs.' 

These years guided forward

by an unseen mysterious Wisdom,

with periodic blind mazes

and unintelligible paths;

however we study

and recapitulate the journey,

so much is lost without recovery,

our chief benefactors lie entombed

in some formless oblivion

and the weighiest causes

are so often silent.

Our faculty of insight

into passing things

is but impressions

in an everliving, everworking

chaos of being, unfathomable

as our soul and destiny,

a complex manuscript covered

with formless inextricably-entangled

and unknown characters,

partially deciphered.

But only in the whole

is the partial to be truly seen,

only in the Divine ordering of history

and its providential control

can bafflement be dealt with

and a revitalizing elan be found.

Ron Price

25 November 2002

Picasso, or perhaps it was one of his close friends, once said that his energy, the energy he puts into a painting, is all transferred into it "in one go." Much of painting, to Picasso, was a breaking down and a remaking of something as he attempted to transform it. What was true of Picasso and his painting, as expressed here, is also true of the construction of my poetry, except for the long epic poem I am working on where the energy is spread out over many years. The tradition of self-portraiture in painting is also mirrored in my writing as a part of the tradition of autobiography. Self-portraiture begins, or so it is often argued, with Albrecht Durer in 1493 and autobiography, arguably, one thousand years before, in 426 AD with St. Augustine. -Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, "Magic, Sex and Death: Part One on Picasso," 9 June 2002, 3:35-4:30 pm.

You can't put it all down.

The essence is never conveyable

and the corpus of self-portraits

always rests uncomfortably

on the inner land of unreality.¹

I construct my self-portraits

somewhat like an artist

with the real me somewhere

behind the words,

behind that likeness

which tells only some

of the psyche

and the self-worth.

The calculation, choices

and manipulations are all

part of construction and

it is far beyond this my

corporeal vessel--some

scrutinized self, some

fashioned being with its

infinite variety of meanings,

its statement of self-analysis.

There is richness and ambiguity here

amidst the fluctuating fortunes of life,

the complexities and the multitudinous

renditions of these my days designed

as a token of some glorious handiwork.²

1 A Sufi idea of 'the inner land of unreality' compared to 'Revealed Truth' referred to by Baha'u'llah in Seven Valleys, USA, 1952, p.28.

The whole thing is defined by some big picture,

some made self and a quite precise facticity

where the meaning changes, restoring the experience,

beyond any meaning I ever assigned back then,

in some combination of the eventful and uneventful.

As the novel ends, the last chapter begins to unfold

and I tell of a joy in being thoroughly worn out,¹

before being thrown on the heap ready for that

proverbial and mysterious endgame. And that tree

which is my life, arrayed with these fresh leaves,

blossoms and fruits of consecrated joy, also has

a terminal blight, complex twists and turns, and

will one day denude the tree of all of its verdure.