PIONEERING

OVER 4 EPOCHS

INTRODUCTION

A leopard adorns the opening of this website. An opportunistic, solitary and versatile hunter, the leopard is often used in heraldry and on coats of arms. My use of it here is largely accidental. When my son and I were creating this second edition of my website in 2001 this photo was available and we stuck it in to provide a visual stimulus. I have kept it here as part of my introduction. What follows is a collection of writings from a quite solitary person or, should I say, a person who has become more solitary with age, who has developed what he likes to think is at least partly a versatile and opportunistic content and style. Like the leopard, too, I eat meat but, unlike the leopard, I do not climb trees, at least not any more. The leopard and I also part company in that I write poetry and prose. The leopard, then, at the top lefthand corner of this access page to my website has proved, in a somewhat serendipitous fashion, to be an appropriate opening image.

I feel I must apologize at the outset for the lack of a friendly website layout. User friendliness is crucial and this site lacks this friendiness. There is no navigation chart on the top of this home page to tell readers what can be found at this site. In addition this home page is very wordy for the modern reader who prefers pictures, short spurts of print or no print at all. The font needs to be toned down a bit to prevent readers from the semi-blinding colour. This home page, this access page, should contain an outline of what is on my site--and it does--but only after many pages of reading, of scrolling down—near the very bottom of this access page. I have been advised to condense the content of this home page and add that navigation chart right at the top, as I have mentioned. Others have advised me to place my introduction on a separate page linked to this home page. Also, the links at the very bottom of this home page need fixing. I have received much advice, as I have all my life. I have given much advice as well for life consists of much giving and receiving of advice. Sadly, I have no web design skills and, after trying to get help from other sources and being a bit slow on the technical-mechanical side of life, I have left this site as it is—with this opening apology to cover all these idiosyncrasies and site weaknesses.

Readers will find here is a large body of poetry and prose spread over some 3000 pages. It was written either from my home in northern Tasmania or while living in Perth Western Australia. It was written during the dozen years 1995 to 2007. After being exposed to poetry from my birth by a mother imbuded with poetry’s influences; after writing only occasional poems for thirty years, 1962 to 1991; after teaching in primary, secondary and post-secondary schools during the twenty-five year period, 1967 to 1992; after nearly thirty years of periodic episodes of bipolar disorder, receiving an appropriate treatment and achieving total compliance with that treatment by 1991; after going as far as I could go and wanted to go in my professional work as a teacher and my academic study as a student; after some 40 years of association with a Movement which claimed to be the emerging world religion on the planet; indeed, after a range of other experiences that readers can find described in my 2600 page memoirs(1)---I began to write poety more seriously and extensively in that Holy Year of May 1992 to May 1993, the year that commemorated the centenary of the ascension of Baha’ullah. That year was "an auspicious juncture" in the history of this Faith as the Universal House of Justice described that year in its annual Ridvan message in April 1992. And auspicious it was in a very personal sense; for in that year a poetic efflorescence began, an efflorescence which has not ceased fifteen years later.

Largely through the assistance of my son Daniel who was then in the middle of his four year mechanical engineering degree at Curtin University, I acquired my first website in 1997. I began to put my poetry on the site, poetry written in and after 1995. I also placed essays on this site. I had been writing essays for academic institutions for twenty years, 1962 to 1981; I had been writing essays of varying lengths for publication in newspapers as early as 1979 in Tasmania, from 1983 to 1986 in Katherine in the Northern Territories; and then for magazines, journals and books in the late eighties and 1990s. After trying to write novels, science-fiction and books unsuccessfully for another twenty years for a popular and academic market from 1983 to 2002, I published a book on the poetry of a Canadian, Roger White(2). A little of that book is found here as well. Anyone wanting to read that book can download the entire 400 pages at:

http://bahai-library.org/books/white or----http://www.juxta.com/

After working on my memoirs or autobiography from 1984 to 2003, yet another twenty year block of time, I finally came up with an autobiographical context and style I was happy with and readers can access some of this 2600 page, 5 volume work, at the bottom of this page or go to eBookMall and download a different part of that work. Also included at this 3^rd edition of my web site are several essays, interviews, book reviews and an assortment of autobiographical and analytical material which I have included as introductions or embellishments to some forty-three categories of poetry. The list of these categories of poetry can be seen below, at the end of this access page or introduction. There is an extended analysis of my poetry, my autobiography and my religion in many places on this website and at many others places on the internet which I will not list here for fear of prolixity.(3) The overall intent in all of this writing is to provide a framework of understanding for a life, our lives, a religion and a society under the title: Pioneering Over Four Epochs. In the world of publishing I am a small player in a burgeoning world of print, a small player in an immense ballpark. Fame, rank, name has not been my goal. It is the exercise of a talent that I enjoy among a complex range of motivations that is part of my raison d’etre for writing. My poetry and prose is read by many thousands of readers on the internet but, as yet, none of my prose-poetry is published in a hard cover. In spite of having more readers than I ever could have imagined any degree of wealth accumulated is meagre. I got my first cheque after six years of publishing on the internet a few months ago. It was for $1.49. At 25 cents coming in per annum and fame diffused over literally millions of websites in time frames of nanoseconds, my concerns for and interest in fame and wealth as well as their associated encomiums and approbriums remain moderate and not troublesome as they so often are to those who acquire these mixed blessings.

Each writer, each poet, has their field of exploration in the world of the personal, the social, the intellectual or, indeed, any one or more of the many aspects of life. My gaze and exploration has a breadth, an ambit, a very wide range of topics and subjects that have become part of my study, my purview. The poet and the poem, the essay and the individual, the book and the society in which it exists are, from my point of view, inseparable, interdependent, interconnected in a myriad ways, many quite unknown to the writer. Each throws light on the other in a combination, a complex interaction pattern, that readers I hope will find a pleasurable juxtaposition, if not frequently at least occasionally in my writing and frequently enough in the lines I put on paper to keep them reading. I can only hope. Much of this poetry and prose can be found in the Baha'i World Centre Library in Haifa Israel several flights below the ground, below the Internatonal Teaching Centre in arguably the largest library in Israel. Some of this oeuvre, my literary opus of writing as it is sometimes called, can also be found in several Baha’i libraries in towns in Canada, Australia and England.

To date I have written over six thousand five hundred poems and several million words. I have taken less and less interest in recent years in counting words, a necessary habit I got into as a student and then later as a teacher in the more than half a century I was in classrooms from 1949 to 2005. There are, perhaps, a hundred or so poems on this website: again who’s counting? Most of my poems have prose introductions. My poetry, it seems to me, is often a sort of thinking out loud; it may be better to call my pieces prose-poems, what one writer-critic said is the most common form of poetry in the last 200 years.

I began writing for teachers and academics in the 1950s and 1960s to get my education and my university degree. In 1967 I began writing for students and to pay my bills for in that year I became a teacher. Writing and talking was the way I made my way in the world; it was the critical form of my modus operandi, the Mos, as they say in the who-dun-its. It became part of my survival package in this complex world. As I indicatged above these skills have not made me either famous or rich, but they have helped me put a roof over my head and the heads of my wife and children, pay the bills and get on to the next day. Such, in summary, appears to be the case after the passing of more than five decades writing for various publics.

This third edition(2003) of my website, the second(2001) and the first(1997) all benefiting from the help of my son, Daniel Price, is part of this exercise in writing for a wider and diverse public. Editing is an endless job and after a decade of making many additions, deletions and alterations, I feel that in this third edition I have finally achieved a solid and consistent base of content which I can refine as the years go on. This is all I intend to do with this site in the years ahead: make the occasional alteration, deletion or addition. Any significant change will involve making a new website which, I trust, one day I will acquire. Some of the internet sites at which I have posted my writing and some of the blogs I have created at some of these sites amount, in various ways, to my own websites, but this is a technical and tangential matter of little concern to me or readers here. The acquisition of a new website, a fourth edition, is not as pressing an issue as it once was on my personal writing and publishing-promotion agenda.

People who come to this site and find themselves attracted to the style and content of the writing may learn a great deal about society from my particular perspective. They may also learn little; they may not agree with what they read; they may not find my particular perspectives to their taste. Every writer must live with this possibility, with this potential reality. Readers may also learn about the nature and process of autobiography, about poetry, about the Baha'i Faith and about the individual in society. I would like to think that readers will gain some understanding of the chaotic panorama that is the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well as the longer stretch that is the history of humankind. I think the angle, the perspective, I take is often a refreshing one. For it is the approach, the mix, the take, I bring to the issues that makes this site relevant and attractive to readers, if it is attractive at all. At least that is one way of putting the stress, expressing the meaning and significance of what is found here at this site.

After teaching in classrooms across two continents from 1967 to 2005 I have no illusions about my readership. People learn in a variety of ways and not everyone is as enthusiastic about print as I was and am. "Those who can’t do, teach." This saying has some application to me for I was never a person with mechanical aptitudes or interests. Many of life’s activities, popular among the millions and billions, never turned me on. Sport after the age of 18; gardening from the word go; cars, cooking, clothes, shopping, even most of the books ever written have not been and will never be on my readintg list—I could make a long list of other turn offs. "Those who can’t teach," it is also said, "they do research and write books." That seems to be where I am now at the age of 63. I have no pretensions about my skills; living in Australia and teaching people with abilities far in excess of mine: people who could talk faster, knew more, were funnier, more handsome and personally attractive in a host of ways helped me keep a handle on my ego.

Readers can gain a knowledge of the various topics I deal with in many other places, by many other authors, in books and articles by literally thousands of writers. I recognize that what I write here is but a drop in the bucket of the burgeoning knowledge and literary explosion we are all living through in our age. This reality is true of all writers and all readers. Only a drop of our lives is ever conveyed in one go: in conversation, in personal contact, in a book, indeed, in any form of communication. As I say, there is, for me if not for others, a certain kind of inventiveness, a certain juxtaposition of themes, my own recipes, that makes what is here unique. Readers will simply have to try what I write on for size and see if it works for them, as it is said these days. If I do not meet, do not connect with the personal meaning threshold of reader after they read a few lines or paragraph they can easily click me off their radar. It requires no effort. I take much pleasure from the act of writing and I hope, dear readers, you take something away from your time on this site that is of personal value.

The Irish writer, Frank McCourt, says that the best storyteller is one who can so beguile his readers that he leaves them wanting more when he's done. I'm not sure how much beguiling I've done or, indeed, if beguiling is one of my talents. The pleasure a reader gets at this site certainly depends on my talents, but much also depends on the reader. I am aware, though, as one writer put it rather humorously, that publishing poetry is like dropping a feather in the Grand Canyon and waiting for the sound of the feather hitting the rocks or the river below. I don't expect to shake the world with what I've written here. Perhaps, though, with that feather I may gently stroke the world. With hundreds of thousands of words one can do a lot of stroking.

Since the Baha'i Faith has a range of websites and an increasingly large literature, no attempt is made here to provide material that can be obtained elsewhere in many places on the internet, in books and journals, inter alia. I have given this website the title Pioneering Over Four Epochs because this title captures for me the general framework within which I have come to view my life and it is my pioneering life and the Baha'i Faith that is at the centre of this website. Readers are advised to go directly to section 16 below for my 'pioneering' link, if that is their primary interest. But I would think this will rarely be the case and each reader who seriously examines this site will browse about in their own individual way. My poetry and prose, my commentary and analysis in its various forms here is what makes this website different than any of the poetry sites--and there are hundreds of them--I have surveyed on the net and unique among the published books and articles currently available in Baha'i bookshops or on the internet. I like to think, then, that there is something fresh, something original, something that is different from other learning places, something that will stimulate readers who come to this site. There is certainly a lot of writing or words here at this site, far too many I imigine for a good deal of the reading audience in cyberspace. But readers can switch me off, as I say, at any time even before they have begun. Such are the perils of too many words!

I should say, be up-front, as they say colloquially these days: if you have little to no interest in the Baha’i Faith, if your curiosity is not whetted by now, I strongly advise you click off and go elsewhere. This new Faith which claims to be the emerging world religion on the planet is a pervasive theme at this website.

The American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, published his famous 'frontier thesis of American history' in 1893. Turned placed the pioneer at the centre of the American historical experience. In 1890 the US Census Bureau declared the frontier closed. From a Baha’i perspective a new pioneer began to merge in 1894 and has now been part of the Baha’i landscape of experience for over one hundred years. Of course, in a new, somewhat obscure and complex sense we are all pioneers now; we are all working out a survival modality in what seems like a new world, a new age, a new historical zone. But my concern here is with the pioneer in the Baha’i community and not so much the pioneer who can be found among the many diverse publics who inhabit our global community of six billion people.

In 1894 a Baha'i from Egypt arrived in the USA and began to actively teach in the Chicago area. He could be said to be the first Baha'i pioneer in the West, although the term 'pioneer' was not used until 1924 and not used widely until 1936 by the Baha'i community. So Will C. van den Hoonaard informs us in his The Origins of the Baha'i Community of Canada: 1898-1948 on page 181. The Baha'i pioneer is certainly central to the Baha'i historical experience. The pioneer is also central, as I say above, to what is at the heart of the concept and pattern of this webpage.

The term 'pioneer' is used by the Baha'i community to describe those who travel to another town or another country to serve that community and the wider communities they work in and for. Indeed, the term can apply to any Baha'i who advances the teaching and consolidation process of this new Faith. I have laid out below forty-two divisions of poetry, one division for each of the forty-five years of my own pioneering. There are three additional literary efforts, products, publications, not found on this site, for each of the other three years and for the three warm-up years, my preparation period for pioneering, my period of Baha’i youth in the years 1959 to 1962:

1. A book on the poetry of Roger White

2. An autobiography; and

3. A host of posts on some 4000 sites on the internet.

All of my poetry here and elsewhere is not about the pioneering process. The more than 6500 poems and several million words range over much that is modern life, much that is the Baha'i Faith, its history and its teachings and much that is my own life. A list of the topics is, as I indicated above, found at the end of this essay, this access page—below.

I left the home in which I grew up with my parents on or about August 20th 1962. My mother and father helped form a local administrative body for the Baha'i community we moved to in Dundas Ontario about a dozen miles away. I studied matric that year and then went on to university and got a B.A.and a B. Ed in the next four years. I was twenty-two on graduation. I am now sixty-three. In retrospect, I have come to see the beginning of my pioneering venture as taking place on those hot nights and days in late August of 1962 when I left Burlington to live in another town. Many of my poems have been written with this beginning date in mind.

I would like to think that (a) at this early stage of the development of the Baha'i Administrative Order, an organic Order which in its current form took its first significant shaping by 1936(4), not so coincidentally when that term pioneer began to be used extensively in the international Baha’i commuity, over seventy years ago, and (b) with the completion of this Faith’s spiritual and administrative centre in Haifa in 2001, this prose-poetic statement will serve to be yet one of the multitude of expressions that will enrich the first century of what Baha’is call the Formative Age and the first century of the evolution of that Order which, arguably, began its first shaping, in the last years of the ministry of ‘Abdu’l-Baha less than a century ago.(4)

The presence of the Baha'i Faith on a medium, the Internet, that is coming to have more and more importance for the global Baha'i community. This site, Pioneering Over Four Epochs and sections of it are now found at several dozen search engines and hundreds of websites and sub-sites. Individual pieces of my writing can also be found at a host of forums, discussion sites, message boards and topic sites like history, psychology, sociology, sport, popular culture, et cetera, et cetera--far too many to list here. I trust that what is found here will give some pleasure to readers both now and in the future as this Faith comes to inspire generations yet unborn, as it has inspired me in the last half century, 1957-2007.

I like to think that this website will be of primary interest to those wanting to gain some insight into the Baha'i Faith from the experience and understanding of someone who identifies himself with its belief system and who provides, what you might call, a poetic perspective. I like to think, too, that there will be some people who might find the content of this site intellectually stimulating enough to be attractive in its own right. To the many who do not find poetry their 'cup of tea,' the essays, interviews and prose sections may be preferable. They can just leave the poetry out. There is something here, some print, for anyone who has a general interest in the topics I have mentioned above and which are listed in order at the end of this introductory essay. But, as I say above, there is a strong Baha’i bias. I write, not from any official Baha’i perspective, simply as one of the members of the community of Baha’is in the world. And, as should be obvious to readers already, I write a great deal here. This is not a light-on site, with little boxes of print, with lots of photos and illustrations creatively arranged to suit an audio-visual age. If by now you find this access page a little too’wordy’ for your taste, I’d click off and go to a site more suited to your visual, intellectual, auditory, or whatever—bias. I won’t mind; I won’t know and you are free.

The contents of this webpage are the traces I have left behind from my experience in the twentieth century with some new additions, new traces, in the twenty-first. I completed the second edition of this web site, three days before the official Opening of the Terraces, the beautification and extension of the administrative and spiritual centre of the Baha'i Faith, in Haifa on 23 May 2001. Two years later a third edition of this website went onto the Net. A book, an autobiographical study and an autobiography, was added as were several hundred thousand more words. This book, now an integral part of this website, is currently in its fifth edition. There is clearly too much for anyone to take in at one setting. This material needs to be approached in manageable chunks or portions, just like any good book and, for this reason, I have placed little chunks all over the internet with one big chunk at the bottom of this page.

I see the 2^nd edition of this webpage, as I say, completed two days before the official opening of ‘The Terraces,’ as part of the celebration associated with the project that has been completed in recent years at the Baha'i World Centre. I see it as part of the 'befitting crescendo to the achievements of a century.......a period that will leave traces which shall last forever.' (5) This 3^rd edition is, I trust, a refinement of previous editions. I hope readers will not have to wait too long for a bright, new, more user-friendly, edition. But don’t hold your breath. This edition, without doubt a little too wordy for many an internet user, may be as good as it gets. Time will tell.

FOOTNOTES

1. An abridged edition of my memoirs entitled "Pioneering Over Four Epochs: An Autobiographical Study and a Study in Autobiography," can be found at Baha’i Library Online>Books.
2. The Emergence of a Baha’i Consciousness in World Literature: The Poetry of Roger White, Juxta Publications, Hong Kong, 2003. Can be downloaded at that site and at Baha’i Library Online.
3. I have posted prose and poetry at some 4000 internet sites in the years 2001 to 2007.
4. The Baha’i Administrative Order, its origins and development, is a subject unto itself. See: Loni Bramson-Lerche, "Some Aspects of the Development of the Baha'i Administrative Order in America: 1922-1936,^" Studies in Babi & Baha'i History, Vol.1, editor, Moojan Momen, Kalimat Press, 1982, p.255.
5. The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message, BE 152.

Here are some other sites: