It seems to me that God has caused me to inhale the sweet scent of holiness in the highest Paradise and to be refreshed with a crystalline wine cup, tempered at the camphor fountain. This is the way 'Abdu'l-Baha describes a human experience of God in His book Memorials of the Faithful(Wilmette, 1971, p.97). It is very difficult to put this experience of God into words but I try in this prose-poem.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, Decmeber 26th 2005.

He says the just shall quaff of this cup*
and at the age of 61 I have done some
drinking, a taste, a drop, a fountain.

In India the camphor flame symbolizes
an entire ritual, a culmination of worship;
with its strong light and fragrance,
it is waved to close, to climax, the ritual,
to close life itself; it is the last waving.

Look within thee and thou wilt find Me
standing within thee:
mighty, powerful and self-subsistent.

The camphor flame symbolizes this oneness:
the indwelling-God, closeness, closer than life's vein,
a mystic unity in that abode in the Centre of Realities
where I take leave of self, enter the ocean of union,
drink the peerless wine, tempered in that camphor flame:
bright and pure, a delicate draught, oh so sweet,
beside the Crimson Pillar in the snowwhite path,
the gate that opens on the placeless.

God's power is in that flame, symbolically,
it is said, the light of that flame is a potent
condensed symbol of all that stands for light,
for Baha. Tempered, the wine is made
to the right strength: not too heavy, not too light,
just right, balanced with light, as I have tried
to balance this life, taking leave of this dark
and narrow world and joining light to light
in this my new heavenly homeland that
no man has seen, this gathering-place of splendors
and its rain of blessings and its tempering camphors:
both here and in that Undiscovered Country.

Ron Price
22 September 1995
(revised 26/12/05)
* Quran 76:9

Apologies for not posting as frequently as I would hav eliked but retirement is a busy period as I am finding out.
-Ron

MY FIRST KISS

As the millennium turned the corner in 2001 I launched myself onto a host of websites. Three years later in 2004 I had in my files information about literally hundreds of these sites. Many of them involved posting my prose-poetry. Some of them involved me in making assessments of the poetry of others. Occasionally in teaching youth and adults in the years 1968 to 2004 I had to assess, to comment on, a student's poem. But just as my career of teaching and assessing student work ended in late April of 2004, I new field opened on the Internet where the assessment of someone's poem was involved. One such poem was called "My First Kiss." The seminal idea for the poem which follows comes from reading that poem by a Tom Friel(May 6, 2004) at the site called Wild Poetry Forum.-Ron Price, Pioneering Pver Four Epochs, May 26, 2004.

It came so fast from her:
juicy, warm, unexpected,
filled me to overflowing,
in the evening I recall now
nearly fifty years ago,
just when I'd come across
an utopian ideology with
the future in its bones,1
little did I know in the midst
of what seemed to me just
simple-sweet reasonableness.

The girl and the kisses
were soon gone:
I never kissed Karen again,
but the ideology remained,
a cultural base for a globe,
a base for a web:
of consciousness,
of imagination---
in the midst of a babel
of voices in the decades
as the crisis of western society
deepened and its dark heart,
the darkest before the dawn
in this age of transition.

Kisses have been for me
much more work than I
ever imagined they'd be.
As the years went on
I kept trying to make it!
But the work was more
than anyone had ever told me.
In that ideological home, too,
it was often more than I could bear.

In '57 the first man orbited the earth;
in '62 the first American and I began
to pioneer that new ideology
from one end of the earth to the other.

1Daniel Bell, the End of Ideology, 1960.

Ron Price
May 26 2004

A BIRD'S EYE VIEW OF 60 YEARS.

2004 Writer: three books on Internet in 2003/4:
All Non-Fiction: Total 2000 pages.
2002-1999 Tutor and/or President: George Town School for Seniors Inc
Writer/Poet: Living in northeast Tasmania
Program Presenter, City Park Radio, Launceston
1999-1988 West Australian Department of Training: Lecturer In General
Studies(1988-1996); Lecturer in Human Services(1997-1999:July)
1987-1986 Acting Lecturer in Management Studies and Co-ordinator of
Further Education Unit at Hedland College in South Hedland, WA.
1985-1982 Adult Educator, Open College of Tafe, Katherine, NT
1981 Maintenance Scheduler, Renison Bell, Zeehan, Tasmania
1980 Editor, External Studies Unit, Tasmanian CAE, Launceston
1979 Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour, Tasmanian CAE,
Launceston
1978-1976 Lecturer in Social Sciences & Humanities, Ballarat CAE, Ballarat
1975 Lecturer in Behavioural Studies, Whitehorse Technical College,
Box Hill, Victoria
1974 Senior Tutor in Education Studies, Tasmanian CAE, Launceston
1973-1972 High School Teacher, South Australian Education Department
1971-1969 Primary School Teacher, Prince Edward County Board of
Education, Picton, Ontario, Canada
1968-67 Community Teacher, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern
Development, Frobisher Bay, NWT, Canada
1967-62 Various summer jobs from grade 12 to end of university
(Two High Schools in Canada; McMaster Uni:1963-1966;
Windsor Teachers College: 1966/7)
1944-1961 Born and raised in and around Hamilton Ontario. My mother came in contact with the Baha'i Faith in 1953/4 and I joined this Faith in 1959.
__________________________
Bio-data: married: 3 children: ages in 2004-39,34 and 27. Wife: Tasmanian: age 58. My age is 60. I am a Canadian who moved to Australia in 1971 and married an Australian in 1974.