My family had been amused at me lately: I got very excited on Sunday about glimpsing the first robin of the year. I had also seen a jay and a chickadee that day. Ridiculous small pleasures...and then today, I have a small orange crocus in my front garden which has opened its pixie face to the world. Yesterday I sat out on the front step with my cup of tea and soaked in sun for an hour. Life is good.

I have also received new books in the mail: I recently finished Bruce Feiler's work, Where God Was Born, and enjoyed it greatly, so ordered some of the works he suggested for critical reading. One is Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane. Already I am finding it rich, but I also find that I am amused at myself: I grunt out loud, unconsciously, when I come across a particularly interesting point, and the sound pulls me out of the reverie of reading...something like the times when, in my sleep, my own snoring snorts so loudly that it wakes me up. Fortunately, when the book is engrossing enough, I fall back into its phrasing, its ideas, its lure, quite quickly, until the next "huh" escapes my convoluted brain via my lips. It's an unlovely way of expressing my intrigue.

What is more lovelier, and a little strange to me: of course, there are many friends and acquaintances in our faith who come from Iran, which is where Baha'u'llah's teachings originated in the 19th century. I know a little Persian...not a lot...enough to invite people to tea, to thank them for delicious meals, to be courteous. I can count to ten and I know that the first person singular present conjugates with the am ending. But I know the sounds enough to recognize a little when the prayers are being chanted, as they often are in Baha'i meetings. The other day, at our Naw Ruz celebration, one of the Persian Baha'is opened the program with a chanted prayer, and when she closed her book, she kissed it and raised it to her face in reverence. I was deeply touched, somehow: it reminded me of the continuities of faith. I think of the Jewish people and the emblem at the door, the centering when they arrive in their sacred home space, and of the reverence in the Catholic mass, the rituals. My husband is somewhat impatient with such rituals, perhaps because as a former Catholic, he grew up with them, and rejected them along with dogma. I did not grow up with these kind of repeated gestures: there is no equivalent, in Baha'i teaching, to the sign of the cross. So to observe the embrace of the book, the love for the text, seemed very fitting, especially for someone who has a reverence for the word, and the Word.

Baha'u'llah has banned the burning of books, which from my point of view, is just one of the evidences of His truth.

Today, I read Eliade, and revel in the open book of the spring ground as the first crocus appears in our front yard. Life is good.