This afternoon, the last day of June, in my garden.

Thanks to Dan Jones for this link. I like Josh Groban, and I like these beautiful places.

Announcing:
A Warm Place in My Heart:
Young Voices on Faith

forthcoming September 2007
George Ronald

Heather Cardin
Compiler and Editor

This morning my inbox brought a link to a very useful site, so I will share it with you; it's a series of short commentaries from a writer named Phyllis Ring, writing on spiritual matters. It's a honeycomb of writing, and thus another of Matt's China series from the Buddha Caves seems appropriate for its accompaniment.

Today I am borrowing an image from my friend Matt Pardy, currently travelling in China. He posted some photos to Facebook and for the topic of choice today, a stone Buddha seems like an appropriate image.

I have been reading the Don Cheadle/John Prendergast book, Not On Our Watch, which is a consciousness raising book about the horrors of the genocide in Sudan. It is hard to read, and the pictures are very difficult to look at. I chide myself because I am sitting comfortably in my home and when I am reading about all of these tragedies, it's too easy to feel helpless rage. But there are many places that a person can enlist to make a difference, and one is the link that the book recommends, so I add it now, here, in hopes that some of us will become more than apathetic and trusting that somehow it will all work out in the end. As the book repeats, and as the movie "Hotel Rwanda" reminds us (and I think of Rwanda a lot since my daughter is currently there, one person can make a difference. I am a writer; that is where I can start. I will write.

When your child is in Africa and sends you a photo of herself in front of the Baha'i House of Worship in Kampala, Uganda, along with a stunning letter about her experiences there, you realize that you have nothing you want to say except how happy you are for her and proud of her. This is Bernie's and my eldest daughter, who is still working in Rwanda as a journalism intern, and who will return in July so that our whole family can go on Baha'i pilgrimage together. She is very, very happy in Africa. I will post a few of the photos she has sent, but you are also invited to read her blog.

My beautiful daughter in Rwanda...self-portrait, and a photo of one of my favourite, much-missed tropical flowers, frangipanis. Some pictures just say everything needed to be said.

My interest in family history is receiving some wonderful blessings. In the course of doing some research related to the book I am collecting, of stories of Baha'i elders, my cousin Jack McLean contacted his sister Mary Lou, in B.C. She happened to have a family tree AND some amazing old photographs. So in these, you will see a picture of our grandmother Jessie Fallon Halsted, and in the second picture, on the left with her arm tucked into the gentleman's arm, is our late aunt, Ruth Halsted Kern. She is photographed with Ali Kuli Khan, who was her employer in Washington D.C. in the late 1940's-early 1950's, and from whom she learned about the Baha'i Faith. She declared her faith and then took the new teachings to her family, including her sisters Joyce McLean, Hope Hubbert, and my mother, Edna Halsted Nablo. I don't know who the other lovely woman in the photograph is.

I find all of this process so fascinating and feel like it is a precious gift to have these photos of our family history and of the illustrious Ali Kuli Khan.

Here you see some happy faces: our friend, Harsh, arrived on the weekend to visit our neighbour and his fiancée, Nysa, and we all spent some lovely times. Our dear friend Juliette also travelled from Montreal with her son Pele so I got to hold this precious baby...such an expressive little fellow, very happy natured. All of these connections are from my days as an instructor at Maxwell School, back in the day...when Harsh and Juliette were both students and friends. They have kept in touch with us these many years; Harsh and my husband Bernie are particularly close friends, and we were all just delighted to have a reunion, especially with the joy of seeing Harsh and Nysa together and with Juliette and Nabil, her husband, also a Maxwell alumnus, sharing their lovely son with us! I have known Pele's grandparents since our Saskatoon days. It all makes me feel my age a little, but in a good way. Harsh and Nysa did a presentation at our Baha'i fireside, in the morning, including showing some small video clips from their time spent last winter as pioneer researchers in Ecuador. This story can be found at their blog.

There are some things more beautiful than flowers, much as I can't believe I'm saying this. Poems, of course, and vistas of the world, but today I received a photograph of someone I love, and I share it with you here.

This is Tahirih. For those who do not know, she is named for one of the foremost heroines of the Baha'i Faith. The original Tahirih was a Persian poetess who accepted the teachings of the Bab, based on a verse from a dream, and because of her audacity and courage, was strangled by the authorities and thrown down a well, where her body was covered with stones. The full story is incandescent, particularly as she was trying, in 19th Century Persia, to proclaim the inevitability of the emancipation of women. You will encounter, in the world, many Baha'i young women named in her honour and memory, and this is a picture of one of them.

This beautiful Tahirih was, for a time, my student at Maxwell School, and at that time became a good friend. I had the joy of visiting her and her parents in their home in Arizona some years ago. Since then, she has been a faithful correspondent and has shared her journey: an undergraduate degree in her native Arizona, then a Master's degree from the London School of Economics, and always, her passion has been and continues to be for the oppressed of the world. Currently she is working on an organic farm on the border of Arizona and Mexico, and in the fall, will pursue a Ph.D. She jokingly tells me she has become "nerdy". She has always been a great reader...and I sent her One Hundred Years of Solitude when she was in China for a year.

This photo is of Tahirih in Guatemala. For some of her story, as told in her own words, look for my forthcoming book, A Warm Place in My Heart: Young Voices on Faith, George Ronald, Publishers (2007). She is there, sharing her life and her work, her passion and her love, with the world. Her pure love for the world shines through. I love her dearly.

From the George Ronald website...

Warm Place in My Heart, A

Register to use shopping cart

George Ronald Publisher Ltd
Warm Place in My Heart, A
Young Voices on Faith
by Heather Cardin
Soft Cover
ISBN: 978-0-85398-517–4

Description:
‘The youthful and eager workers for the Cause . . . occupy a warm place in my heart.’
Shoghi Effendi

Why have faith? Why practise faith in the world as it is today? What makes a young person in the early part of the 21st century willing to follow a Faith that requires exemplary moral conduct and which views spiritual growth as the purpose of an otherwise very material life?

These are the questions Heather Cardin asked young people around the world. She invited Bahá'í youth and young adults to share their thoughts about why they believed and why they were Bahá'ís.

The answers came from 45 young Bahá'ís between the ages of 13 and 30, from every continent and from many backgrounds. Some have had very positive experiences, others not so positive, but all draw on the power of the love of Bahá'u'lláh and His teachings to give them strength to continue their lives as Bahá'ís.

These are the authentic, powerful voices of young people as they see themselves and the Bahá'í Faith in the 21st century.


£0.00 / $0.00
176 pages
216 x 138 mm ( 8.5 x 5.5 ins)
Available September 2007

This morning I spoke with my lovely daughter, pictured here, in Rwanda. She had just been on a safari! She has fulfilled my dream of seeing giraffes in their natural habitat. Now I will have to do the same.

Her letters home, and the couple of conversations we've had by phone, are so happy. She is working for Radio Rwanda, both as a reporter and on air broadcaster, and she is learning to speak Kenyarwanda. A little.

I tell her of the garden: the yellow day lilies, the red ones about to burst open, the peonies about to bloom, the white irises, the purple ones, the cheerful pansies, the white lilac...and the vegetable garden, the tomatoes already in flower and the beans and peas reaching up, and up...and she laughs. She is seeing far less commonplace vistas. She is having the world open up. She is a Baha'i youth in Africa. To listen to her in her voice, go to her blog.

San Diego, Quail Botanical Gardens, an Australian corkwood tree

for more beauty, a new discovery, via luckybeans:

3191

In Memoriam:

Jameson Bond, d. June 1, 2007

In this post, I want to say adieu to our family's friend, Jameson Bond, known as Jamie to all who loved him.

In the 1940's, two young men met at the University of Toronto as part of a small gathering of the neophyte Baha'i club. This meeting would establish a friendship that carried them all of their lives. They were Jamie Bond and my father.

I have just phoned my father to tell him that Jamie has gone to the next world. He passed away in the company of his beloved wife, Gale; in my book, Partners in Spirit, Jamie closed the penultimate chapter with his loving homage to his wife.

When I was teaching at Maxwell, from time to time, Jamie and Gale and I would meet, whether at a Baha'i event or at the school. He would share his memories of my young father (quite a man for the ladies, he would say, although my dad remembers being painfully shy). He and Gale became mentors to me when I was a teenager and we all lived in the Ottawa Valley.

He and his wife were Knights of Baha'u'llah for the Arctic, and I had the pleasure of serving with Gale on a National committee of the Baha'is when I was a teenager. She was patient and kind.

I will remember Jamie and Gale in my prayers. The pictures are of Jamie and Gale with our friend, Hunter, and of Jamie with Reggie Newkirk, both taken during the Maxwell years.

Godspeed, Jamie,

Love, Heather