Today is the First Day of Ridvan, and we celebrated by having some friends over for lunch. Now I am having a quiet afternoon, enjoying the silence, reflecting, and trying to recover from a cold.
The Most Great Festival is, indeed, the King of Festivals. Call ye to mind, O people, the bounty which God hath conferred upon you. Ye were sunk in slumber, and lo! He aroused you by the reviving breezes of His Revelation, and made known unto you His manifest and undeviating Path.
(Baha’u’llah, The Kitab-i-Aqdas, p. 59)
This time last year…I was at Bahji for the celebration of the Holy Day. We were 5 days away from the Tenth International Baha’i Convention, and I was surprisingly put together and relaxed. It was spring, but felt a bit more like summer. Everything is a blur…you know that you need to remember the details, but you don’t have time to write everything down. The anticipation of waiting for the delegates to arrive, making sure last minute tasks were taken care of, phone calls and emails…
But on the Holy Day, everything stops for a moment. There is silence, then the sound of chanting filling the gardens at Bahji, and the sunlight strong on my face and hair, the crunching of stones underfoot as over 500 people circumambulate the Shrine of Baha’u’llah, the joy of talking with friends and laughing as the sun begins to set.
…and then back to work.
