{"id":1667,"date":"2009-04-21T16:12:35","date_gmt":"2009-04-21T22:12:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/?p=1667"},"modified":"2009-04-21T16:13:31","modified_gmt":"2009-04-21T22:13:31","slug":"this-time-last-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/archives\/1667","title":{"rendered":"This time last year"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today is the First Day of Ridvan, and we celebrated by having some friends over for lunch.\u00c2\u00a0 Now I am having a quiet afternoon, enjoying the silence, reflecting, and trying to recover from a cold.<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>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.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong><em>(Baha&#8217;u&#8217;llah, The Kitab-i-Aqdas, p. 59)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/sholeh\/2432258464\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2148\/2432258464_d1d27fd2c9_m.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"240\" height=\"179\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This time last year&#8230;I was at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ganbahai.org.il\/en\/akko\/\" target=\"_blank\">Bahji<\/a> for the celebration of the Holy Day.\u00c2\u00a0 We were 5 days away from the <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bahai.org\/2008convention\/\" target=\"_blank\">Tenth International Baha&#8217;i Convention<\/a>, and I was surprisingly put together and relaxed.\u00c2\u00a0 It was spring, but felt a bit more like summer.\u00c2\u00a0 Everything is a blur&#8230;you know that you need to remember the details, but you don&#8217;t have time to write everything down.\u00c2\u00a0 The anticipation of waiting for the delegates to arrive, making sure last minute tasks were taken care of, phone calls and emails&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>But on the Holy Day, everything stops for a moment.\u00c2\u00a0 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&#8217;u&#8217;llah, the joy of talking with friends and laughing as the sun begins to set.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;and then back to work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today is the First Day of Ridvan, and we celebrated by having some friends over for lunch.\u00c2\u00a0 Now I am having a quiet afternoon, enjoying the silence, reflecting, and trying to recover from a cold. The Most Great Festival is,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bahai","category-haifa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1667"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1669,"href":"https:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1667\/revisions\/1669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}