The recital will resume tomorrow with another wordy entry concerning the knighted protagonist of my youth Mark-Andrew Feaster. It is germinating as we speak, lodged in the BLOG draft files.
Had dinner with two older Bahai's tonight and heard all about crazy cats Stanward Cobb and David Hoffman. Also digested a beautiful little anecdotal gumdrop concerning Ruhhiyih Khanum. In the 70's, when he was living in Haifa, my roommate Mike would visit Khanum on a weekly basis (She always called him the "Trouble-shooter"). Mike had heard a rumor that Khanum once owned a tweny-five foot long snake. When he accosted her about the reptile she simply smiled.
"Wanna see it?" She inquired, which of course, my roommate, crazy Mike the mystical trouble-shooter that he still is today, quickly responded in the affirmative to her invitation.
Khanum purportedly went upstairs to the house of Abdu'l-baha, ferrying a Parisian hatbox hugged around her arms upon return. The two of them went out into the garden and got down on their knees. When Khanum opened the box, she unveiled a snake slough, over twenty-feet long! To the dismay of onlookers, both of them unraveled the snake skin, laughing the whole time.
I also brought up the whole Jungian synchronous physical-world-is nothing-but-a-staged-illusion-and-once-you-tug-at-the-metaphysical-pulleys-and-reel-back-the-curtain-you-can-discern-that-corporeal-reality-is-nothing-more-than-a-tinted-shadow issue that has appropriated much of our blogging discourses this past week. Mike sort've digressed and told another story about how the present material world helps us out as well. Apparently Abdu'l-baha owned a fur coat even though some critics dismissed it as being material and a tad gaudy.
"But the servant of Bahá was very practical." Mike said laughing.
"Practical?" I said, my brow furrowed.
"Yes," Mike said. "He wore the fur coat when it was cold outside. Plus he used to sleep on it."
"Sleep on it?" I said, again, volleying back the same crooked look.
"Yes," Mike said again, still laughing. "It kept the fleas out."
"Kept the flees out," I said to myself amist a smash of laughter.
2 comments:
what did you hear about stanwood cobb? i collect books and have many of the ones he wrote. many of them are signed, he signed more books than anyone i know. one of the books of his i had was given by Martha Root to her friend and signed by her (gave that one away to my spiritual mother). mike sounds like an interesting guy.
I love this. That's surreal. It reminds me of this little story: We have our own mystic trouble-shooter called Mahmood who in his young age went on pilgrimmage, and asked RK in a Q&A session if she and Shoghi Effendi ever argued. Everyone started hushing him down - oh how inappropriate! But she told him to stand up and said everyone, look at him, we need more Baha'is like that, not afraid to ask questions! And thanked him for asking it. Her response was that she never ever felt like she would even think of arguing with Shoghi Effendi, so much respect she had for him...
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