Belief

Real reason for this blog is to preserve some stories for our grandchild (one so far-but so near to our hearts). I just can't think of all the stories at once. Some hide behind the gray hairs and I have to lull them into a false sense of security and then pounce!--throw a net over them before they elude me. It is a game with time and we all lose to its delaying tactics. This is a classic story about my mother that I hope Samaya will appreciate one day. My mother showed up in the dead of winter at my grandmother's house in Beacon, N.Y. after five years of chiropractic school with two pennies in her pocket. She went to Iowa with a GED--like many children of the depression she dropped out of High School to work help her family survive. I marvel at the belief she must have had to think that she could take classes such as anatomy and organic chemistry with only a GED. Belief in herself?That God would help her? I don't know the answer. She just knew that she would succeed. She worked in a battery factory in Cold Spring next to our home town of Beacon, N.Y. and slowly began going to peoples homes to give them treatments. Finally, she opened up her first office in my Grandmother's house. Our living room was her waiting room for years. Slowly her practice grew because her belief was contagious. She would not give up on anybody and she did not permit anyone to give up on themselves. At some point our living quarters moved to the second floor apartment and life became normal. I know the word normal and my family is like having oil and water in one sentence, but to us everything seemed normal. You would think that my mother that had used up her allotment of belief, but nothing could be further from the truth. She had become a Baha'i in college and was so overwhelmed with the belief that Jesus had returned that she had to tell the world. Her dream was to form a Baha'i community in Beacon. At that time there was only a few Baha'is in the Hudson Valley. I remember some elderly Persian believers. Wed. was her day off. Grocery shopping in the afternoon and then in the evening she would sit downstairs at a dining room table. There would be nine place settings--cups, saucers, plates etc. She would sit at that table every wed. night saying prayers and envisioning a Baha'i community that would join her. Slowly one by one the room began to fill up. Her goal was a community of nine before she left for London in 1963. It was the First Baha'i World Congress with some seven thousand Baha'is from all over the world. The day before the ninth person became a Baha'i. The point I want to get across to Samaya and others that I hope will come along is that the people you read about in the history books--the pioneers who discovered new worlds of the body, mind or spirit had belief in common. They turned their eyes inward and saw a dream and they believed in them selves and in their dream--seeing the two realities intertwined--inseparable. I don't know what Samaya will see when she looks inward. That is for her to find out. At her dining room table may be nine inventions or books or paintings or cures or a cause or a God. I just want her to look and believe.