Help us Grow this Site

Reflections (c) June Perkins

To help us grow this blog compilation we would love to hear from Baha’is anywhere in the world who blog regularly and would be happy for us to reblog their work.

We reserve the right to choose what we reblog.

To participate in the site we would appreciate it if you visit some of the other blogs and if you enjoy them leave constructive comments and feedback for the blogger.

If you are thinking of starting a blog perhaps this space will encourage and equip you to do this.  Just take a look at some of the other compiled blogs, and read our handy tips!

We will keep adding some useful links for you to go and search, but the compiler doesn’t have time to mentor everyone individually so this compilation and links are your mentors!

We’d love it if you do your blogging in wordpress as it enables us to easily reblog work, whilst allowing readers to connect back to your blog.

Of course as a Baha’i we hope you always show respect for the Faith in the way you conduct yourself online. This site is moderated and we want it to be a safe and friendly space.  We reserve the right to remove anyone from the links who does not show respect for others.

We welcome visitors from all Faiths and walks of life and hope you will enjoy this compilation, which we hope over time will reflect the diversity of cultures and interests within the Baha’i community.

Email us at: gumbootspearlzATgmail.com (at to avoid spamming replace with @)

‘Please note The blogs are not necessarily focused on Baha’i topics exclusively. These blogs should not be taken as official positions of the Baha’i community, although many writers actively imbue their work with the principles of the Baha’i teachings. For a more directly focused Bahai Blog visit Bahai Blog This is not an official Baha’i site, for that go to Baha’i.org

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A river flows to the sea

the Book of Pain

Sometimes, clearly,
it is a mercy.
Othertimes, un-clearly,
it is still.

Recently, a nephew of ours had a health scare. He is, thankfully, out of danger now, but the event got me thinking…

Everyone dies. When that time comes, some who are elderly or infirm are ready, even eager to go; others die untimely, leaving heartbreak and sorrow in their wake. But no matter how or when, the idea we need to hold onto is that the event is, in its own inscrutable and mysterious way, the mercy of God. And in our sorrow, we must allow that thought to comfort us. I acknowledge this is not easy to do, especially when the death is of someone we deeply love, and even more so if they are still young and full of potential. But what is the alternative? Anger? Depression? Doubt? These are poisons to be fled. In the end…

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Delaying Gratification

FFWR - Celebrating the Baha'i Calendar

Be patient for thy Lord is patient.

A few days ago I read a thought-piece about children, their poor school performance and their need to learn to delay gratification  here    True true.  Impatience is a big problem in modern societies.

Our neighbors are farmers.  Old school.  They plow, they plant, they wait.    They pray for rain (or for the rain to stop) and they wait.   They weed and they hope the seed is good and they wait.  You get the picture – a lot of delayed gratification.

Sooooooo …

It would seem that delaying gratification would come naturally to people in pre-modern societies — but you know what?  They needed training, too.  And here is how I know:  Fasting!    Fasting has been a part of religious ordinance since ancient times.   (No matter how tough we think we have it, God always seems to want to make it…

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Prayer Lesson, MAEA Conference, and Art Ideas

I can’t deny it – it really stinks when you spend 5-10 hours a week prepping lesson plans, and have no students attend class. But I understand how busy life can get. Today’s lesson was very important, so hopefully I can push my curriculum back one week and fit it in next Sunday. Regardless, here is an overview of the lesson plus some fun art ideas to try.

Lesson : Prayers.

Open with Devotions, Classroom Rules, pass out snack.
Lecture/Discuss prayers. Talking points : Why do we say prayers? What happens when we don’t pray? Who do we pray to? What do we pray for? What is the Obligatory Prayer?

Prayer Scavenger Hunt : Put students into groups and hand each group a prayer book. Hand each student a prayer scavenger Work Sheet and a pencil. You can see the worksheet here , although the formatting was changed when I…

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Mahvash Sabet Released From Prison

the Book of Pain

Those of you who have followed this blog (as irregular as it has been) have read my previous posts and poems by Mahvash Sabet, a Bahá’í prisoner of conscience immorally incarcerated in her native Iran because of her Faith. She is one of seven such unfortunates who are referred to as the Yaran or Bahá’í 7. It is with great joy that the Bahá’í world recently announced her release from prison, after enduring ‘ten years of unjust imprisonment and harsh treatment.’

Mahvash’s poems come from her wonderful book of poetry, Prison Poems, available here in the United States and here in Great Britain. I recommend you obtain a copy of this volume as soon as you can.

Mahvash Sabet’s release does not, sadly, indicate a softening in the hard-line government of Iran’s attitude to the human rights abuse of members of the Bahá’í Faith—there are still nearly 100 Bahá’ís incarcerated in Iran, including…

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Abdu’l-Baha speaking of Jesus Christ in 1912

I’m too late to share this for the Easter holiday, but I figured it was still worth it. I came across this beautiful passage recently reading the book The Promulgation of Universal Peace, a collection of talks given by Abdu’l-Baha a little more than a century ago.

During Abdu’l-Baha’s journey through Europe and North America in the early 20th century, the life and teachings of Jesus Christ were a common topic. That may seem strange given that the whole point of Abdu’l-Baha’s trip was to introduce Westerners to a new faith and a new spiritual message. But seen in the context of the Baha’i Faith’s core teaching — that all religions are in fact reflections of a single spiritual truth, and all human beings are members of a single family — the fact that Abdu’l-Baha tended to talk in terms familiar to a Western audience makes a great deal of…

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HOW TO KNOW EVERYTHING

For Owen Allen’s Blog Owen’s Meanderings.

Owen's Meanderings

There is a concept in the facilitation of Baha’i Study, of elevated conversation. Elevated conversation is something that anyone can enter. It does require knowledge of certain things but, those things being known or understood, it is not necessary to be knowledgeable about other things and still be able to enter elevated conversation about those things.

Well those couple of sentences are, I am sure, just baffling. So lets look at it through a specific principle of the Baha’i Faith: religion and science are in harmony.

The first thing i would say is that, while scientific knowledge is useful for an elevated conversation around this principle, it is only that it can be a tool of elevated conversation, not a tool of scientific knowledge. This is a distinction that is important to make.

Let’s drill down into the ideas.

Conversation can be described as being in play with another or…

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Jeanette Lock

Such a great archive of stories being built here, would be so great to see more blogs like this across the world.

Family Poems (14/16): Memas

Everybody Means Something

After recently posting Unfinished Business in response to Sue Vincent’s book addiction post, and finally managing to finish Reading in the Park after only five decades, it struck me that it might be useful to post the family related poems, not in chronological order of composition, which is how they have appeared so far, but in a sequence that better reflects their chronological sequence in autobiographical time. I started last Monday with the first one after Unfinished Business, as that was posted so recently. The rest are following at the rate of a poem a day.

Memas

In Panchgani
in the cold front room
of the small cottage
which she didn’t own
she lay still
under the white sheet
beneath the crimson and green
of the freshly cut
half-opened rose
with her headscarf tight
against the breeze
from the open window
still in the pale flowered brown dress
she always wore for travelling

there…

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Reading Purrfection

Do all those mixed-race couples on TV count for anything?

This is from the Fruit Tree Blog

Like I’ve discussed a few times on this blog (like here and here), the past couple years have not been America’s proudest in terms of race relations. Regardless of whether you feel the nation’s actual situation has worsened, or rather that greater transparency and awareness are revealing more clearly how bad that situation has always been, one thing is for sure; Americans are feeling a greater level of anxiety around race than they did just a few years ago. A Gallup poll recently found that 35% of respondents worry “a great deal” about race relations in the country, the most since the organization started asking the question 15 years ago.

The great irony here is that even as Americans’ collective anxiety over race has risen, our society’s most vital institution — the nuclear family — is more racially integrated than ever before. A generation ago, about one-in-a hundred babies…

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