0
1 Except for my work with the International Baha’i community
Yes, you can learn all about this
in the world of palaeobotany, or
in a newspaper or on TV—all to
the level of your capacity and
interest. If, as it is often said,
people prefer entertainment to
edification and put a premium
on personality at the expense of
issues, they can get a quick TV-
hit of that first flower and tree
back in the cretaceous period--
Cainozoic era in their fragmentary
forms: leaves, stems and branches,
stems, trunks, pollen, spores, seeds--
all old ancestors in the evolutionary
story of flowers back to dinosaur times.
But now, growing in this new age, a new
flower has begun to bloom compared to
which all other flowers are but thorns;
and, yes, a tree is now growing in the
world of existence: its boughs and its
branches, its stems and its offshoots,
its leaves and its trunk will endure as
long as those most august attributes
and most excellent titles will last,1
attributes and titles of that essence
which the wisdom of the wise and
the learning of the learned can not
comprehend--will never understand.
1 Baha’u’llah, Baha’i Prayers, Wilmette, 1985, p.233.
Ron Price
16 April 2008
