It feels like being married is also the nest step in striving for excellent for the sake of another human being. As a child, you want to make your parents happy. If you are as lucky as I am, your parents are happy when you strive to become a better person. As you grow up, you want to make your peers happy. Again, I was lucky that the good friends outweighed in quality the number of bad ones.

But in neither of these cases is the “dependency” as strong as in the imagine of the two trees. If I am a bad child, my parents will not be held responsible before God. They are only going to be held responsible before God for how well they played their role as parent. And although in the future, as a mother, I will greatly influence my children’s spiritual growth (God help them), they are not as dependent on me as is my husband. That is to say, my children can become amazing, strong trees on their own even if I am a weak tree.

But my husband is the one who will be most affected by my spiritual progress or regress: the strength of his tree is intimately related to the strength of mine in a way that no one else’s is or ever will be. This of course makes the process of investigating a potential spouse’s character during the time they are dating so much more important, serious and scared; you are not only choosing a person to spend eternity with, but whose spiritual growth you will become interdependent with.

Drawing by Florence Fudakowska, January 2012

Friend: “Wow, Sahar, you look so relaxed!”
Me: “Wait, what?”
Friend: “You are always in such a good mood!”
Me: “Excuse me, what?”
Friend: “How do you stay so calm?”
Me: “Are you talking to me?”

That last one is not meant to be rude – I really am perplexed by these friends of mine. You see, I have been going through a lot of pressure lately on many fronts, and I feel anything but always relaxed, cheerful or calm. But apparently, that is the impression I have been giving off, and I think I might have figured out why: because I have been using more and more mantras, and they have actually been helping.

I discovered a couple of years ago the power of using mantras. Digging into older blog entries, I’m surprised that the only mention of this love of mine was in reference to the time, a couple of years ago, when I sprained my ankle. I use mantras all the time but I have been using the following one a lot lately, as it helps me take a step back and deal with things in a healthy way: “Perseverance makes things happen.  Perseverance tempered with humility makes the right things happen. Perseverance tempered in humility placed in the shadow of wisdom makes the right thing happen in the right way.”

I back up these mantras the inspiring stories that hit close to home. As a Bahá’í of Persian background, it might come to no surprise that the story I carry in my heart at all times to remind myself of the power of perseverance tempered with humility placed in the shadow of wisdom is that of the Bahá’ís in Iran. These individuals are persevering in their pursuit of justice. However, they are not doing so in a combative fashion, nor because they think they are better than others. Rather, they firmly believe that justice for all, even themselves, is a fundamental human right. They also firmly believe in respecting the authorities, which is why all recourses taken are legal.

Mantras are awesome – and for now, they are working wonders for me. Hopefully they don’t come with an expiry date!

During the study circle, one participant and I thoroughly enjoyed the imagery of the insistent self as a mole that keeps popping up and that we must continually whack down. But however much that image still makes me smile, and however much I relate to it (seeing the years I have been trying to whack my ego in place!), I have come to realize that perhaps one of the reasons for my inability to better control my ego is exactly because of this idea: that only violently the ego can be put in its place.

But perhaps a better image can be found in the Harry Potter series. What if the ego is like the three headed dog, rearing its heads and blocking us from our very own Chamber? If we learn to play the music of God’s Word, translating It into action, the dogs will be put to sleep and we will be successful in attaining that innermost Chamber, in which we will find God shining within us.

Little did I know how big this project would become, and how relatively small a portion had to do with photography.

The Journey West commemorates in a very unique way the centenary of the visit of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, an Eastern religious leader, to selected countries in Europe and North America, both to visit Bahá’ís living there as well as to present the newest world religion of which He was the Head to an international audience. It includes pictures of the times, of course, as well as posts about the actual travels, posts describing the various elements of the environment that existed at the time, and essays on the topics ‘Abdu’l-Bahá covered in His many public talks. It also includes a podcast; each one goes over one of the talks ‘Abdu’l-Bahá gave at the time on topics that were quite avant-garde.

While at a first glance, it might seem that only two populations would be interested in these travels, i.e. historians and Bahá’ís, a closer inspection of the context of these travels and what they accomplished in a very short span of time (in a pre-internet era, no less!) reveals that anyone interested in contributing to the advancement of humanity should study how, with limited funds, no formal education and a body broken by over 40 years of exile and imprisonment, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá managed to make the impact that He did.

As Lorraine explained, “around the time the trip was taken, circa 1893, there was a shift in perception about religion in the United States. A congress had just been held where, for the first time in history, different religious leaders were on a very large public stage together to start an interfaith dialog.” The public was receptive to new ideas on religions from the East, seen as a source of spiritual inspiration.

What if we stopped this guilt-tripping culture? What if we embraced who we are, stop fighting it, and instead spend our energy on becoming who we want to be?

Intriguing, is it not?

The more intriguing question is why? I have the impression that this phenomenon is related to a couple of things, including:

• Sympathy: when one who is usually in a good mood is not doing so well, others might want to contribute to that person’s well-being by giving them the gift of going above and beyond.

• A warped definition of power: typically, people in power are portrayed as in a perpetual foul mood. When someone is in a bad mood, one can’t help but associate, be it subconsciously, one’s colleague to a person in a position of power, to whom we never say no to.

• Fear of confrontation: if we say no to a person in a foul mood, there is an increased chance that we will be confronted with a not-very-happy retort.

Whatever the reason may be, this phenomena does not have its place in modern-day society. It is sad that some people are often said no to, until, not receiving the support from our colleagues that we are supposed to get, our mood turns sour. Only then do we get some portion of the help we were meant to get in the first place – but at what cost?

Perhaps an innovative way of preventing drinking and driving is by analyzing why people who do not drink and drive choose the safer, more responsible path. And underlying the sense of responsibility will most probably be found a deep respect for human life, the kind that would make it unthinkable to put it at risk.

I wonder what would happen if the money put into drinking and driving scare campaigns went instead into developing community service projects for those caught drinking and driving. Not your typical, clean-the-highway community service, but rather one that contribute to the long-term, step by step improvement of the community: tutoring children in a certain subject, playing games with the elderly, delivering groceries to the sick, the elderly or to mothers with too much to do. Maybe the bonds created between the people in a community would become so strong that putting them in danger by drinking and driving would be unfathomable?

You can find the second review to my book here. Now please excuse me while I go squeal. Sleeping babies, I apologize in advance for waking you up.

The day has finally come! You can check out the first review to The Spirit Within Club here.

You can probably imagine how excited I am