Homeschool World Forum

[RonPrice]

Q: After you have talked a great deal and listened as you must do as a lecturer at a college each week do you find this helps the poetic process?

Price: The main affect it has after more than thirty years of going into classrooms and loungerooms for various kinds of meetings is to make me want my silence back desperately. That balance between the solitary and solidarity that Rollo May talks about is something I've begun to seek more seriously. In fact retired from teaching at the age of 55 after 50 years of going into classrooms for one reason or another. Now I seek out the silence of the solitary for an indefinite period.

"Excess of speech is a deadly poison" says Baha'u'llah. I feel as if I have had an excess of that speech. My career has been rewarding, enriching, very meaningful; my experience in Baha'i communities generally richly diverse; but the time came 8 years ago for a change. Who knows? I'm nearing the retirement age of 65 in Australia and I began that silence of retirement a little earlier. Optimism and hopefulness get somewhat tarnished after more than four decades of extensive talking and listening. I think my poetry has been born in this observed experience, in a certain weariness and doubt and this tarnished optimism.
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married for 37 years, a teacher for 35 years and a Baha'i for 48 years.