Private corners

It’s so much fun reading my daughter’s blogs. She challenged herself to write 30 blogs in 30 days, so there’s a continual flow of yummy stuff to read. And it amazes me how differently we remember things. Not just the experiences of her childhood. Everything.

Throughout her adult life we have spent a lot of time together. Rooming together, working in the same restaurant, performing together professionally, hanging out with card playing friends at coffee houses, sharing an eye-opening series of candid discussions about race unity, serving together as elected members of a Bahá'í spiritual assembly, starting various joint projects and ventures. Sometimes happy with each other, sometimes not.

Yet although so many of her blogs are about times and places and events in her life that are also my times and places and events, her memories of them are very different than mine. More proof that we – all human beings -- each live in our own private universe. I think my daughter and I should put a book together, or rather separately together. List a bunch of our shared experiences, then each go off to our own corners and write about them.

Wait a minute, why does that idea sound familiar? Riiiiiight, we’re already doing that. It’s called blogging!

Now, this minute, we are preparing to launch our most ambitious project yet. It’s a children’s theatre company associated with a New York City group of the same name. We’re calling our local chapter Soul Miners, based on a statement made by Bahá'u'lláh: “Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom.”

Probably the easiest way to describe this activity is to borrow a phrase from the New York City company and say that our goal is to build character on stage. Following their highly successful model, we will be providing Saturday afternoon theatre arts schools built on a foundation of spiritual education. Or moral education. Or virtues education. However it’s described, the core lessons for the six-to-ten-year-old students will be to know that they were created noble by a loving God, to understand that their highest calling is service and contributing to mankind’s well-being, and to appreciate the essential unity of message in all the great world religions.

And we’ll be aiming for as much diversity as possible in this and subsequent classes – racial diversity, religious, economic, whatever – which will provide great casts for the production of original musicals from the New York group’s award-winning repertoire.

We almost didn’t get started at all. The sheer volume of “how to” information that our New York mentor gave us, and the size and scope and complexity of that 10-year-old project, temporarily paralyzed us into frightened inaction. I might have stayed paralyzed forever, but my daughter, who’s better than me at cutting to the core of things, declared that we would have to just begin very small, very simply, and let the mission develop and grow over time. With that decision made, we were finally able to set a firm starting date and take action to recruit students, teachers, and volunteers.

In another situation I recently heard someone say, “ We are building the ship as we cross the ocean.” I immediately thought of Soul Miners. Yes! I said to myself. That’s exactly what we are doing.

What an exciting journey this will be. What magnificent gems we will help to mine. What wonderful stories we will share. And someday when we talk or write about this experience, no doubt we will each relate a very different version of what happened.

And we’ll both be right.

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