Pioneering Over Four Epochs

Some time in the 1990s, a few years before retiring, when I had become literally exhausted from the combination of talking and listening involved in my chosen profession of teaching and my chosen religion, the Baha'i Faith, particularly in its community dimension, I saw a film called Field of Dreams. In 1999 I retired and in 2001 my son, Daniel, who had moved back home, bought a DVD video copy of this film. My son loved the film and I watched it with him at least twice or three times between 2001 and 2004. This poem is about that film, my experience of it and its metaphor of dream, of impossible dream and the pleasure it gave me at a critical moment in my life.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, March 8, 2004.

If you build it, he will come,

so went the words

to that farmer in Iowa

and so went the words to me

for the previous thirty years.1

And now, more than forty years,

into my own field of dreams

I know I must go the distance.

And I know I will, with all my failings,

inadequacies, weaknesses and strengths.

My cornfield is my writing--the place

where all my dreams come true.

For this writing is my place, home,

where my beliefs translate into reality

with its mixture of the mysterious,

the legendary, the reclusive activism

of my life--for I have grown tired

and I need a place to dream,

my impossible field of dreams,

where I can fulfil my heart's desire

on a magical and moving ride,2

where I can continue,

in my own way, to build it,

for I know He has come.

1 1959-1989: the years from my entry into the Baha'i Faith up until the public screening of Field of Dreams

2 David Ansen, Newsweek Magazine.

Ron Price

March 8 2004