The Frisbee: A Spiritual Contemplation

SPINNING TRAJECTORIES

The Frisbee was marketed in 1959. It was originally called the Flyin' Saucer and was marketed with that name by the Wham-O-Company in 1957. It immediately became a nationwide craze. That same year, 1959, I became a Baha'i. I was fifteen. Far from creating a craze, the Baha'i Faith in the 1950s was a 'few-and-far-between' phenomenon. There were, perhaps, 800 Baha'is in all of Canada in 1959. I was the only youth in my town of Burlington with a population of about 6000 at the time. There was a small handful of, arguably, two dozen youth in their teens and twenties in all of southern Ontario at the time. -Ron Price with thanks to "Inventions: Information from the Fifties," Internet, 31 January 2002.

And we've been spinning ever since....

me and the Frisbee, round and round,

always aiming and being aimed,

sometimes floating high

and out of reach,

wide of the mark,

way over their head

and at other times

right into the palm of their hands,

always hoping to float right in there.

Floating is so much easier,

as unrestrained as the wind,

didn't He say that somewhere?

It's been quite popular

all across the land,

easy to market,

spinning its way into people's hearts,

giving them fun, pleasure.

Now this other item

spinning me about

these many years,

is going to take a little longer

to be a craze.

This one's not about

going round and round

in quite the same way.

The spinning trajectory

involves the whole planet

and takes more time

than an instant on

a sunny afternoon.

This one takes a lifetime,

perhaps eternity.

Ron Price

1 February 2002