For some two weeks now I've been feeling quite under the weather. I know the weather here is quite mild but I'm learning that suffering is relative and when it doesn't get much colder than this morning's 9 degrees Celsius (I passed by a bank or something that read -9 degrees Celsius, which I'm sure was a gross exaggeration of what the temperature actually was, but not how it felt), people, including me, suffer. I made the unwise decision to go to dawn prayers at the Shrine of Baha'u'llah this morning - the windows were open, and I spent a lot of the time walking briskly along the paths throughout the gardens that surround the Shrine trying to get warm, because the visitors' center didn't open until 20 minutes before I was scheduled to leave.
After that I had my annual staff visit to the International Archives building - it's the smallest and oldest of the buildings so far constructed on the Arc (only the library remains unbuilt), it's the only one without offices at least in the building proper, and in my mind it has the most unique atmosphere. On the back wall is a large blue, red, and yellow stained-glass window. Nowhere else in the World Centre can such a window be found. The interior is a bit cold to aid in the preservation of the archives inside. Most fascinating to me are the preserved writings of the central figures of the faith - even though by now I can read Arabic and Persian scripts with some effort (and can comprehend minimal vocabulary), my skills don't really extend beyond reading the equivalent of Arial font, so I didn't even try to read the writings. Many of the letters in Arabic and Persian script have the same form and zero, one, two, or three dots above or below the line to indicate exactly which letter they are. A lot of the writings I saw today don't have any dots included yet they can still be read - by the ultra-lettered only. So I just appreciated their form, knowledge of who addressed them to whom and what they were about, and their often very, very beautiful illumination.
After that my body said no more and more or less forced me retreat to bimarestan (this is "hospital" in Farsi, but I use it here because it literally means "land of the sick", which I think can be applied to my bedroom). Hopefully, I'll feel better this week. I saw a naturopath last week who prescribed or suggested to me a large number of remedies, not for my current illness but for my general health. I described to him the problems I've been having with fatigue and irritability and he explained (without forcing the concept on me, I think because I radiate a faint air of "I'm not really that open to alternative medical methods so please don't try to give me any crap") that my diagnosis in traditional Chinese medicine would be "liver qi stagnation". Interesting. I've come upon a correlation between the irritability and the liver in the Baha'i writings:
"Envy consumeth the body and rage burneth the liver: avoid these two as ye would a fierce lion."
--from a provisional translation of the Lawh-i-Tibb or Tablet of Medicine by Baha'u'llah
I don't recall studying any connection between chronic anger or irritability and the health of the liver in nursing school, except that poor liver health is correlated with irritability through a third factor, alcoholism.
In any case, according to my accumulated medical knowledge none of these are harmful and I'm game for all of them, and I guess we'll see how they work out. It would be nice to come out of this as strong as an ox. I'm getting bored with the limited scenery my bedroom has to offer.
