The Old Woman Who Carried the Wood

The Master, the listeners record, would offer small stories about the dignity of ordinary working people. He drew them from His own observation in Persia and from the older Sufi tradition. They were brief, and they were never sentimental; the dignity He named was the actual dignity He had seen.

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In one such story an old woman of a Persian village walked, each week, seven *kos* — perhaps fifteen miles — to a stand of wood beyond the next village. She would gather a small load on her back, tie it with cord, and walk back. She did this in all weather. She had no son to do it for her; her husband had died many years before; the wood was needed for her cooking and her small heat in winter.

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A passing prince, riding through the village one afternoon, saw her returning under the load. He stopped his horse. He asked her, with the polite curiosity of a great man who has noticed something unusual, why she did not pay a man to carry the wood for her.

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She set the load down for a moment and looked at him. *I have no money for that, sir. The wood is my own back's labour.*

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The prince offered her a coin. She looked at it. She thanked him very gently and refused it. *If I take this from you, sir, I shall expect to take another from another lord next week. I have walked the road for forty years. The walking has kept me strong. I should be sorry to lose the road.*

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The prince watched her shoulder the load again and walk on, slowly, in the direction of her village. He sat on his horse for a long time. Then, the recorders preserve, he turned the horse and rode home.

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The Master would close the story without elaboration. The listeners would understand what He had not had to say. The dignity of the poor, He had often said in other forms, is not a thing the rich can purchase by relieving them; it is a thing already present in the upright walking under a load that has been carried for many years.

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The almsgiving the prince had been about to perform would have lessened, not increased, the dignity he had stopped to admire. The right action, in such cases, is the older work of building societies in which the wood is no longer needed at such a cost — and, in the meantime, the courteous bow that the prince finally gave the old woman from his horse before he turned and rode home.

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*Paraphrased from Stories Told by 'Abdu'l-Bahá (Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 2000); see original for full text.*

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