THE JOURNEY TO BABA IS FROM Here TO HERE

 
The Winterfeldts had a Baba quote hanging on the wall in their living room: "... It is a divine art to look always cheerful; it helps others." That's very much the way they lived. Fred and Ella were so indissolubly intertwined as a couple that Meher Baba referred to them as "FredElla." Together they formed one heart in two bodies, devoted solely to their Beloved Baba and the service of His lovers....

Fred wanted me to come to their Monday night meeting and give a talk, my first Baba talk, to the group in New York City. I was extremely reticent. I was a bearded twenty-two-year-old, while most of the people there were around the age then that I am now and looked far more conventional than I did. I didn't know any of them, and I really didn't want to give a talk, but Fred insisted. "Baba would want you to do this," he said.

I got up in front of all those people and said, "The journey to Baba is from here to here." I gestured from my head to my heart. Then I sat down. That was my first Baba talk....

It was just before Christmas, and I had spent months hitchhiking alone across Europe and Asia, except for the times I spent aboard a ship. Meeting Baba had been such an intensely personal experience, and I had no way of voicing that at the time to all these people, full of New York energy and Christmas cheer. I felt I was in an alien world. But Fred and Ella were just magnificent, two remarkable people....

In some ways being with them, too was a sahavas. And thinking that, I was reminded of something Francis Brabazon had said to me at Meherazad. He used the metaphor of the tortoise and the hare, saying the hares were all going to come by the jet plane, but the tortoise came overland and succeeded in the goal of reaching Meher Baba. He said, "Robert, you are the 1965 Sahavas."