Poems, Paintings, Sculptures, Analects, Prophecies, Plays, Quotes, Axioms, Photographs....

From Parabola:

ARCS

Dag Hammarskjöld outside the UN building (1953).

‎“You wake from dreams of doom and--for a moment--you know: beyond all the noise and the gestures, the only real thing, love's calm unwavering flame in the half-light of an early dawn.” 

―Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

Be sure to read IN ONE PART OF THE BURNING WORLD by Roger Lipsey: Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations, and Tibet in the Spring issue. 

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Cecil Beaton, Aldous Huxley, vintage bromide print on white card mount, 1936

“The world is an illusion, but it is an illusion, which we must take seriously, because it is real as far as it goes, and in those aspects of the reality, which we are capable of apprehending. Our business is to wake up. We have to find ways in which to detect the whole of reality in the one illusory parts which our self-centered consciousness permit us to see. We must not live thoughtlessly, taking our illusion for the complete reality, but at the same time we must not live too thoughtfully in the sense of trying to escape from the dream state. We must continually be on the watch for ways in which we may enlarge our consciousness, we must not attempt to live outside the world, which is given us, but we must somehow learn how to transform it and transfigure it. Too much ‘wisdom’ is as bad as too little wisdom, and there must be no magic tricks. We must learn to come to reality without the enchanter’s wand and his book of the words. One must find a way of being in this world while not being of it. A way of living in time without being completely swallowed up in time.”
―Aldous Huxley "Shakespeare and His Religion." An essay, the last Huxley wrote (it was actually dictated on his death bed), was published in Show Magazine in 1964 soon after his death. It was reprinted in Huxley and God: Essays, 1992 by Harper Collins.

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Olive Cotton, Grass at Sundown, 1939

“You are so young; you stand for beginnings. I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will, gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. Perhaps you are indeed carrying within yourself the potential to visualize, to design, and to create for yourself an utterly satisfying, joyful, and pure lifestyle. Discipline yourself to attain it, but accept that which comes to you with deep trust, and as long as it comes from your own will, from your own inner need.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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William P. Silva (1859-1948), The Sun Dispels the Morning Fog

The Word

Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,

between “green thread”
and “broccoli” you find
that you have penciled “sunlight.”

Resting on the page, the word
is as beautiful, it touches you
as if you had a friend

and sunlight were a present
he had sent you from some place distant
as this morning—to cheer you up,

and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing,

that also needs accomplishing
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue

but today you get a telegram,
from the heart in exile
proclaiming that the kingdom

still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,

—to any one among them
who can find the time,
to sit out in the sun and listen

—Tony Hoagland