"Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings" by Joy Harjo

Bless the poets, the workers for justice,
the dancers of ceremony, the singers of heartache,
the visionaries, all makers and carriers of fresh
meaning--we will all make it through,
despite politics and wars, despite failures
and misunderstandings. There is only love.

~ Joy Harjo, "Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings"

Peacemaking

“Avoiding conflict isn’t peacemaking. Avoiding conflict means running away from the mess while peacemaking means running into the middle of it.
Peacemaking means addressing those issues that caused conflict in the first place.
Peacemaking can never be separated from doing justice. They go hand in hand. Peacemaking means having to stir the waters on the way to peace.
Peacemaking means speaking the truth in love, but speaking the truth nonetheless."

~ Peggy Haymes from "Strugglers, Stragglers and Seekers"

Herman Hesse, "We must become so alone..."

"We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.”

~ Hermann Hesse

Peony, by Maureen, N. McLane

There’s a woman
walks through me
sits at the table
reading Rumi
You are in your body
as a plant is in the earth
yet you are yes the wind
and she is bending
into the wind her death
and she is a thin tree
and what she never saw
this peony.

~ Maureen N. McLane, "Peony"

The Body and the Earth by Wendell Berry

“What marriage offers - and what fidelity is meant to protect - is the possibility of moments when what we have chosen and what we desire are the same. Such a convergence obviously cannot be continuous. No relationship can continue very long at its highest emotional pitch. But fidelity prepares us for the return of these moments, which give us the highest joy we can know; that of union, communion, atonement (in the root sense of at-one-ment)...
To forsake all others does not mean - because it cannot mean - to ignore or neglect all others, to hide or be hidden from all others, or to desire or love no others. To live in marriage is a responsible way to live in sexuality, as to live in a household is a responsible way to live in the world. One cannot enact or fulfill one's love for womankind or mankind, or even for all the women or men to whom one is attracted. If one is to have the power and delight of one's sexuality, then the generality of instinct must be resolved in a responsible relationship to a particular person. Similarly, one cannot live in the world; that is, one cannot become, in the easy, generalizing sense with which the phrase is commonly used, a "world citizen." There can be no such think as a "global village." No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity. We thus come again to the paradox that one can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one's partiality."

~  Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays, 

(pg.117-118, "The Body and the Earth")

January by William Carlos Williams

Again I reply to the triple winds
running chromatic fifths of derision
outside my window:
                                          Play louder.
You will not succeed. I am
bound more to my sentences
the more you batter at me
to follow you.
                                           And the wind,
as before, fingers perfectly
its derisive music.

~ William Carlos Williams, "January"

"The Whole of Life" by Jiddu Krishnamurti

“You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.”

~  Jiddu Krishnamurti