“Professor O’Malley’s Dorm Room”

All anyone could find in it:
a bed lumpy with books
old essays by students
old books
by former students
old checks
from students repaying loans
never cashed
—————————————-
“He was a university professor who ‘never earned a doctorate, taught a graduate seminar, or wrote a book’ He never married and, after entering Notre Dame as a freshman, never again lived outside a campus [...]

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radiance

“God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.”
Dag Hammarskjold, Markings
quoted in This Sunrise of Wonder by Michael [...]

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“Window Ledge in the Atom Age”

I have a bowl of paper whites,
Of paper-white narcissus;
Their fragrance my whole soul delights,
They smell delissus.
(They grow in pebbles in the sun
And each is like a star.)
I sit and scan the news hard by
My paper-white narcissus;
I read how fast a plane can fly,
Against my wissus.
(The course of speed is almost run,
We know not where we [...]

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water

“… any reasonable person who looks at water, and passes a hand through it, can see that it would not hold a person up…  But swimmers know that if they relax on the water it will prove to be miraculously buoyant…”
William Stafford
from Writing the Australian Crawl 

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“a certain way of life”

“War is not an accident.
It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life.”
             A. J. Muste
            The Essays of A. J. Muste edited by Nat Hentoff
for more on the subject of peace, please see my olive leaves blog at <oliveleaves.wordpress.com>

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“a flower in the parking lot of The Pentagon”

 
Poetry
Its door opens near. It’s a shrine
by the road, it’s a flower in the parking lot
of The Pentagon, it says, “Look around,
listen. Feel the air.” It interrupts
international telephone lines with a tune.
When traffic lines jam, it gets out
and dances on the bridge. If great people
get distracted by fame they forget
this essential kind of breathing
and they [...]

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Peace people

   “At the beginning of the Peace People movement, some of us started out to change Northern Ireland and the world. In the years since, I have come to believe that the real struggle starts in my own heart and in all our own hearts and that ‘inner change’ should be the first priority in [...]

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Culture of Peace

(this is from an email that I received today)
How do you join the global movement for a culture of peace?

The Culture of Peace Movement is not an organization. All you have to do is decide to make ‘building a culture of peace’ your goal. Every effort for a better world makes a difference when we [...]

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The Learned Blacksmith

All that I have accomplished…
 has been by that plodding, patient, persevering process
 of accretion which builds the ant heap
 particle by particle,
 thought by thought,
 fact by fact.
                          Elihu Burritt (The Learned Blacksmith)

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