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Steffen here offers us little stories of small but significant “happenings” in life, sometimes dreamlike, sometimes right from outer life. These gemlike word pictures distilled from utterly transformed life experience combine the vividness of myth with the moral depth of biblical parables. They can serve as thoughtful daily inspirations. Illustrated partly with Steffen’s own drawings. Poet’s Honey One morning you chanced to observe a tiny bee that bore on its little legs big bunches of pollen, and these from blossoms that had a bitter taste. But in the honey you don’t notice that bitterness anymore. Just as little as in a poet’s word – evil experience. Albert
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If you feel melancholy and dejected, you need only look at the sky, and as soon as you conceive this immensity again, the primal force within the soul reappears.... I love to look upon the meadows, lakes, and arabesques of the trees, but I always return to the blue of the sky because that is the most blessed for my eyes.... Do you realize that the harmony which streams out from the azure can be cultivated by drinking in this blue, by giving yourself up to it alone, and turning away from everything else? “Today, I have not taken in enough blue,” you could say, if you wanted to test in some measure the impatience and lack of concentration within you; and in order to be freed from these disturbing influences you need only gaze upwards for awhile. Albert
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Constancy After all the discussions, quarrels and insults which you had listened to at the meeting, you went home and in your own room seemed to yourself lonelier than ever. You asked your-self: “Are we then a community at all anymore?” To answer this conscientiously you realized that it was necessary first to become quite still within your soul. So you imagined to yourself that at this late hour of the night, not only the room which you had left, but also your own inner self which had experienced there such turmoil, were now completely empty. Within and without, all was cleared away. Even all light was extinguished. Having closed your eyes, you had only with your senses fallen asleep, and in spirit were yet more awake than by day. No impression, no memory! Nothing. Whereupon you beheld above you a crystal form, from which a rosy flood of light poured forth. And you knew instantly the source of this super-earthly brightness. It was the spiritual will to remain true, which in spite of all the conflicts still held sway within this community. Albert Steffen, |
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We would be less perturbed over the great catastrophes of mankind, over the pogroms and civil wars, over crime of all kinds, if we studied the faces which gaze at the bill-boards and headlines. There is an account of a murder case, for instance. The murderer is depicted. A warrant is issued for him. One person wishes to see him hanged, or is happy that he has escaped, another secretly hopes that he will alter his clothing and hair so that no one will recognize him; or perhaps someone even equips him with money and weapons in his imagination. All such fluctuating thoughts come and go without our being conscious of them. And already our gaze is caught by a new sensation. We are inwardly taken possession of by everything out of such superficiality. Here is where karmic thought should enter in: What will eventually become of this human being, quite irrespective of whether he is caught or not? Albert
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