O Thou, cut down in me this hour and every
hour the swift growing tree of self-regard
which screens me from the needs of others.
Fill me with the realization that for these
few swift years I am put here on earth,
I am lent to be spent in the service of others.
In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each [person] a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.
~ Dag Hammarskjold in MARKINGS