Patty Smith – the queen if rock – sang her song (2004) “Peaceable Kingdom” at Stephen Colbert’s Late Show last night. I have always liked the poster of the painting “Peaceable Kingdom” we have hanging on our wall at home. But I often see it and wonder: How could we have peace today? What would a pluralistic peaceable world look like?

A found in my research about Hicks a very inspiring ongoing collaborative art project, Our Peaceable Kingdom, by Lee Mingwei’s. He writes:

The resonance between Hicks’ Quaker vision of peace and the questions I was asking in my own work felt urgent. What does peace look like today? Can it be plural, tender, even contradictory? Hicks’ Peaceable Kingdom offered not a conclusion, but a quiet proposition: that peace is not agreement, but the radical act of coexisting with difference.

Patty Smith’s song Peaceable Kingdom

Patty Smith at Late Night Show with Stephen Colbert.