diversity

May 2023 (Vol. XXXVI, No. 5)

Dear Friends ~ Wherever you are in this world, greetings and thank you for your generous donations helping us bring Nan's letter to you. We warmly invite you to sit comfortably, breathe deeply. Look around and within, up and down, over, under, and out. Notice the diversity before your eyes. There's diversity of vistas and horizons, smells and tastes, and the abundant flora and fauna blanketing this earth. Diversity is immediately apparent, openly offering its manifold and minute gifts. We see it in the flowers, trees, and landscapes. We feel it in music, dress, and cultures the world over. We may seek it in myriad cuisines. We marvel in our crayon boxes of the many skin tones humans inhabit. If we are lucky, we live diversity in our relationships, personal, local, and global. I feel particularly blessed in the diversity of our own family, in which the divine provided five children, all now grown: Asian, African American, three born to us, white Irish and German parents.

Diversity is the magic

Diversity is the magic. It is the first manifestation, the first beginning of the differentiation of a thing and of simple identity. The greater the diversity, the greater the perfection.

~ Thomas Berry in THE DREAM OF THE EARTH

Our ability to reach unity in diversity

Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Understanding the Different Types of Diversity in the Workplace

In the modern working world, we define diversity as a concerted effort to accommodate the full spectrum of human experience.

~ Blaise Radley from "Understanding the Different Types of Diversity in the Workplace" on the workday.com blog

Psalm 148

Leaders of the nations and all peoples,
young and old,
Give praise! Unite together in all
your diversity,
that peace and harmony might
flourish on earth.

~ Nan Merrill from her interpretation of "Psalm 148" in PSALMS FOR PRAYING

One song

All religions
All this singing
One song

~ Rumi in RUMI'S LITTLE BOOK OF THE HEART

The one true thing we all have in common

Diversity is the one true thing we all have in common... Celebrate it every day.

~ Winston Churchill

A beautiful mosaic

We have become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.

~ Jimmy Carter from "Jimmy Carter 95th Birthday" in Newsweek magazine

Revelations 7:9

I saw before me a huge crowd which no one could count from every nation and tongue. They stood before the throne and the Lamb, dressed in long white robes and holding palm branches in their hands...They said, Amen! Praise the glory, wisdom and thanksgiving and honor, power and might to our God forever.

~ Revelations 7:9 in THE NEW AMERICAN BIBLE

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams
for if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

~ Langston Hughes, "Dreams" in THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES
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