Autumn Chant by US poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950),

“Now the autumn shudders
In the rose’s root,
Far and wide the ladders
Lean among the fruit.

Now the autumn clambers
Up the trellised frame
And the rose remembers
The dust from which it came.

Brighter than the blossom
On the rose’s bough
Sits the wizened orange,
Bitter berry now;

Beauty never slumbers;
All is in her name;
But the rose remembers
The dust from which it came.”

From Ellam Ondre (All is One), written in the 19th Century, by an anonymous author, in Tamil, and translated into English by K. Lakshmana Sarma, in 1951,

“All including the world seen by you and yourself, the seer of the world, is one only. All that you consider as I, you, he, she and it, is one only. What you consider to be sentient beings and what you consider to be insentient, such as earth, air, fire and water is all one.

The good which is derived by your considering all as one cannot be had by considering each as separate from the other. The knowledge of the unity of all, is good for you and good for others as well. Therefore all is one.

He who sees “I am separate,” “you are separate,” “he is separate” and so on, acts one way to himself and another way to others. He cannot help doing so. The thought “I am separate, others are separate” is the seed from which grows the tree of differing actions in relation to different persons. How can there be any lapse from righteousness for a person who knows the unity of himself with others? As long as the germ of differentiation is there, the tree of differing actions will flourish, even unawares. Therefore give up differentiation. All is one only.

Ask: “If in the world all things appear different, how can I consider all as one? Is there any way of gaining this knowledge?” The reply is: “In the same tree we see leaves, flowers, berries and branches, different from one another, yet they are all one because they are all included in the word ‘tree’. Their root is the same; their sap is the same. Similarly, all things, all bodies, all organisms are from the same source and activated by a single life principle.” Therefore all is one…

The knower of unity will act as one should. In fact, the knowledge of unity makes him act. He cannot err. In the world, he is God made visible. All is one.”

Mysteries, Yes by Mary Oliver (1935 – 2019),

“Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.
How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.”

“Matter is energy (light) whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter…
We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the cosmos. We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.”
Albert Einstein, who presented his quantum theory of light on this day in 1908

From Earth Bound: Daily Meditations for All Seasons by Brian Nelson,
“As the autumn air grows chill, take this opportunity to become more mindful of the air itself. As David Abram writes in The Spell of the Sensuous, “the air is the most pervasive presence I can name, enveloping, embracing, and caressing me both inside and out.”
We swim in the air even more deeply than we swim in water; it bathes us as it slips into our lungs and fills our hearts. It refreshes us, calms us, even startles us at times. As you bundle up against the oncoming chill, roll your sleeves up every now and then so that you can feel the prickles of the cold air against your skin, reminders of the invisible realm that gives us life.”

“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, American Unitarian social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early women’s rights movement, born on this day in 1815

From All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
“Comrade, I did not want to kill you… But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony — Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother.”

“The dog is the most faithful of animals and would be much esteemed were it not so common. Our Lord God has made His greatest gifts the commonest.”
Martin Luther, theologian and instigator of the Reformation, born on this day in 1483

“I wonder why space and emptiness are almost always seen as loss, as missed opportunity, as the unknown in need of labelling. Yet nothing much can ever happen without them. Rather are they the necessary conditions and context for imagination and understanding. Without the blank margins on this page, or the spaces between the letters of each word, you could not read it. Without the small silences between the notes, we would never hear a melody. Space is not a vacuum. Dark space, like mystery, is where the tomb becomes the womb, where the light is let in.

I remembered a conversation I had with Vincente, the architect who built our most beautiful Church of St Benedict in East Leeds a few years ago. Behind the altar and the presidential chair we created a huge, totally empty wall. Parishioners thought we had forgotten something. Everyone wanted to pin a meaning on it – a figure, a banner, a text, a cross. Vincente talked to me about the potential for worship in the concept of space; about creating a building in which all that was unnecessary was excluded; about simplifying a church so that the emptiness could be made meaningful only by the infinite. The invisible has the strongest presence of all..
When it comes to understanding the essence of the Gracious Mystery, silent space and empty nothingness have long been at the heart of the Church’s apophatic tradition – a non-negotiable reminder that all our descriptions of God will forever be well wide of the mark. The Gracious Mystery can never be confined in small places, in small images, in small liturgies. We are always tempted to lock God away in windowless tabernacles with low ceilings and high security; to pinpoint the divine presence with fallible compasses and dogmatic navigation systems. The Spirit of God will always need space to blow and dance where she will.”

Father Daniel O’Leary (1937 – 2019)

What the Day Gives by Quaker poet Jeanne Lohmann (1923 – 2016),

“Suddenly, sun. Over my shoulder
in the middle of gray November
what I hoped to do comes back,
asking.

Across the street the fiery trees
hold onto their leaves,
red and gold in the final months
of this unfinished year,
they offer blazing riddles..

In the frozen fields of my life
there are no shortcuts to spring,
but stories of great birds in migration
carrying small ones on their backs,
predators flying next to warblers
they would, in a different season, eat.

Stunned by the astonishing mix in this uneasy world
that plunges in a single day from despair
to hope and back again, I commend my life
to Ruskin’s difficult duty of delight,
and to that most beautiful form of courage,
to be happy.”