One morning in my garden I asked God to bless every living thing. And God asked, "But what is not a living thing?"

First of all I thought of air-invisible, inert. But the air leapt into my mouth and became my living breath. The air became the red of my blood and in the secret furnace of my cells the air became the fire of life itself.

Then I thought of water-colorless, inert. But drinking the water, I thought, "What is this body that drank the water? Is it not itself mainly water? This water that I drank is now the essence of my blood and tissues. When, then, is water merely water and when is it water of life?"

Then I thought of earth-brown, inert. "Earth, "I thought, "is not living, "and I kicked at the clods under my feet turned green and put forth leaf and stem and flower and the grain ripened in the ear. I took the ear, ground it, made bread out of it, and ate the bread. And the bread became the very stuff of myself, so that I could not separate that which was me and that which was earth. This which now was me had but a short time before been the clods of earth that I had kicked with my feet.

"Surely, "I thought, "there is something that is not living. "I thought of stones. But even with the thought I sensed the stirring in the stone, and I knew that the immovable, changeless stones were changing and moving, flowing no less than rivers, to become the living pith and bone of creatures yet unborn.

Oh, then I caught a vision of the world- not as dead and inert, but as living and alive!

Suddenly I saw that even the infinitesimal particles of which all things are formed- too small even to imagine, too small almost to conceive- are alive. I watched and I saw that they were dancing; I listened and I heard them singing.

I saw all the world of which I am part, and I saw that it is life, nothing but life. Everything is alive and has the power of life. Things pass from one phase to another, from one form to another, but they are always alive. There is no line between living and not living. Both are aspects of life, as breathing in and breathing out are aspects of breath. There is only the breathing in and the breathing out again.

We move through a world of opposites, but the opposites are not the reality, they are only aspects of reality. They are only reality as seen from this viewpoint- or that. The reality is One, and it is Life.

I thought of some of the opposites- of night and day, of evil and good, of hate and love. I asked Night, "What is Day?" And the Night answered, "I am Day,only seen from the other side."

I thought of living and not living, and I saw that life is not the opposite of death, as it is generally thought to be. Birth is the opposite of death. Is death then but the same door as birth, only seen from the other side?

Now we can see things only from where we stand. Can it be that we see only one side of all that is, as we see the moon?

Ah, if we could see life not from the viewpoint of the moment, but in the radiance of eternity!

We would see not night and day, but eternity; not yea and nay, but truth; not birth and death, but life; not good and evil, but God.

We are the namers. We give names to all things and try to describe them.

But when is a rose a rose?

When is it a seed? when it is a new plant green with spring? when it is a heart-shaped bud? when it is a full-blown bloom? when it stands thorn sharp against the winter snow?

The universe is the rose of God.

The universe is not the fixed and finished work of a Master Maker, who made it and the things in it as a watchmaker makes a watch. The universe is a living organism, unfolding from within, creatively expressing the creative Spirit of God, from the smallest particle to the largest galaxy continually breathing, growing, expanding through space and time and mind and spirit, with no end or limit to the possibility of development.

And I, too, am the rose of God.

When was I, am I, shall I be?

Of this that is my body now, how much was my body a year ago? Of the stuff that was my body twenty years ago, does a single atom remain the same?

As to my mind, nebulous, delicate, subtle, dancing with thoughts, how shall I make my thoughts stand still long enough for me to say, "This is my mind"? This very thought has altered the configuration.

Now from the viewpoint of the moment, I see my existence as an isolated fragment, beginning, ending; but, could I but look from the fixed center of being and take in the whole reach of reality, I would see that what seems to be a broken arc is really the perfect circle of eternity.

Is this what the Lord of living saw when He hung upon the mount? From that anguished, ultimate peak of experience, did He see things not one-sidedly but whole? Did He look past endings and beginnings, past every appearance of separateness, clear to the Animating Principle, and did He see that the Animating Principle was Himself?

And we, when we see things whole, shall we, too, not share the wholeness?

O living air, earth, water, breath, blood, flesh, O metamorphosing rocks, there is no begining and ending, there is no living and not living. There is only the ever-renewing, ever-unfolding expression of infinite life.

Walking in my garden, I asked God to bless every living thing.

Even as I asked, I knew that in all the world there was not one atom that did not leap up in acknowledgment.