As a human being, we belong to LIFE.

“The burden of being black and the burden of being white is so heavy that it is rare in our society to experience oneself as a human being. It may be that to experience oneself as a human being is one with experiencing one’s fellows as human beings. Precisely what does it mean to experience oneself as a human being? In the first place, it means that the individual must have a sense of kinship to life that transcends and goes beyond the immediate kinship of family or the organic kinship that binds him ethnically or ‘racially’ or nationally. He has to feel that he belongs to his total environment. As a human being, then, he belongs to life and the whole kingdom of life that includes all that lives and perhaps, also, all that has ever lived. In other words, he sees himself as a part of a continuing, breathing, living existence. To be a human being, then, is to be essentially alive in a living world . . . Community cannot feed for long on itself; it can only flourish where always the boundaries are giving way to the coming of others from beyond them – unknown and undiscovered brothers. For this is why we were born: People, all people, belong to each other, and he who shuts himself away diminishes himself, and he who shuts another away from him destroys himself. And all the people said Amen.”

Howard Thurman
1899-1981

Spiritual advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.