Dr. Ruby Dunlap’s Ugunda Fulbright Blog
Along the stone retaining wall outside our apartment is a row of snowy white daylilies. That is, I call them daylilies because of their leaf, stem and bud shapes. If not actually a daylily, they must be close kin to the daylily tribe. The flowers start out as a daylily bloom, a suggestion of a white trumpet on a slender stalk. But then the Designer of this flower changed His mind. Instead of the expected trumpet shape, the flower turns into a loose fringe of white, the petals going abruptly from wide to narrow in a graceful drape. I do not know which gives me more pleasure, the recognition of a familiar plant type or an unexpected variation in that type. This daylily illustrates my conviction that our appreciation of diversity needs to be anchored in an appreciation of unity. Otherwise, diversity becomes mere difference and mere difference seems to me to degenerate easily into competitive hostility among differences.

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