For Emily

The beginning...

On the eve of yet more miles between us, I ponder this matter: that not all are so lucky to have a friend who will love them in spite of every flaw, listen to them as if they have just spoken the finest words the world has heard, and most importantly, remind them in the midst of difficulty that there is still good in the world, for you, my friend, are the unfailing good.

How funny it is to think about, that we have now been known to one another for more than eighteen years. My whole life, you have been the person who I have looked to for enduring understanding, patience, and compassion. Your intellect and curiosity have brought me to crave and seek the unknown, and your inherent goodness has proven to be both my refuge and a never ending lesson, the ultimate lesson that is, one which has demonstrated that though we can be many things in this world, perhaps most important is to be someone who cares for all others.

Alas, your adventure awaits you, and more days, more years, will soon come and go. But for my part, I will always be here to lend an ear and all my care. Finally, my dear friend, thank you for showing me what it means for two souls to exist in such harmony. 

The world awaits you as it always has, and more than anything, please remember what I know to be true: that you will continue to change the world for the better, simply by living in accordance with your matchless nature.

"Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams." ~Henry David Thoreau

... and there is no end.

On Explanations

We must continue to hope that one day our animal friends may know what it means to be free.

As I packed my final boxes one Monday afternoon, preparing for my move from a summer in Brooklyn back to college in the Berkshires, a friend and I conversed over the matter of the determination of advocates and activists. How is it that one person feels the urgency of a cause so deeply, and is thus compelled to live their life in pursuit of the rectification of that one single wrong, while another person turns away and cares little to naught about the very same evil?

Stephen King once wrote that, “the battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day.” This, I believe, does also beg the question at hand: What ultimately destines us to one or the other side in this epic battle? Is it a cosmic force, chance, a deliberate choice, a compulsion, or something altogether distinct from any of these?

Who truly knows the answer to this question? I have searched in vain for quite awhile now. Tired of the absence of any substantive, satisfying, or at all convincing answer, we began musing on the array of possibilities that nevertheless must exist. That’s when it came to me.

Perhaps those who speak for animals, when so many others remain silent among the animals’ harrowing reality, perhaps these individuals speak because they know. Maybe it could be that there is a memory in their soul from a life they used to know, a life of their past. Maybe those who speak were once the siblings and friends of the myriad animals who are subjugated on farms, in laboratories, in rings, in tanks and cages, on stages, in concrete and grass, in planes and cars and boxes and bags, in any and all conceivable places. Because they once knew and experienced, they understand and speak out for all of the wrongs to be amended, to be remedied how they can.

Let this proposed idea be called unlikely, naïve, idealistic, fallacious. Let it be mocked. Let it be disproven. But when you are conscious of a world of suffering made to be irrelevant, we begin to "tell ourselves stories in order to live" as Joan Didion once phrased it.

For the world to cease to commit animal cruelty in its many fashions and learn the happiness and peace that is unconditional compassion… that is my greatest wish.