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.

An Introduction

I first read one of my favorite quotes in the front of Michael Lang’s memoir The Road To Woodstock:

 With blustering resonance, these words echoed in my mind long after the first reading, persuading me to do the things I hadn’t thought to do before, pushing me towards the edge of everything unknown, towards the edge of a found sweetness.

Leaving high school and my hometown of Peachtree City, Georgia at the age of sixteen and traveling to the Northeast for early college was among the first marks of my irreverence for those experiences had merely in the name of convention. It was also a tremendous leap, perhaps more unexpected by myself than anyone else. It was a departure from my chronic cautiousness, and it changed my life for the better more than anything else.

Two years and a degree later, I couldn’t convince myself to stay in college in pursuit of a “higher” degree. For all my vast love of learning and my college’s community, I wasn’t quite fulfilled by the idea of staying in school for another two years. Then the opportunity came to spend the summer in Brooklyn as an in-office extension of my magazine internship. My parents would say, “This is your semester away from school to get some real world experience before returning for your Bachelor’s.” And I would agree, until the point where I stopped agreeing and started to know, intuitively, that some other path was waiting for my trek.

Looking back I now recognize that the first path only saw me attempting to triumph through a footslog, trying to fit myself into the role of my magazine internship position. But then one evening when I left the office, I decided to stop forcing myself into a box that I wasn’t meant for… and I never went back.

All the while, I’d continued nurturing my natural passion for vegan food, scouting out new vegan restaurants and bakeries with great frequency,  observing their inner workings and atmosphere, and taking advantage of finally having a kitchen at my disposal. Then it occurred to me that I just might have a love for the culinary arts and for sharing food that promotes good health for the earth, people, and animals. So while I was lost in my internship, I started to become found in the kitchen and in a wonderful little café called Sun In Bloom, where I recently took a job.

So there I was and here I am now and where I will be I cannot know. The “so far” is all I have, all any of us have. The so far holds our memories and our past cares, our used-to-be’s and our maybe’s, our whispers and our screams, our walking and then running to the now. Every day adds new experiences to our “so far.”

This blog captures mine.

Newly graduated from Bard College at Simon's Rock, all smiles as I approached the next part of my life and what it would teach me.