A while back I finally decided to start a vegan blog, which I had been planning to do for a long time. I know I still owe you a post on climate change, but I'd like to go ahead and share my new blog, which has gotten rolling.

culture, politics, and animals

Henceforth, that is where all of my posts related to primarily veganism and animals will go. Gaia will continue to be a spiritual space for me.

I have been journaling lately: beyond keeping a blog full of random thoughts, I now have a dream journal on another blog, and I also use MyFitnessJournal.com. I write in my dream journal whenever I remember a dream, and I write in MyFitnessJournal on most days. MyFitnessJournal greatly encourages me to keep tabs on everything I'm eating, by making it easy to keep track of each item, writing it down and giving me stats to review. Even if I screw up on a daily basis, eating too much of this or that or in general, it forces me to keep thinking about it instead of avoiding it. This is a step up already. But, beyond that, there's an open-ended journal to write about my day, what I ate, why I ate it, how much I exercised, what exercises I did, and perhaps most importantly of all, reflections and plans for the future.

What's awesome about having a place to reflect and plan on a daily basis is that, even if I fail most of the plans I make, I continue reflecting and thinking up new plans instead of constantly rehashing what didn't work and shouting at the sky, "Why can't I do it right?!" So each day is, in some small way, fresh; I don't blow any one idea out of proportion because I know that tomorrow I will begin anew. This was not the case before I started journaling. You may have five tricks in your box, and maybe that sounds big at first glance, but if they are not working, what use is that? By journaling, I think up new tricks every day. Most of them don't work out half as well as I'd planned, but that's okay because I know I can get back up and try something new and refreshing - I know because I do so every day. You may come up with five more tricks, and only the first one is actually successful... and then you come up with five more, and only one of them seems half-successful and the others pretty useless. But if you keep coming up with new ideas, day after day after day, and then that motivates you to research new ideas or leads to a conversation about your ideas that gives you a new idea, eventually you'll find one here or there that is really helpful. Maybe after a year, you have fifty ideas and ten or twenty that are really useful to you at the moment, ten others that may be useful later on, and the others ideas you can build on or have built on already. That's better than the past eight years spent on the same five half-baked ideas that didn't work.

The point is that I keep my mind on improvement. "Improvement is always possible; perfection never is." (Steve Pavlina) I used to always focus on perfection, but now I am focusing on improvement. Each day, instead of thinking "I want to be as healthy as so-and-so" and then worrying because I'm not getting any closer, I say to the universe, "I want to get better. I want to learn. Each day I can learn by re-gauging where I am right now and what I'm capable of doing from here." Because in reality we don't even know where we are. How can we know how to get there if we don't even know where here is? So each day we spend trying to figure out where here is, and because we live in a multi-dimensional world, there's no end to this learning. There's no end to improvement, to being a student.

One thing I love about Aikido training is that the fact is inescapable. You can't just go off on your own and dream of becoming a master all by some magical force within you that no one else has discovered. You have to train with others, who may be more advanced, you have to constantly look for improvement, to have others very intimately point out your weaknesses as well as your strengths, which are constantly shifting. You see a 7th dan (black belt), their technique so clearly more studied than yours, and just know that even they are still learning. And you know that it will take you at least half a life time to get there, like it does everyone else, so you just return to where you are right now.

I have noticed that, too, this is the purpose of persistence. Someone gave me some fitness advice that training daily - like journaling daily - is best for endurance, even though otherwise one may wish to wait a few days for muscles to recover from training. Persistence = endurance.

My dream journal serves the same purpose - not just to have a record of my dreams and help me remember them, but even to remember to think about them and then to reflect on them. So even though I'm pretty laid back about it and haven't since had a lucid dream, I know it will continue to be a part of my life instead of just something that I had a lot of interest in at first and then gave up. Yeah, my strong feelings about it have waned a lot since I started, but they wax occasionally because I've kept thinking about it by journaling... and I know that, in the end, I will be glad I did it because ultimately it is something I do value and do find interesting.

Because I am focused on improvement, I am glad that I'm doing it and not just about what I've succeeded at already. Or, rather, I now view the process itself as a success, even though I am still just beginning.

To quote Steve Pavlina (again), "Either you succeed, or you have a learning experience."

"What do trust and forgiveness mean to you?"

When people say trust with regard to close relationships, they are usually referring to whether or not the person's words match up to reality, although I think trust is not an all-or-nothing thing. I trust myself to ride a bicycle, I don't trust myself to teach anything to a black belt. But as far as words go, that's tricky... I do trust everyone on some level, with words, and I also distrust everyone on some level with words (except for maybe Zen masters who have mastered the art of silence). Sometimes that trust doesn't really manifest itself in practice, and sometimes the distrust is not harmful in the bigger picture. But actually, in some way, I can look within myself and say the problem was not with the other person, but with how I chose to trust them. Was my trust broken, or did I have false expectations? Or both? A distinction must be made: like love, there is conditional trust and unconditional trust.

As far as forgiveness goes, I believe this: "To forgive is to set a person free and discover the person was you."

I've decided that even if someone makes a promise, I will just expect nothing. Not in a distrusting sort of way, but... someone said that life (the universe) is a dream, and we are the dreamer of our reality. Our dream is not us. A promise is not them or me. A promise is just a symbol in a dream. It is a projection of our consciousness. The Truth is merciless, so we should be merciful to ourselves - and each other.

Other views are welcome.

Meet Tarra & Bella, an elephant and a dog who've become very close friends!

Episode #1
Episode #2 - the sequel

The second video talks about what happened after the first story aired. I love the sanctuary owners' response. (No, Disney... no.) The story of Bella & Tarra actually isn't that unique within the animal realm. You may know about the Christian the tiger, raised by two people with obvious mutual love (the video went viral). Or the boy who was raised by wolves. Joan Dunayer's book Animal Equality has many more heart-warming stories like this. As she notes, they are typically dismissed by science as mere "anecdotes." But aren't anecdotes most natural and abundant, language being the gift of the story-teller, life being remembered and imagined in stories? Can love be quantified? As animal rights/vegan theorists and myself have noted, our story begins locally, at the level of the individual. If the fact that the average American eats more than 1,100 chickens in a lifetime means nothing, then perhaps it is because we have forgotten the individuality of each of those 1,100 chickens.

In other news, this month Bolivia became the first country to ban circus animals.
Following this, PETA came out with a video on the Ringling Bros showing how they keep elephants pent up to the point of mental illness and also lead them about with hooks in their flesh. I must ask whether it is possible for circuses and zoos, in a world that fetishizes animals by wearing their skins and counts them as human property, to place respect over profit.

To underscore the final point of the story:
Humans have no monopoly on love and compassion (dharma)... We have a lot to learn from nonhuman animals, spiritually - without erasing their autonomy. :)

Housemate told me, "'Your body is your temple. Don't put crap in it.'"

It occurred to me, then, that our mind is also our temple. Just don't put junk in it. Imagine that the mind is a muscle: relax all your muscles, and you will discover emptiness. The emptiness of clear, clean (Holy) water. I also try to make my conversations with others like this. When I was a kid, my dad would say, "If you ain't got nothin' good to say, don't say it." I think I am just now beginning to understand the significance of those words.

Story time...

The other night I was at a party, and my old roommate was there... I hadn't really seen her in this context before, or seen her in a long time. But as she traversed the room, she kind of created a channel with each person that struck me as astonishingly deep. I hear she likes to keep her friend groups separate, and I can see the beauty of it: doing so helps her to create this singular channel with each. I have a feeling others didn't appreciate this nearly as much as I did, at least that night. This is the person who taught me unconditional love. If you are like me, and struggle a lot socially, I recommend finding a person like this to have faith in through understanding... it will help you find faith in everyone more, just to have one person. Then you will know your ideal firsthand.

I've been thinking a lot about how I would like to portray myself in social media and in other social interactions. Shakespeare said that all the world's a stage, and we are but actors on that stage, so it's important to find our role. We have to make it our own, but we also have to make it others'. People don't usually want to see a play that doesn't take their own interests into account. According to Anna Deavere Smith and postmodernism, acting could be about embracing the ambiguities, the unknown in our lives. We don't know all the things that exist around us, or even in us, in this moment, so how can we as actors become mirrors reflecting what we have observed, channels engaging our audience, putting our audience on display? Fires in the Mirror?

In a mind clear as still water,
even the waves, breaking,
are reflecting its light. - Dogen Zenji

How can we become clear media?

I have struggled with this as an activist. I came to the conclusion that I need to communicate more with my social "audience"; I need to try to learn about the people I encounter, where they are coming from, why they disagree if they disagree, why they struggle if they struggle, how they're different. I have all these universal (global) ideas of social justice (i.e. the least amount of exploitation of sentient beings possible) which I'd like to apply, but it seemed as though there were all these incomprehensible, frustrating barriers. I realized how the individuals and individual communities I meet and engage with represent the local... it is said we must think globally and act locally. In practice, we need to know details; we need to know our locale. Well, this is it.

I have gone back to the drawing board that this life always seems to be calling for. Suddenly, and no doubt this is partially due to pure luck, my friends started telling me that my words had influenced them. My vegan campaign did very little (to my knowledge), but my little expressions of sincere concern, my continual references to what I believe in without directly or intentionally implicating others, had influenced them to consider changing their eating habits. And best of all, the burden on me was lifted, for I no longer felt like I had to create new vegans... instead I felt that I just wanted to learn about people. I suspect that, in doing so, in making them part of my own sense of sincere interest, they could become part of my (vegan) world. They now... belong. I accept, at the same time, my place in their world. (Don't get me wrong -- I'm not proposing that campaigns are useless in general or the like. This is just my journey I speak of.)

To find the locale of one person is more intimate and, for me in some cases, easier than to understand the broader audience of actually standing on stage before hundreds of people as did Anna Deavere Smith, or on the platform of a blog or Facebook or a powerpoint presentation. And perhaps this is only natural - the need to delve into the most intimate locale (oneself), the most intimate interaction (with another individual), before learning to embrace a multitude of views at once. There are things one can share with an individual that, of course, one would refrain from sharing to the larger group. There's a kind of global locale to the open community of the internet. And the reality is that I get social anxiety... anyone who's seen me trying to talk to a group of people face-to-face could tell you that right away. It's as if I just never learned how to be a mirror to others, too busy worrying about the distortions that that mirror implies.

So I realized something. I want to be a mirror to my friends, to the world, to you, distortions and all. I want you to know me in your own way. The things I want to share with the world through social media, in any interaction really, but particularly in the more controlled places where my deliberations distinctly matter, should be how I want you to know me: not just as me playing my role, but by mirroring our shared love for discovery, like a clear medium into which, together from our respective vantage points, we can look. This is not to say that I will limit the things I write about so much as open up the way(s) that I write so as to reach as many people as deeply as possible for our mutual growth. And only by asking sincere questions about you and your perspective, as well as myself and mine - by in some way capturing and putting my audience on display - can I dare to hope for that.

I know that I will slip up many times to come, forgetting the lesson I now share; I know, also, that I will return to it many, many times - build on it, deepen it. Let me know if I have succeeded, at all, and if you plan to join me (comment, digg, Twitter follow, ShareThis, etc.) . Thank you.

_/\_

Got my first Letter to the Editor published in the Kennebec Journal yesterday, titled "Eating 'organic poultry' still violates a life" by the Editor.

Here's an excerpt:

The suffering that goes on in factory farms is truly bizarre and heart-rending, but I wonder if it will ever be mitigated by the continued consumption of animals that promotes the notion that we may only value them as objects of a human environment.

The article I responded to in the above letter is "Eating less meat can help the planet" (Liz Soares).

Thanks for reading. _/\_

Just want to share this poem that moved me... After I read the first verse, I had to send it to an "enemy." Even now I know not what to say to him in my own words, but I don't think the biting edges of our relationship are necessary. This is the best I can do:

When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams
as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast.

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart.

But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.

When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, "I am in the heart of God."
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.
-Kahlil Gibran