A Return to Veganism (Take Two)

So I sat down to write a post that rapidly was becoming an autobiography of eating. A few paragraphs in I was starting to bore the hell out of myself. The whole epic was really meant as a contextualized introduction to the announcement, that in April I returned to veganism.

The long and short of it is that I go in and out of phases of thinking about what I eat. After managing to stay vegan in college, in Australia, and on a 10 week road trip around these grand ‘ol omnivorous United States, I went back to just being just vegetarian shortly after we moved to Tucson. The truth is I got kinda lazy. I ate cheese, I watched TV, I drove a car to work, I wasted time. And perhaps I needed these years of fallow time to just rest up and eventually bore myself back into thinking about the choices I make.

A few months ago I read this article in the UU World. It more or less reminded me of all my reasons for going vegetarian when I was 12 and vegan when I was 19. I decided it was time for me to take a bit of a challenge back into my everyday life, and change how I eat.

This past week I have of course also been quitting smoking. It has been interesting (to say the least) to watch my desires for old comforts to emerge. Those of you who know me know that I bite my nails. I started biting my bails when I was six years old and my parents wanted me to stop sucking my thumb. So clearly I have a long history of replacing one comfort habit with another.

I’ve been kinda silent on this blog the last couple months. One excuse is of course being a puppy mom. Beyond that I think I’ve been in some sort of passively introspective cloud that had me worried about blogging. What is my own voice, I wondered. Why am I still so stuck in my own head when there are real things happening in the world? And why would I want to share my own revelations about mediocrity and depression on the web?

And eventually I realized that the real issue is that there are still huge conversations I’m not ready to have with myself. And that is the fear that has been keeping me dormant.

Towards the end of college I decided I wanted to be a minister when I grew up. By the summer after college I had made a short list of perspective seminaries (the same list I am still working with today). Yet I knew I wasn’t ready to pursue seminary yet, I didn’t feel together enough to embark on such an intense journey.

It might be time.

It might be time for me to care about what I eat and how it impacts my body and this world. It might be time for me to care about how I spend my time, how present I can be in relationships, at work, in joy and sorrow. It might be time for me to stop waiting for the perfect time and just forge ahead – raising my voice, even as I am learning to use it.

Where I’ve been, what I’m doing

I haven’t posted in a bit and wanted to give folks a sense of what I’ve been up to.

Those vegan cupcakes have kept following me. Last weekend I was in California for a training and wouldn’t you know it, a beautifully iced agave nectar vegan cupcake was waiting for each participant. Then yesterday, Princess left three little cupcakes for me and J. on a flowery china plate, so today I am once again having coffee and cupcakes for breakfast. Tip: definitely always recommend your favorite cookbooks to all your friends.

On Thursday I turned 25. I’m feeling good about that.

Petitpoussin wrote a great post on identity, which I mean to respond to in a post of my own when things slow down.

‘Cause not only has this been a birthday week, highlighted by a visit from my parents, but tomorrow is the installation service for our minister, who we will call Rev. D., who began her service to our church this past fall. For those of you who might not be familiar with the ins and outs of church culture, installation services are a big deal. Exciting and wonderful, but also time consuming and stressful in that, do we have all the details in order, and what will I wear kind of way.

And of course Sunday mornings keep coming around as well. Tomorrow morning I will narrate worship. In costume. As a 18th century illeterate mystic farmer, Thomas Potter, cause nothing starts a Sunday better than some historical cross dressing.

But first, today J. and I are going to a baseball game between the Giants and the Rockies with my parents. (Tucson hosts spring training games – though we seemed to have skipped spring, and moved right into summer – today’s high is 94.) I’m not usually the sports going type, and in the past year it has sometimes seemed like I’m not even the social type. Yet with increasing frequency the need to prioritize my relationships over work becomes very clear. I spent Thursday afternoon having a picnic at an oasis (seriously) hearing what my parents were doing in life when they were 25. And today, the opportunity to watch a game with my dad – I haven’t done that in at least 10 years, and who knows when the opportunity will arise again.

So hello to everyone reading this where ever you might be. May you have happiness and sunshine and the joy of good relationships with friends and family.

On poetry, procrastination and the plane I need to catch

So, I need to leave in three hours to go to California (yes, another stay at our favorite Catholic retreat center), for a training on Pastoral Care for Religious Educators. I haven’t done my homework. We were supposed to read a book – “The Helper’s Journey: Working with people facing grief, loss and life threatening illness.” I have to say, I find myself a bit intimidated by that kind of title (so I spent the week nursing a cold with some historical fiction).

In many ways, not for the first time, this is a post about procrastination. I like my job and I like my life, so why do I put off the things that I have myself chosen to do. One of my friend’s thinks procrastination increases pressure, and that she for one produces better work under pressure. Another friend, M., thinks procrastination is a way of avoiding failure. If we are always putting things off we are never giving life are all, and if we are never giving life our all, we aren’t ever really trying and subsequently can’t ever really fail. My own procrastination style probably lies somewhere between these truths.

So, this morning, this week, what am I avoiding by putting off work and reading? Often I find that I am reminding myself that I enjoy the work that I do, that I have the privilege of working with so many people in such a meaningful fashion. That the writing I do for my job is creative and fun, that the people I work with (somehow, sometimes) gain something from my presence and performances, and my own soul is nourished working with people in the context of worship and religious education.

That I am going to this training cause 14 months ago a youth in a church a few hours away from where I work committed suicide, and of course there arose within me that wave of – what do I do? I am not prepared for this.

Who is prepared for a tragedy? Who wants the job of explaining such an event to the 16 year olds, 14 year olds, 12 year olds they work with, not to mention their parents? I went to a workshop a few years back on liberal religion and crisis. The speaker (a very witty, very irreverent nun) said the role of liberal religion in crisis was not to give answers but to create the space for people to ask, “Why did this happen” and answer “I don’t know.”

We all have so many questions. And one form of spiritual intimacy can be found in the space we create through the asking of questions, and the reverent silence that can sometimes unfold when we do not loose ourselves seeking answers.

There’s a poem that’s been lingering in my mind for several weeks (we’re using it in service later this month), and I leave you with these words before I drive up a hill south of LA and continue to explore new corners of the work that I do, and perhaps in so doing, come to some deeper understand of why it is that I do (and sometimes don’t do) the work that I have chosen as my own.

Hold fast to dreams
for if dreams die
life is a broken winged bird
that cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
for when dreams go
life is a barren field
frozen with snow.

- By Langston Hughes

A Poetry Saturday

I like to write poetry posts on Saturday mornings while drinking coffee. There is a part of me that wants, that needs, Saturdays to be that day of rest. But for me, in my rhythm of the week it just doesn’t work out that way. So I post poetry, and salute these Saturday mornings (and then I often go to work).

I accidentally took the graceful little volume The Far Mosque by Kazim Ali home with me from Hawaii and having been reading it all week (thank you Petitpoussin).

Y’all should also totally check out the first installment of the Creative Writing Carnival which Sylvia is hosting. It comes in yes, one, two, and three installments.

Dear Rumi

-By Kazim Ali

You’ve forgotten he other life in which
Shams-e- Tabriz threw your books into the fountain.

The ink, finally unrecognizable,
Reached for you in dissipating life.

Once I went up the mountain at daybreak, and still met pilgrims
coming down who had woken for the journey earlier.

In the tomb on not-Shams I prayed and prayed to be found.
Am I the sun inside me?

Shams will walk out the back door and never return.
You will go mad—spend years looking for him.

One day in the marketplace, estranged and weeping,
You will understand the farthest mosque is the one within,

and that the sun in the sky is not the one you orbit around,
nor the one who went out the back door and never returned.

Somewhere in the world now, every minute,
A sun is dropping over the horizon into yesterday.

At the fountain in the village square,
The books are still sinking, bereft of your hands.

Even the mountains are bending down to try and save them.
Dear Shams-e- Tabriz, Ido not mourn.

You spindle me, sun-thorn, to the sky.

One Month

In one month I will have been to Hawaii, hiked through lava fields, snorkeled near sea turtles and sang karaoke with petitpoussin.

In one month I will have been to California for a training on Pastoral Care for Religious Educators. That’s right, another intense weekend spent with the roaming peacocks of the Mary and Joseph Retreat Center.

In one month I will have celebrated my 13 year anniversary of being a vegetarian.

In one month I will have turned 25, which I suppose means, I must finally admit I have survived adolescence, and entered the sometimes mundane realms of adulthood where people watch both what they eat and say.

In one month my parents will be visiting from Philadelphia, after selling their house and after my dad has finished his radiation treatments. We will hike, and picnic, explore cute little southwest towns, and go to a spring training baseball game.

In one month I will have cleaned my apartment and (hopefully) built more bookshelves to house the piles of reading materials that currently are taking over our home.

In one month, this Sunday’s intergenerational worship service on peace that I still have to prepare for will have come and gone, and the topic of dreams will be dominating my working hours.

In one month I will be compiling a list of people to take to coffee so that I can politely beg them to spend a portion of their time volunteering in our Religious Education Program, ‘cause yes, children are important.

…

I go in and out of stages where my tendency to plan ahead starts to dictate all the other actions of my day. (I sometimes find writing upcoming events in my calendar calming). Things seem so complete before they have even begun; time takes on a different note, and an unidentifiable doubt creeps up from my datebook, through pencil and pen to my hand, and I begin to wonder what else I might be doing.

One Week

In one week I will be on a plane (really three planes) to visit a dear old friend in Hilo, HI, who is known to the blogosphere as petitpoussin.  I am totally excited and am already mentally packing my suitcase.

In one week I will have also done insane amounts of work, shopped for oragimi paper and beads, co-lead an intergenerational worship service on Making Peace, oriented parents of fourth and fifth graders to Our Whole Lives: Comprehensive Sexuality Education Program, and have attended an all day staff retreat at a dude ranch.  (’cause I really do live in Arizona).

In one week I will hopefully have fixed the perpetually there flat tire on my bicycle and done my laundry.

In one week the newest issue of the Earth First! Journal (where J. works and I volunteer) will be in the mail headed to subscribers and radical bookstores.

In one week I will have said good bye for another week to J. who I love very much.

In one week I will have attended a potluck, gone on a hike, auctioned off a bicycle at the Food Conspiracy Coop’s annual meeting, and seen Tucson’s 2007 production of The Vagina Monologues.

In one day it will be one year since my grandfather died. And I don’t really know what to do about that.  I miss you grandpa.  Thank you for so much.

pressing

This has been a week full of work, meetings, good conversations, visiting friends who are sick, and wonderful weather.

I woke up this morning an hour before my alarm clock, with my To Do list pressing onto my chest, my neck, my forehead.

Thoughts on lamentations, on exile, on remembrance, on Sabbath, have been beginning to form in my moments of reflection this week past. While great writing may eventually flow from these thoughts, for now, I have found a new aspiration of sorts: to live my life in such a way that my souls is happy.

Yes this seems like a terrible cliché.

But I know people, and perhaps you do too, who very simply glow. The ways they have found and chosen to work, to rest, to challenge themselves and engage in the world, are true. They are alive.

I am not there yet. To wake up with anxiety. To feel overwhelmed by the trivialities of the day. To want to apologize for all that is wrong in the world, without being ready to take action to change it. To see the beauty of the sunrise, and yet still spend the day inside. To want so much and yet still feel so stuck. This is where I still am.

Last week I started my Saturday with a poetry post. It felt good, true, alive. And so this week I present you with two of my favorites.