Same Time Tomorrow: A Meadowsweet Donation Drive

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"It's hard to be famous and alive. I just want to play music every day and hear someone say, 'Thanks, that was great, here's some money, same time tomorrow, okay?'"

- Terry Pratchett, from Soul Music

Lovely, beautiful, generous readers.... have you been working out? Seriously, you're looking really good these days, at least ten years younger than you are (you're in your early thirties, right?). Your hair always looks fantastic. And have I mentioned lately how much I enjoy your company? Always so witty and interesting — you must be the joy and envy of all your many friends. Also, I heard that your spouse/offspring/pet did really well in that thing he or she was doing, and I know that you must be so proud — though I bet they have you to thank for all your encouragement and support. You know, speaking of support....

I've been thinking recently, especially after my little crisis back in September, that it's time for a bit of a shake-up around the old blog. I have visions in my head of a truly marvelous semi-magazine layout, with feature articles, more frequent guest posts, an expanded resources page, maybe a poetry and lectio divina column... And, most thrilling of all, a domain name. O so professional.

Of course, I've been blogging here at meadowsweet-myrrh dot blogspot dot com for several years now, fast approaching my three-hundreth post, and the sheer number of pages published here could easily fill a couple sizable books. Meanwhile, the number of you wonderful readers has crept up and up, especially over the last year. Many of you keep coming back because, let's be frank, you are wise and well-read people who recognize good writing when you read it — but more importantly, at least I hope anyway, you can tell when a person has poured her heart and soul into the work she shares, and you are kind and empathetic folks as well as being intelligent and sharp as a tack.

Cú Chulainn and the Queen of Swords: Reflections on Reason and Nakedness

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One of the ways that I clothe and shelter my nakedness in the world is with my intellect, which always seems to be churning away sometimes even in spite of myself.

Don't get me wrong, I value reason highly as an expression of Spirit in the human animal; it is a wisdom-weaver and pattern-dancer, it is one of the meaning-makers of human experience that can serve to highlight and elevate, to shape and navigate. When used in this way, reason and critical analysis can exercise the mind, stripping it of falsehoods and obscurities and laying it bare to the world in all its complexity and sublimity (and when applied with a devotion that borders on bhakti, reason can be a terrible and awesome thing that shakes the world ruthlessly down to its rattling joints).

But too often, reason can be wielded as a weapon. I find that I do this far more often than I like, and it always leaves me feeling uncomfortable, disturbed from the dwelling-place of naked presence that I am continually seeking in the world. When I feel threatened or misunderstood, I can swing my intellect like a sword, cutting down hesitant, half-formed or poorly-articulated arguments where they stand — without regard for the meanings they are striving towards or the complexities they, too, are trying to navigate. The fight becomes the thing, and I get caught up in the thrill of parry and thrust and the heat of my own mental muscles tensed and flexing as I dodge and turn and feel the bite of my blows striking home.

Naked in the World

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"I reckon we're doing this 'cos we are goin' to die, d'yer see? And 'cos some bloke got to the edge of the world somewhere and saw all them other worlds out there and burst into tears 'cos there was only one lifetime. So much universe, and so little time. And that's not right..."

- Cohen the Barbarian, from The Last Hero, by Terry Pratchett

There is a difference between a hero, and a bully. We all know this, we know it in our bones, in the marrow that makes our blood and the heart that moves it. There is a difference between a warrior, and a grunt-for-hire. Between an act of courage, and an act of arrogance, ignorance or cruelty. And that difference does not lie in nobility, or honor, or wisdom, or even mercy.



Last night, Jeff and I finished reading Terry Pratchett's The Last Hero: A Discworld Fable. With illustrations by the marvelous Paul Kidby, the book is more an homage to the fans of the Discworld novels than anything else. Though my favorite character in all the Disc — Captain Samuel Vimes of the City Watch — sadly did not make an appearance, cameos by Vetinari, Mr. Slant, Ponder Stibbons, the Librarian, Leonard de Quirm, Rincewind, Offler the Crocodile God, a few sad-eyed swamp dragons, and Great A'tuin herself, a giant turtle swimming through the black, starry sea of space carrying the discworld on her back, kept us in giggles for the past several nights. Still, I had been looking forward to some piercing satire and cultural commentary, and for most of the book had to rest satisfied with friendly, conspiratorial winks towards Pratchett fandom instead.

But not last night. In the final pages of the book, Pratchett's genius for story-telling flexed its muscles once again, pulling all the threads of humor, character and destiny tight, weaving a climactic show-down with the gods themselves (and a face-off with the many-eyed Blind Io is not something to sneeze at!). The blurb on the book's dust-jacket sets the mythic tone of the book, introducing the ancient and increasingly decrepit Cohen the Barbarian, who has watched most of his friends die soft and senile of old age, and who is angry, very angry, at the gods. So "the last hero in the world is going to return what the first hero stole" — Cohen intends to bring fire back to the peak of Cori Celesti, right into the halls of Dunmanifestin. And he plans to bring it back with a bang.

Pagan Peace-Making: A Call for Submissions

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Six months ago, I resolved to write a book. Or, at least, to try. I gave myself a year, to flush out all the insecurities and psychological stumbling blocks that were in the way, and begin the work of articulating my vision and song of practical Pagan peace-making.

Six months later, the journey has changed shape. The process I committed to has come to demand that, first, before the sojourn of writing there must be a period of pilgrimage, a going-out along the peace-forging path in a new and more social way, learning from others as I go. Back at the beginning of May, I was invited to join the blogging project Pagan+Politics, and the familiar anxiety swept over me again as I wondered if I was up to the challenge. The experience has been both simpler and more difficult than I anticipated, with a great deal of stress and distraction as I have fought the urge to follow arguments far off course, into unfruitful bickering and petty fact-checking. Yet it has helped me to clarify my own thoughts, as well as get a better sense of where the detractors and dismissers of peace-making are coming from. Most importantly, however, it provided an opportunity to hear from readers the relief and gratitude at discovering they were not the only Pagan Pacifists out there, and to discover just how important it is for us to hear the voices of others and to know that we are not alone.

Personal Values & Communal Values in Paganism

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For the second year running, June's "Pagan Values Month" has seen quite a bit of discussion... not about values per se, but about Pagan self- and community-identity. Eloquent and compelling arguments have been made by not a few of my favorite writers making the case that "Paganism" as a single religion may not exist,* and that continuing to speak and think about the so-called "Pagan community" in this way might not be helpful or conducive to... well, whatever they're hoping religious community is conducive to, I suppose. And what is that, exactly? Here is where I feel the question of "values" becomes essential, and perhaps the key to unlocking the question of self-identity and community-definition, rather than the other way around.

Defining Pagan Religion

The question of what constitutes a "religion" is not at all a new one for me. It became a running theme during my college studies, continually provoked and reexamined by an advisor who had specialized in the history of the Reformation during his doctorate work. To raise the objection that "Paganism" may not be a "religion" is to beg the question of how exactly we define "religion" in the first place. When I turn this question over in my mind, it seems to me that I run up against the same problem again and again. Our use of the word "religion" is almost as sloppy and ill-defined as the word "Pagan" itself; indeed, some might go so far as to imply that the whole idea of "religion" is a uniquely Christian concept that relies on a distinction between what is and is not similar to (mainly Protestant) Christianity.

The Peaceful Warrior: Pagan Pacifism Without Excuse (Part 2)

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Vulnerability, Individuality and Interdependence

Contemporaries of the Celts reported them as being strongly independent, and many of the heroic tales passed down to current day describe courageous individuals who choose a life of glory and accomplishment to be remembered down the ages, rather than an unremarkable life of longevity and quiet. Cu Chulainn, the quintessential Celtic warrior-hero, makes just this choice when he overhears a prophecy that the young man to take up arms that day would become the most famous hero in Erin; the eager young hero then proceeds to test out, and break, every piece of weaponry in the land until the king himself must offer him his own spear and war chariot.^[6] At first glance, such stories might seem to support the notion that the ancient Celts were hungry for conflict and the accolades that could be earned, that they were downright scornful of peace and "easy living." But other well-documented aspects of Celtic culture suggest another interpretation, perhaps no more true than this first but more relevant to today's world.

The Peaceful Warrior: Pagan Pacifism Without Excuse (Part 1)

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There is no going back. We consent to our own destruction, with the passing of time, with the changing seasons, with the restless intensity of living and breathing. Above the blazing concrete and glass of the city skyline, sharp-wedged forms of birds wheel and tip against the dark, blustering sky of the oncoming summer storm. I find myself thinking again that it takes an awful lot of courage to live in this world sometimes, knowing even at the height of summer that winter is coming, the dark is coming, and death, too, will eventually arrive to claim us. It takes courage to release ourselves, to enter willingly into the wild dance that whirls in this liminal space between life and death, creation and destruction. In my mind, the image of birds crashing through wind currents and swift-driven clouds commingles with the image of the warrior, poised in grace on the edge of chaos. The face of that warrior is not violence, but fearlessness. And the culmination of fearlessness, the height of its realization, is peace.

On Violence and Control

We live in a modern world, a world that has known the power of peace as well as the force of violence and war. A world that has known King and his dreams of the mountaintop. That witnessed Gandhi leading hundreds to the shore, stooping to gather the sea salt forbidden to them by law but offered freely and ceaselessly by something far greater and older than empire. And it is no less true for being trite: these days we have the capacity for obscene violence as well. This world we live in has seen the invention of atomic weapons by men cloistered away in sterile laboratories, and the use of those weapons to intimidate and threaten, to bring whole cities broken and poisoned to the ground. I share this world with you, and together we have watched our modern culture grow bloated and listless with propagandistic marketing trends and diet fast food. Yet alongside these we've felt a dawning common understanding that can no longer excuse violence against women and the marginalized, nor accept the callous mechanizations that would treat nature as fuel to burn for turning a profit. These times are unique, with their contradictions and global communications networks. There is no going back. We live in a world in tension, a culture brought precariously to the brink of tremendous violence again and again. How can we live, fully and freely, in such a world?

Memorial Day, Motherland and Blood Sacrifice

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It's Memorial Day here in the United States, and I find myself, once again and as usual, deeply ambivalent.

As a Pagan pacifist, as a peace-making Druid, I know that I am not naturally inclined to celebrate holidays of militarism, patriotism and nationalism. This is simple and straight-forward. I find it easier to celebrate the values commemorated on Martin Luther King Day — those of social justice and the sentiments of equality and community, as well as the grief of injustice and of dreams mown down by hate and violence — than the adolescent indulgence in triumphant glorying and loud reveling that occurs each July on Independence Day. Yet unlike these others, Memorial Day leaves me feeling disconcerted and conflicted. All through this holiday weekend, I have read passing comments and thoughtful reflections alike on the True Meaning of Memorial Day, all repeating and revolving around this singular, pervasive notion: that we must "honor the memory of the soldiers who fought and died for us." Honor is such a powerful word, and death such a vital reality. But there is a kind of emptiness, a hollowness echoing within that expression, one that takes for granted what our relationship is to the dead, what our responsibilities are to the living, what honor and memory truly look like, how they function, what they require of us.

Pacifism comes to Pagan+Politics

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I am pleased, proud and (incredibly) nervous to announce that I have been invited to join the ranks of politically-savvy bloggers over at the Pagan Newswire Collective's Pagan+Politics group blog. Many thanks to Jason for his invitation and his vote of confidence — I hope to rise to the challenge of writing weekly about pacifistic- and anarchistic-related news, without too many days ending in tears and wails of "why doesn't anybody understand me?!"

My introductory post is already up, but in case you need some enticement, here's an excerpt:

I have been writing publicly about pacifism for several years now, and it still remains a challenge to face down my own anxieties about misinterpretation, hypocrisy, judgement and impotence. It is not always fun to write about ideals and ethical principles that can make not only my readers but even myself feel uncomfortable, uncertain, inadequate, angry or sorrowful.

So why do it? Because I honestly believe that, despite our discomfort and uncertainty, despite our habitual resistance to the idea, the truth is that peace is easy and freedom is innate. Though we are surrounded today with myriad examples of violence, war, hatred and rage, though we have complicated systems of government control looming over us at every step — ordinary, everyday life for most of us is still characterized by spontaneous, consensual cooperation and moments full of the profound simplicity of peaceful relationship. Outside my window and here in this room, the world revels in this sunny spring afternoon, a spring that came without coercion or malice, that arose delicately and swiftly out of the interplay of countless creatures and forces, gods and forms, all organizing themselves through their striving and reaching and vying and dancing, rooted in the necessary rot of autumn, preserved through the inevitable cold of winter, and deeply engaged in the ceaseless process of becoming something beautiful.

How to Save the World: Seven Pillars of Vegetarianism

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So the title of this post is a bit grandiose, but we're talking about climate change here today, because it's Blog Action Day 2009. Think thousands of bloggers sitting in front of their computers can't change the world? Well.... you're probably right — but! That won't stop us from trying. My goal here today is not to convince you climate change is real and caused by human activity (it is), or to lecture you about the evils of modern consumer-based society and why a market system based on consumption will never, truly actively support a reduce-reuse-recycle model (it won't). My goal here today, friends, is to give you an excuse.

Actually, seven. Seven excuses, seven reasons to give up meat, to go vegetarian; seven excuses to save the world. You see, according to current studies on global warming and its major contributors, one of the most effective and easiest ways for ordinary individuals to fight global warming and help the environment is to reduce their consumption of animal products. Steve Pavlina notes in an article earlier this year:

A 2006 United Nations report found that the meat industry produces more greenhouse gases than all the SUVs, cars, trucks, planes, and ships in the world combined. [...] In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, eating one pound of meat is equivalent to driving an SUV 40 miles.

Reducing our reliance on and support of the environmentally-devastating meat industry by cutting meat and dairy out of our diets has more impact than switching to that hybrid car or buying those energy-efficient light bulbs. Eating a vegetarian or vegan diet, especially one of mostly locally-grown organic foods, might just be the single best thing you can do to help restore the natural ecosystems of this planet, ecosystems human life evolved within and on which we depend for our future survival. And you can make the change immediately, starting today, at your very next meal. That's your first excuse.

But if that's not enough, I have six more. Vegetarianism isn't just about the environment, though that is an essential pillar in support of this lifestyle. At every level of our personal and social existence, we find compelling reasons why a vegetarian diet is not only a good idea, but a deeply meaningful choice to live with respect and gratitude as part of the natural world. The seven pillars that support this view are: biological, historical, environmental, political, ethical, psychological and spiritual. And each pillar has tied to it a strawman argument against the vegetarian diet, set up like a scarecrow to frighten people away from examining their choices too carefully. Well, consider this post a kind of Bad Wolf essay, panting and prowling through the temple, ready to blow those strawmen down.

Biological

The first pillar of vegetarianism is biological: as a species, we have evolved biologically to eat plants, not other animals. Recent discoveries in anthropology and paleontology provide evidence that our closest ancestors are not aggressive, omnivorous chimpanzees but "peaceful vegetarian" apes such as the gorilla and the bonobo. Our teeth are shaped primarily for ripping and grinding plant matter, rather than gripping and tearing flesh, and recently uncovered fossils of our earliest ancestor, Ardipithecus ramidus, has teeth much smaller, flatter and less protruding than predicted by earlier "killer ape" theories put forth by scientists. Our immune system is built to handle a vegetarian diet, as well — if we fail to cook our broccoli long enough, all we risk is slightly crunchy broccoli, and not potential deadly infections such as E. coli or tapeworms that can come from eating contaminated meat or foods cross-contaminated through animal feces. Our senses have developed to aid us in determining which fruit is ripe or rotten, whereas such discernment of meat is usually much more difficult. Furthermore, our digestive system is not physically capable of digesting most animal flesh, which must usually be cooked first to render it even remotely palatable; the sight and smell of raw meat sickens us, while fresh fruits and vegetables are inherently appealing to our visual and olfactory senses as well as our culinary tastes. Consuming even cooked meat puts unnatural strain on our bodies that can lead to digestive problems and heart disease, while eating fruits and vegetables provide us with the appropriate balance of nutrients, vitamins and minerals as well as the sugars and carbohydrates we crave and the fiber and water necessary to keep our bodies running smoothly.

The argument constructed against all this biological evidence is that we are not meant to be vegetarians, but omnivores, and thus eating three meals a day based primarily around a meat main-course is not only perfectly healthy but necessary to meet our nutritional needs. Besides taking for granted that the farm-raised, hormone-injected animals we eat today are in any way comparable to animals in the wild (to be dealt with later), this argument ignores the fact that most omnivores in the animal kingdom with similar teeth and digestive systems to our own (as opposed to, say, bears and other mainly-carnivorous animals) use meat only as an occasional supplement to a plant-based diet, rather than a staple food in itself. This meat is usually in the form of insects or scavenged carrion. It is true that we have certain minimal requirements for protein and fats that must be met, but studies have shown that eating a diverse diet of fruits, vegetables, grains and legumes more than adequately satisfies these needs (almost all cases of protein deficiency are, in fact, cases of starvation, not an imbalanced diet). Indeed, most Americans eat far too much protein, and health problems from heart disease to cancer can result. Stop for a moment and ask yourself where herbivorous animals such as cows, sheep, gorillas, and elephants get their protein to begin with. Their bodies, like ours, naturally manufacture protein out of the amino acids found in abundance in plant matter. When we eat animal proteins, in fact, our digestive system must first break these down before it can obtain the amino acids it needs, putting it under unnecessary strain.

Of course, as a species we are capable of eating an omnivorous diet, and this is one (of several) reasons why we have survived and managed to populate vastly different environments the world over. However, this does not mean that a meat-based diet is ultimately the healthiest or the best choice, especially for those living in circumstances which offer many ready alternatives. We should seriously question the practice of taking emergency survival techniques (such as eating whatever is available in harsh environments with few alternatives) as a foundation for ordinary healthy living. We should also remind ourselves that we are not defined merely by our biology; we can make lifestyle choices informed by other aspects of our social and personal lives as well, while still respecting our biology and physical needs. For instance, although the female human is capable of reproduction at as early an age as 12 or 13, few people today would argue that teen pregnancy is a good idea, let alone take it as an imperative to impregnate young girls as soon as possible.

Historical

This leads us to a consideration of our history as a human species, and how we have traditionally dealt with the question of diet. Long ago, our species evolved in the tropics of south-west Africa (this is why, incidentally, the colors, textures and tastes of tropical fruits are so particularly appealing to us); from there, we eventually migrated and spread to Eurasia and other climates where such foods were not as readily available. In response to changing environments, we found new alternatives provided by the indigenous flora and fauna, eventually establishing traditions of agriculture to supplement and then eventually replace a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Studies in archeology and anthropology show us that in ancient as well as modern day hunter-gatherer tribal societies, hunting and fishing rituals centered on showing respect and gratitude for the sacrificed animal and a promise or prayer for the continuation of its species. These rituals were sometimes so elaborate and lengthy (Joseph Campbell reports a three-day ceremony for the killing of a single stag) that they rendered frequent or mass-scale hunting simply impractical, which in itself insured a limited diet of meat and a restriction on just how quickly a species of animal could be depleted. With the introduction of agriculture and the domestication of livestock, the balance of plant- and animal-based food in the diet varied depending on a person's individual wealth and social class. Animal domestication on a large scale in Europe tended to have certain unhealthy consequences for the surrounding population, giving rise to epidemics and a general increase in disease and unsanitary living conditions for both humans and animals (Europeans brought these diseases with them to the New World, and the result was devastating to the native population). Meanwhile, agriculture and domestication alike contributed to the quickening process of deforestation and the homogenizing of ecosystems through controlled cultivation.

The historical support for vegetarianism is not so cut-and-dry as the previous biological arguments, precisely because for the most part humanity has survived by eating a combination of plant- and animal-based foods. What is clear is that our species has a history of adapting to local environments and finding or creating alternatives to support our lifestyle choices. History also provides us with evidence that the kind of large-scale animal consumption that our culture relies on today has traditionally had negative consequences for both human beings and the environment, while the hunting and eating of wild game in hunter-gatherer cultures has been healthier for both and tends to include natural limits that help to mitigate negative consequences. This evidence does not make the claim that eating meat is physically or ethically worse (see above, and below), but challenges us to question our ability to do so without putting strain on our relationship with the natural world on which we rely.

The historical objection is simply that "we have always eaten meat" and if our ancestors did so, then it certainly couldn't be wrong for us to continue the practice. There is no real need to bring up the myriad examples of horrific, unethical and generally unhealthy practices once embraced by human beings in the past that we have thankfully left behind us (or in some cases are still working to overcome). It is sufficient to point out that our ancestors themselves set a precedent of adaptation and change, rather than strict adherence to past lifestyles; if such were not the case, our species would still be nibbling fruits and crunching on ants in the African tropics. Furthermore, most objections of this nature focus on the generally healthier and more respectful relationship of the tribal hunter with his prey, and skips over the several thousand years of less idyllic agricultural practices that are our more immediate heritage. Certainly invoking the rituals and restrictions faced by hunter-gatherers to justify today's meat-based diet is not enough to overrule the reality of modern factory-farming and animal abuse.

Environmental

And so we return to the contemporary concerns of environmentalists today, and the role that the modern meat industry plays in contributing to the global warming and environmental damage more generally. We have already touched on a few of these concerns in the introduction to this post, but just for fun, I'm going to quote two more statistics from Pavlina's essay:

To produce one pound of meat requires, on average, about 5000 gallons of water. Compare that to 25 gallons for a pound of wheat. To produce their daily food, a vegetarian needs 300 gallons of water per day, while a typical meat-eater needs 4000 gallons. It takes energy to transport all that water too, and this means more greenhouse gas emissions.

and this one:

The EPA reports that the run-off from factory farms pollutes our waterways more than all other industrial sources combined. Food animals in the USA produce 45 tons of animal excrement per second. That’s 130 times as much excrement as our human population produces. Some farms have so much excrement to deal with that they actually liquefy it and spray it into the air, so it gets carried away by the wind.

What these two tidbits effectively illustrate (and his article is full-to-bursting with similar facts) is precisely that those problems which were negligible on a small scale at the beginning of the agricultural revolution fester and grow into hugely wasteful, damaging practices when allowed to proceed unchecked and unquestioned. The modern approach to factory-farming, reliant on hormone injections, genetic modification, and the assembly-line rearing, slaughtering and processing of animals, consumes more energy and produces more waste than most people can even conceive of when they chow down on that mass-produced burger from the local fastfood joint. Once again, this pillar of vegetarianism does not insist that eating meat is inherently wrong, but points to the pervasive systems of meat production and processing today and asks us whether we can really turn a blind eye to their consequences every time we crave a porkchop.

It took me a long time to come up with any possible objection that could be propped up against this pillar and used to argue that, despite all evidence to the contrary, "eating meat is actually better for the environment." Only one has come to mind, and its approach is twofold and somewhat self-contradictory. On the one hand, I have often heard modern-day hunters argue that hunting and killing animals is necessary for their population control and more humane than allowing them to starve during the winter or risk being hit on the highway (this argument is more about killing than eating, of course, and in any case does not directly address the question of domesticated animals). On the other hand, apparently some individuals argue that the domestication of certain animals protects them from extinction and preserves their species (albeit in subservience to human need) into the future. So bizarre are both these claims — and so limited their understanding of "environmental benefit" — that I can hardly bother to deconstruct and reject them. Needless to say, both aspects of this argument rely on a kind of anthropocentric arrogance that assumes our right as well as our ability to control who gets to live and die, while ignoring our own role in eliminating the natural predators and destroying the habitats that would have kept the populations of these animals in ecological balance.

Political

As we move from pillar to pillar in support of vegetarianism, we find ourselves moving from the more objective realm of fact and evidence, to the increasingly subjective realm of personal and social choice and relationship. Politics is the first pillar in which we find the consequences of meat-eating echoing beyond the biological and environmental effects, to the nature of manipulation, misinformation and monopoly.

Current models of factory farming, together with corporate pressures from international giants such as McDonald's, render the meat industry especially prone to monopolization. Currently, the majority of U.S. meat production comes from only a handful of key corporations, who can quite effectively exert huge political influence on government legislation and regulation through lobbying and financial support. They utilize this influence to secure government subsidies which artificially lower the prices consumers pay for products to well below their actual monetary (not to mention environmental and social) costs; meanwhile, regulatory agencies run by former CEOs of the industry are effectively impotent to enforce what few regulations manage to pass into law. Lobbyists of the meat industry continue to fight against informative labeling regarding nutritional value, and the use of hormones, genetic modifications and dangerous chemicals in the production and processing of their animals. The general lack of regulation and information makes possible gross violations of basic human rights and worker safety, as well as jeopardizing general consumer health.

Perhaps none of this bothers you; perhaps you are content to be misled and manipulated by callous corporate giants, as long as you can get that steak dinner for cheap. But personally, as someone fundamentally against manipulation and abuse on principle, I find it impossible to ignore the role that my dietary choices play in the existence and continuation of this industry. When considering the wide-spread social implications of such a choice, reducing or eliminating my consumption of meat and other animal products becomes not just a personal matter of health and environmental awareness, but a political statement against the tyranny of greed and the inhumane, almost sociopathic priorities of corporate interests. Refusing to eat the byproducts of such a corrupt industry is surely not the only way to fight back, but it's one that I can enact, publicly or privately, on a daily basis regardless of other circumstances.

Objections to this pillar of vegetarianism include the rebuttal that factory-farming practices for produce and grains are just as bad, environmentally and politically, as those of the meat industry, as well as the insistence that the meat industry is a thriving business that is necessary to employ and support certain sectors of the domestic and global economies. It is true that factory farming is damaging in general, and that this includes the produce industry's use of petrochemical fertilizers and insecticides, as well as the genetically-modified monoculture crops that sprawl across much of the midwest. On the other hand, a huge portion of these farms' harvests go not to feed human beings, but to support the meat industry itself. Furthermore, when it comes to resisting the potential monopolies of the industry, it becomes much easier to seek out local, organic farms to provide yearly produce, or even to grow your own vegetables and fruits in a personal or community garden. I know of few people, however, willing to take on the task of raising and slaughtering their own cattle. As far as the argument that meat-eating is "good for business," I can only point out that industries founded on abusive and unhealthy practices deserve to flounder and fail, so that new, better alternatives can be found. Would anyone seriously argue, for instance, that the reliance on slave labor to shore up the cotton industry in post-revolutionary America could possibly justify slavery as a necessary and valuable practice?

Ethical

We are now approaching the final three pillars of vegetarianism: ethics, psychology and spirituality. Each of these topics is so complex and interwoven that it really deserves its own full-length essay, but for now I want to summarize some of the main points, and the various objections they tend to raise.

As we turn to the question of ethics, we are forced to confront the very notion of a "meat industry" as an industry like any other capitalist industry in the modern world. Whereas certain objects and items can (perhaps) be produced, exchanged and consumed without any inherent diminishment to their existential meaning or value, the fact that we feel comfortable as a society approaching other living, clearly sentient beings with this attitude raises serious ethical implications. What lines do we draw that separate some living creatures from others, and are these lines justified or even upheld in actual practice? The very notion of "animal rights abuses" may be controversial in some circles (though certainly not here in this blog), but human rights abuses seem much more widely acknowledged as worthy of condemnation and resistance; and yet, the very industry that provides you with sliced, plastic-wrapped deli meat in the supermarket aisle also treats its workers, as well as its consumer base, in abusive and manipulative ways. When we subject one part of the community of life to a model of lifeless consumerism, it seems an inevitable consequence that the rest of that community soon follows, and human beings as well as animals are reduced to mere numbers to be crunched, or gears to be turned.

There is also the ethical question of integrity, and the extent to which we can justifiably pay off others to do the "dirty work" we would rather not confront ourselves. When asked to explain my vegetarianism, this is the first point I make, as it seems the one to conjure up the fewest objections. Certainly, there are myriad unpleasant jobs in the world, but few are as dangerous, humiliating and psychologically traumatizing as the work of a slaughterhouse employee. Although perhaps this is not an inherent aspect of meat processing and packing, it is certainly an undeniable reality of our current system and must be acknowledged and dealt with as such.

Objections that animals just aren't as valuable or important, ethically, as human beings often rest on flimsy or arbitrary quibbling over definition. Not only because any consistent definition of personhood must either include some animals, or exclude some human beings who suffer from physical or mental handicaps, but also because of the diversity of social definitions which attempt to draw lines between animals themselves, designating some as food and others as pets. The argument that plants have been shown to experience a form of pain or survival instinct when threatened (besides deserving careful scrutiny itself) certainly cannot justify an ethical nihilism which declares that, if we can't help causing harm, we might as well not bother to mitigate what harm we do cause. Instead, it challenges us to think more deeply about our relationship to all living beings, sentient and non-sentient alike, and to consider the spiritual implications of relationship with both living and non-living things.

Psychological

The ethical pillar of vegetarianism rubs up against the psychological in many ways as we come to questions of personhood, harm and respectful reverence for fellow beings. Our psychological relationship with the plant world has traditionally been one of quiet cultivation and mutual nourishment, often involving community cooperation to ensure the planting, growing and harvesting proceed smoothly through the seasonal changes. Plants — both wild and human-cultivated — seem to us to more readily accept a symbiotic relationship with humans (as well as other animals) and offer up fruits, seeds and other parts of themselves in their own time. A ripe apple that falls to the ground in autumn can hardly be a traumatic loss for the tree, and on some emotional and psychological level we appreciate this aspect of our reliance on plant stuffs for food.

In contrast, hunting is roundly understood to be an act of potential harm, bringing about a death that the animal may not willingly accept, and one that many traditional tribal societies dealt with through rituals of petition and penitence, seeking forgiveness and cleansing of the "blood guilt" individual hunters themselves inevitably took on for the sake of the community. Rites of a son's "first kill" as an initiation into manhood were once understood as the willful taking-on of a burden or unpleasant task; modern back-patting for such an accomplishment are much more likely to be celebrations of intentional violence as symbolic of a macho-patriarchical conception of desensitized, power-oriented masculinity.

These broad portraits of our relationship to the plant and animal worlds are, of course, not nearly as subtle and complex as any given individual's experience are likely to be, but that does not diminish their importance in shaping the social patterns that influence how and what we share together at meals. Despite all of the above arguments of the previous pillars, it's still possible — in theory — to acknowledge the eating of animal flesh as potentially ethical and healthy, posing no inherent threat to social or personal well-being and being done with respect and reverence for the animals sacrificed. But we must not forget that we are ourselves psychological beings. We may strive for this ideal, but in our strivings we can also willfully ignore the harsh reality of our current meat industry, which rejects and undermines health, ethics and reverence at almost every turn, precisely because our psyches jar and balk at the disjoint.

I know full well that not all of the fruits and vegetables I eat are grown, harvested and processed in environmentally-friendly and respectful ways, yet the strain of this disjoint is not so great because I also know that seeking out organic, local produce is a very real possibility, as is someday growing it myself. On the other hand, commitments to only eat organic, abuse-free animal flesh put a much greater strain on the personal psyche, not only because such commitments are much more difficult to keep (and more likely to be bent or broken in the face of social pressures, for instance, at community meal-events), but because few people can conceive of the real possibility of raising and slaughtering their own food in a way that still feels respectful and emotionally-satisfying. I know myself well enough to know I am not a person who could kill an animal, especially one for whom I had developed respect and reverence through attentive care. Perhaps, under different circumstances, I could become such a person, but I see little point in supposing a reality that posits such a drastic change to my psychological being.

There may be some objection that eschewing the violence and pain on which our existence is inevitably founded is somehow weak-minded or even an unhealthy form of denial. I have addressed in the past my response to this conflation of violence and destruction, so I won't spend much time now responding to such an objection. But I will point out that, psychologically speaking, it becomes much more difficult to argue that vegetarianism is a symptom of weak-mindedness when we stop to consider the enormous social and personal pressures in place that must be overcome in order to make and maintain such a choice. (Anyone who can write an almost 5,000-word manifesto on the matter surely can't be too horribly weak-minded, in any case, if I do say so myself!)

Spiritual

At last we come to what, for me, is the crux of the matter. Scientists, nutritionists and historians may eventually chip away at the first three pillars with new discoveries and more reliable data; society may someday become more just and people more decent to one another and to those with whom they share the world, as the last three pillars wear away to dust. But even if this might one day be the case, even then — this final pillar will remain, not so much a support structure, as an altar. And upon that altar I rest my hands, my lips, and sometimes my weary head, in love and gratitude and praise.

For, to me, abstinence from animal flesh is not just about the ethical and social implications, not just about respecting ecological balance and upholding human and animal rights. It's an act of ritual and worship, an act of communion, surrender and grace as well as intent and creativity. In a consumer culture that has trained us to shovel food down our throats as carelessly as we pump gas into our cars (next time you're driving down the highway, notice the proliferation of gas stations and fastfood joints at all the same exits), my commitment to vegetarianism is a spiritual commitment to approach my daily meals with mindfulness and reverence, as a thrice-daily meditative rite. It's an act of acknowledgement that I am not, in fact, at the top of the food chain, that my body is fragile and, like my spirit, dependent on the mud and the rain and the sunlight, intimately tied to those things and reliant on the simple, quiet subtlety of the lush flora that thrive in every square inch that earth and sea and sky allow them.

In the end, it is a personal choice to shape my spiritual life through my own creative self-will, to become the person I want to be. And I can think of few relevant objections to that.

Lost In Thought....

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The sensation crept up on me slowly over the past week or so. I would sit down somewhere with my laptop, sit down to write, and that creeping, subtle sense of confusion would descend. Or maybe that's not quite it. Maybe I would descend, settling down into the inner landscape of my own mind, looking for the trail of breadcrumbs and blue pebbles left behind from my last writing session. Nothing ever looked the same. Sure enough, the words were there, for the most part where I'd put them, signifying directions and ideas, places I had intended to go. Now where was I? What had I been saying? I would write intensely and slowly until I was tired, until sunset and twilight, and then I would go to bed. And in the morning, I would wake up like a half-dazed sleeper in an unfamiliar place, and ask myself: where was I, now?

Writing isn't usually like this for me, at least not anymore. Writing posts for this blog is usually like a pleasant trip out into the countryside, equipped with a picnic blanket and a set of colored pencils. Find some hill with a panoramic view of sky, green and lovely rolling hills, maybe a stream wending its way to the ocean always inexplicably just beyond the horizon--spread my blanket and pull out my sketchpad. It was all there in front of me, and I sat still and quiet, attending, moving my fingers through the air, moving my pencils in scratches and scribbles across the page. Today, I would say, I want to write about meditation, and I would go sit on a hillside somewhere and watch the subject of meditation slowly coalesce in cloudforms and move in sheepish shadows over the shimmering fields below. Or, today, I want to write about grief and longing, and I would sit by a shallow creak and watch the muddy algae flicker and bend in surrender to the restless redundancy of its current. Or, today, I want to write about what it's been like to write...

In college, I used to build things with my writing. Sometimes what I built was a poem, but more often I was building essays, academic papers, analytical responses. I built with the raw material of class discussion and scholarly citations. This kind of writing was not quite like going out to the countryside to watch the wind and waters move across the earth; it was more like clearing a small patch of flat ground and propping up a shanty out of local stones and fallen branches. Sometimes I liked what I built. Every once in a while, an essay I wrote struck me with a kind of shy impressiveness and I would catch myself thinking, "Look what I made with these ideas, look how I supported this one with that one, how I found the best way to utilize the sharp edge of this argument and the suppleness of that philosophy... and how it all holds together, yes, quite nicely I think." What I made was my own in design, but I was working with what fellow students and teachers, what classes and texts, what others had given me. I learned the craft of engineering an argument.

But this is something else. For the past couple weeks, I've been struggling. There are times when I wonder if I'm not as smart as I used to be, if my brain is out of shape, like a muscle I haven't used all that seriously since I graduated college and left grad school to pursue my own passions. If I had stayed in graduate school, I could have a masters, maybe even a doctorate by now, I could be some wizened professor (or perhaps still unemployed, but with a scholarly publication or two under my belt). I would have a foundation, a network of vetted and institutionally-educated peers, some external confirmation of my work and my progress. Maybe I have been fooling myself, believing that I chose freedom when really I chose laziness and lax standards. Maybe if I were still in school, my brain would be accustomed to endurance and resistance training. Maybe writing these posts about pacifism wouldn't be such a struggle.

But then, maybe that's not quite it. Maybe it's just that I'm descending, settling more deeply into my own thoughts. I don't know what I would build with the ideas of others on pacifism and peace--but I have that creeping sensation that this is not engineering anymore, that I am not really building an argument at all. Instead, each writing session feels like turning again towards the jungle, going out once more into the wild. There are tracks and the thin trails worn by animals in the underbrush of my thoughts, and I step carefully, one foot in front of the other, swinging a stick from side to side to beat the bramble and insects out of my path. Each day I go out into the wilderness of my own mind to see what has been living and growing there, what howls in pain at night, what flowers or fans its feathers in the shifting light of sunset or dawn. How could I not know? How could I be so unfamiliar with my own internal landscape?

I want to pause, to catch my breath--but this is the jungle now, not the pleasant farmland and sunny hills closer to home. I'm on the edge of my own consciousness, pushing forward into the dark where seeds planted in childhood, planted lifetimes ago, have grown up thick and unchecked to obscure the lay of the land, where ideas are skittish and comfortable with camouflage. Something leaps from branch to branch high above in the canopy, and all I catch is a glimpse of brown fur, a long tail, the rustling leaves--I have to move quickly before it's gone.

I can feel it, every time I sit down to write, that urgency, that lack of perspective. I keep moving, feeling my way deeper, hoping to stumble suddenly upon a glade or vast gaping valley where I can stop to look around, to see where I have been and where I might be going. I don't know if my ideas hang together, if the words I have set down here and there to mark my way give trustworthy direction. Sometimes I feel as though I can't even be sure what I'm trying to say, or if what I want to say makes sense at all or rests instead on some secret, shoddy framework that may come skidding and tumbling down with the next heavy rain. This is not a mapping or surveying expedition. This is an excavation; this is a scavenger hunt. This is me, edging half-blind through the inner wilds tracking the ghosts of memory and culture, of Gandhi, King and Christ, catching the scent of reverence on a dense and sluggish wind curling through the limbs of trees as ancient as the heart; this is me, stooping now and then to turn aside a stone or trace the spiral lines of new-grown ferns, collecting samples and cuttings and discarded animal bones to bring back with me for closer study.

Now.... where was I?

Pagan Values: Relating to the Wild

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If you thought my last post ended kind of abruptly, you're right! Plugging away at my discussion of pacifism, defining ideas like violence and destruction in order to talk about Just War theory and environmentalism, I hardly noticed how long and how far afield I'd gone until the clock chimed eight (metaphorically, anyway). It was time to call it a night, and leave the rest for another day. For today, actually.

When I last wrote, I'd set out to find a workable definition of "violence" that would give us some insight into the fundamental principles of pacifism and how they're reflected in the modern environmentalist movement. Opponents of pacifism would like to blur the distinction between destruction and violence and back advocates of creative nonviolence into a corner defending the straw-man view that we can somehow avoid all forms of destruction. Of course we can't, nor would we want to! But luckily, we've seen that this unsubtle approach fails to address how we actually experience the world around us. When we define violence as the rejection, denial or diminishment of the unique and meaningful individuality of being, distinct from destruction as a natural and inevitable aspect of the manifest world, we see that we can strive to avoid violence, against others and against ourselves. Cultivating honorable, reverent relationships and recognizing the utter uniqueness of all beings as meaningfully interconnected is something that we most certainly can accomplish, right here, right now. It also transforms the way we relate to the natural world, and challenges us to reconsider the initial myth of an inherently violent "human nature" at war with each other and its surroundings.

Violence Without Spirit

Our contemporary Western culture suffers from a kind of schizophrenia or sociopathy when it comes to our relationship with the natural world. Exceedingly, almost irrationally anthropocentric, we have come to view almost any check to human well-being, longevity and prolificacy as a kind of malicious rejection of our assumed right to thrive. Under a definition that mistakes all forms of destruction as forms of violence, human beings not only act violently against the wheat field, the deer and the tree; nature itself acts violently against us. The natural force and power of storms and quakes, the inhospitable landscapes of desert, jungle and tundra, even the annual withering and hibernation of winter, all of these become not merely forces of destruction with which we strive, but ways in which the natural world acts out violently. Against this violence, we assert our right to survive, aspiring to tame and control for the benefit of our species.

But reducing destruction and violence to synonyms has another effect: it confuses our perception of indwelling spirit, allowing us to ignore nature as animate and full of divinity whenever it suits us. Only today, when we have employed our knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology and other sciences to subjugate vast realms of the physical world to our needs and desires do we feel secure enough to set aside protected lands and national parks for recreation and aesthetic pleasure. In these places set-apart and roped off, we can open ourselves up to the sacredness of the natural world, we can perceive nature as something with which we might enter into relationship in a meaningful way. But outside of these designated spaces, we slip back into an attitude that treats the natural world as spiritless and empty, something which we can control and use for our own purposes.

The wild tiger is merely an amoral predator mindlessly acting on its base instinct; it can be hunted down, or protected, according to our current sentimentality. When a tiger attacks within the "safe space" of a zoo, however, we perceive it as a being capable, at least in some truncated way, of relationship and so we seek to "punish" it, as though killing the creature might serve as a lesson for other tigers or obtain justice for the victim of the attack. Likewise, we tend to react with horror to those who suggest floods and earthquakes are vengeful acts of an angry god, labeling such views superstitious and ignorant. Yet we respond with apathy or even reluctant acceptance to the pervasive ecological destruction happening around us on a daily basis. We step in to prevent it most passionately only when it mars our "national treasures" or favorite recreational spots. In this way we foster a disconnect between our perception of "wild" nature as senseless and dangerous, and "tame" nature as charming, revitalizing, and sentient only to the extent that it is also relatively safe.

As with many other attitudes of modern culture, we project these assumptions back in time onto societies quite different from our own, and draw odd conclusions. We quite rightly recognize that for most of humanity's existence, the wildness and wilderness of the natural world was a very real and constant danger. Yet we fail to grasp how our ancestors were able to relate to the wild as sentient and radiant with immanent divinity without reducing its force or controlling its power. Instead we assume that ancient peoples, surrounded as they were with danger and challenge, were themselves more prone to violence and less capable, in a milieu of fear and hardship, of developing the mindfulness necessary for peaceful, "civilized" living. The pacifist sees violence as "mindless" because it involves the willful forfeit of mindful choice to respect and honor unique Spirit in all beings. But a mistaken view of human nature as inherently violent attributes that same mindlessness to the complete absence of our ability to choose. The closer we come to nature, in other words (either by looking back in history to when our ancestors lived entrenched in it, or by sloughing off the social assumptions and restrictions that keep us civilized and safe), the closer we come to our own inner mindlessness. When we leave the confines of the zoo, we once again become ruthless predators. Like the natural world itself, we are wild, dangerous and a bit senseless at our core. At our very heart beneath the layers of civilizing influence, implies this view, we lack the capacity to make mindful choices, to relate "face-to-face" with other beings.

Old Stories of the Hunt

As a pacifist who believes that people are not only capable of peaceful, reverent relationship with one another but supremely and deeply suited to such relationship, I don't accept the view that our core is empty of empathy and spirit. Rather, it seems to me that the closer we come to nature--our own and that of the manifest world in which we live--the more capable we become of real connection and understanding. I suspect that our ancestors, living in more intimate contact with wildness and wilderness on a daily basis, were probably less violent than we believe them to be, perhaps even less violent than we ourselves are today. Our modern tendency to sanitize and depersonalize violence with technologies that also allow us to commit horrific acts on a massive scale can fool us into believing we live safe and peaceful lives, but this illusion only lasts as long as we can maintain our ignorance of the real consequences of violence and war.

Among ancient tribal cultures, on the other hand, life-threatening wildness and bodily conflict and destruction were always lurking at the edges of ordinary awareness. Because of this, ancient peoples learned to build relationships of honor and appreciation with the potentially destructive forces and powers of the wilderness, both outside and within themselves. Their stories and myths can show us even today a way of relating to the wild with reverence instead of fear, affirming a mindful relationship with Spirit rather than a senseless battle of instincts. These stories speak to us from a time when human beings remembered, recognized and imagined our roots as deeply entwined in the natural world, when we had only just come into our power as a species capable of cleverness and creativity. A time when we still appreciated these traits in ourselves as an aspect of our own unique individuality within an expansive and inclusive world, and not as qualities that set us apart from and above the world.

From the Cheyenne, for instance, comes the myth of the Great Race, a contest among all creatures to determine who would eat whom. The story goes that long ago, the buffalos, who were huge and strong, used to eat people instead of the other way around. But the people cried out that this was unfair, and so the buffalo proposed there be a race between the four-legged and the two-legged animals to decide the proper relationship among them. The buffalo chose the strongest and fastest of their kind to contend. The people, meanwhile, enlisted the help of the birds of the air who, although only two-legged like the people, outstripped the buffalo on their swift wings. From then on, people hunted buffalo for food, though they would not consume the beard of the buffalo because it was a reminder that once they had been the prey.

Among the Blackfoot, there is another legend about the hunting of buffalo. In this story, no one could induce the buffalo to fall to their deaths over the edge of a cliff, and so the people were slowly starving and wasting away. In the kind of desperation that gives way to jest, one young woman promised that she would marry one of the buffalo, if only they would jump; and soon they were running and tumbling down the cliff, while a great bull, master of the buffalo, came to claim her hand in marriage. The girl's father, outraged and afraid, went on a journey to rescue her and bring her back to her family, but he was soon discovered and trampled to death by the herd. As the girl mourned, the bull pointed out that such was the sadness of the buffalo, too, when they watched their relatives plunge to their deaths in order to feed the people. "But I will pity you," said the bull, "and make you a deal. If you can bring your father back to life, I will let you go, so that you may return to your family." And so the girl found a shard of bone from her father's shattered remains and sang a secret song that restored her father to life. The bull honored his agreement, but said, "Because you have shown that your people have a holy power capable of bringing the dead to life again, we will show you our song and dance. You must remember this dance, so that even though you hunt us and eat us, you will afterwards restore us to life again." This is the story the Blackfoot tell about how the Buffalo Dance began, with its priests dressed in buffalo robes and wearing bulls' heads shuffling along and singing the continuation of life for the massive beasts.

In both these stories, we see a new relationship with the natural world, one that respects its wildness and potential danger without rejecting meaningful relationship. The people who told these stories were buffalo hunters, in relationship with the animal not as domestic stock but as great, untamed creatures perfectly capable, through death or deprivation, of hurting the people who depended on them. It would be easy to say that these legends simply serve, like our modern justifications, to excuse violence as inherent or necessary. From the perspective of Just War theory*, the hunting of animals for food can be considered a form of "just" violence. The needs of the people and the practical benefits of killing outweigh whatever negative consequences the people might suffer, as well as the needs or desires (including the desire to live) that the animals being hunted might have. When an animal has the power and potential to be dangerous and even life-threatening to a human being, the case seems even more obvious; after all, there is no reasoning or other "peaceful" means of reconciling with a senseless animal. Such stories of contest and exchange might amuse or reassure us, but for the most part they're just superstition, overlaying the reality of pragmatic survival.

But what if instead we take these ancient myths at face-value? In Just War theory, the enemy or opponent does not consent to his own destruction, but at the heart of these myths is the awareness of nature, as well as people, as capable of consent and choice. The buffalo himself takes initiative, proposing conditions of equal exchange and just, honorable relationship with human beings. He consents to the terms of the great race or the marriage, accepts the consequences and even, in both stories, demonstrates empathy with human suffering. In the Blackfoot legend, especially, through intermarriage human beings and buffalo come into more intimate understanding, recognizing their common "holy power" to create new life through music and ritual. These stories are not a rejection of "face-to-face" relationship, but a celebration of it. Rather than a prize wrestled from the flesh of unwilling prey, the survival and fruitful life of human beings becomes a gift, in which nature gives of itself by its own consent with the understanding that we, too, will give of ourselves in return. And so, even though the end result is the same (the people still hunt and kill the buffalo in order to survive), a potential act of violence is transformed into an act of mutual empowerment and renewal.

This transformation is what practical pacifism can help us to realize. It puts us in touch with our awareness of relationship, and where there is relationship there is the possibility of generous giving and of gratitude, even in the most difficult, dangerous or destructive circumstances. To hunt a species to extinction dishonors the gift of life that creature has given us, but it also means we rob ourselves of that gift. When we diminish others, we also diminish ourselves. But when we see ourselves as connected to and concerned with the prosperity and protection of others at our most fundamental level, we become more care-full in how we act and react, how we live in and respond to the world around us. We can longer turn a deaf ear or blind eye to others; we learn to listen to them closely, to reach out to them in connection and communication, so that we might know what gifts they offer and how best to honor those gifts in return. At its simplest, pacifism asks us to care for other beings and preserve them from the callousness and diminishment of violence. For when we empower and appreciate others, when we recognize in others the capacity for choice and consensual relationship, we also empower and elevate ourselves and honor our own potential.




*To be fair, Just War theory is rarely if ever actually applied to anything other than literal warfare among humans; however, its implications about the nature of violence and our relationship with potentially destructive forces can be more widely considered and applied.

Pagan Values: Violence, Destruction & The Difference

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Is it really the case, as I claimed earlier, that there is no equivalent to the "just war" theory when it comes to understanding our relationship with the natural world? With a moment's thought we can soon list lots of occasions when an individual or group of people have had to hunt or harvest, plow fields for food or cut down trees for shelter, in order to survive. To say that people are not sometimes "at war" with or struggling against their local environment treads dangerously close to the naive view of nature as benign, beneficent, even tame.

The truth is, the natural world is anything but tame; it is wild, it is the epitome of wildness and wilderness. Forces of the natural world--the ferocity of a wildfire, the upheaval of an earthquake, the very barrenness of a desert or the pummeling pressure of a river's relentless current--can be sources of terrific destruction and obstacles against which we struggle every day. Meanwhile, the "red in tooth and claw" reality of predator and prey certainly seems founded on an inherent relationship between violence and survival. How can we choose to live by principles of pacifism and creative nonviolence in light of this wildness? How can we apply pacifism to environmentalism--let alone to our everyday, social and political lives--when violence appears ubiquitous, especially in the natural world?

Violence in Human/Nature

Really, it has always been the apparent violence of nature as a whole--more than that of humanity alone--that has been the greatest stumbling block for the philosophy of nonviolence. Most arguments against pacifism as an unrealistic ideal only rely partially on the actual history of human violence; after all, there are also many examples in human history of our capacity for empathy, kindness and near-infinite adaptability. Opponents of pacifism more often use nature as the best evidence against its practical realization. Projecting back in time an imagined pure or fundamental "human nature" imbued with all the base self-interest of the animal world and drenched in the blood and strife of continuous struggle against competitors for the scarce resources needed to survive, they argue that people simply cannot overcome an innate tendency towards destruction. The closed system of the earth itself means there is only a finite amount of land, food and other resources to go around. We continually find ourselves in conflict, destroying when there is no more room to create, surviving and thriving at the expense of our rivals and our prey. Even those rare individuals, the argument goes, who can overcome or mitigate violence do so through suppression or denial of their own nature. But this requires extraordinary discipline and strength of will not available to most of us. Pacifism might be an option for the inhumanly committed with unwavering focus, but as a general goal for the average person it just doesn't work.

The flaw in this view is that it takes for granted that destruction is synonymous with violence, and where the former exists the latter must also be present. To kill a neighbor to gain his prosperous fields is, from this perspective, hardly different from the act of eating the harvest of those fields, or hunting down a stag, or chopping down a tree to build shelter. In all these situations, one life is destroyed for the sake of another. We might say that killing a fellow human being is worse because, by some unspoken measure, human beings are better or more important than a stag, a tree or a field of wheat. But this objection relies on a rather flimsy judgment of value. To make a distinction between violence against human beings and violence against non-humans misrepresents our own intuitive relationship with destruction. As soon as we acknowledge that humans are not inherently "better" than the rest of the natural world--something many Pagans find obvious already--we lose what ground we've gained towards a nonviolent philosophy and find ourselves again faced with the overwhelming presence of destruction, and therefore (supposedly) violence in nature and humankind.

Natural Empathy & Our Need for Destruction

The more appropriate and useful distinction that we need to make is, I believe, between mere destruction and violence. That is, between destruction as a natural and inevitable aspect of the manifest world; and violence as an intentional form of destructive dishonor or irreverence towards the unique individuality of being. Not only does this subtle shift circumvent the false dichotomy of humanity-versus-nature, but it reflects the difference between destruction and violence that we experience intuitively and reveals exactly what it is about violence that makes it so damaging and undesirable.

As self-aware social animals, we human beings have developed a natural tendency towards empathy, evident even in early childhood. This ability to connect imaginatively and emotionally with the "other"--not just with other people, but any being that we perceive as animate and aware, from pets, to plants, to landscapes and weather--allows us to function well in supportive communities, but it also means that we feel a visceral discomfort when witnessing others in pain. When cornered by our own urgent needs or fears, however, our capacity for self-consciousness and imagination can come to serve violence rather than empathy, encouraging us to invent convincing justifications for inflicting pain on others. These justifications--self-defense, punishment, deterrence, and preemptive force, to name a few--hold in common a typical diminishment of the "other" into a being less worthy of our empathy, less capable of suffering, against which we can direct destructive force guilt-free.

Sometimes this diminishment portrays the other as a less-than-complete being, not merely an animal but a vicious, repulsive, uncomplicated thing that cannot be trusted to live peacefully and behave civilly, and must therefore be either contained or exterminated. Other times, we diminish the other by viewing it as an abstract destructive power against which we have every right to strive for life. The mugger with the knife looming up out of the dark is as impersonal as the tornado or the virus that threatens us, and we react with a similarly reflexive defense. The criminal condemned to execution is, as Ani DiFranco says, "a symbol, not a human being; that way they can kill [him], and say it's not murder, it's a metaphor." An excellent example of diminishment comes from Jared Diamond's book, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal:

[I]n 1982 one of Australia's leading news magazines, The Bulletin, published a letter by a lady named Patricia Cobern, who denied indignantly that white settlers had exterminated the Tasmanians. In fact, wrote Ms. Cobern, the settlers were peace-loving and of high moral character, while Tasmanians were treacherous, murderous, warlike, filthy, gluttonous, vermin-infested, and disfigured by syphilis. Moreover, they took poor care of their infants, never bathed, and had repulsive marriage customs. They died out because of all those poor health practices, plus a death wish and a lack of religious beliefs. It was just a coincidence that, after thousands of years of existence, they happened to die out during a conflict with the settlers. The only massacres were of settlers by Tasmanians, not vice versa. Besides, the settlers only armed themselves in self-defense, were unfamiliar with guns, and never shot more than forty-one Tasmanians at one time.

Such justifications, listed emphatically one after another, bely the utter absurdity of such attempts at diminishment. As Cobern's explanations grow more and more bizarre and unlikely (the Tasmanians had a "death wish"? the settlers "never shot more than forty-one" at a time?), what becomes obvious is her desperate need to prove that the deaths of the Tasmanians were, one way or another, inevitable.

Choice & Consent

Why this desperate need to prove inevitability? Because destruction really is inevitable, unavoidable. It is, in essence, simply another aspect of creation, that which breaks down before it can build up, making room for the new and letting the old and stale lapse back into the void of potential. We recognize this basic fact at gut-level, so deep is this relationship between destruction and creation, dark and light, winter and spring. Destruction is not always undesirable; sometimes it can even be a welcome relief. And so, what every form of diminishing the other has in common is our need to justify violence by transforming it into a form of destruction.

These justifications would not work so well, or even be necessary, if we did not already understand on an intuitive level that destruction and violence are not the same. We would not need to deny the relevance of empathy and reverence, to deny our own active participation in destruction, if we did not sense on some level that these things make a difference. What we already know is that some deaths, some break-downs, some sources of pain and suffering, are not inevitable. What we already know is that, unlike destruction, violence is always a choice. It is a choice to destroy, to induce pain, to allow our own needs and passions to overshadow those of the other and to force our will upon others without their consent. The word "violence" itself comes from the Latin violentia, which translates as vehemence or impetuosity. Both words suggest the application of force without thought or consideration, without empathy for the suffering it might cause. Related is the verb violare, which gives rise to the English "violate" and means "to treat with violence or irreverence, to dishonor."

When trying to understand a philosophy of pacifism or nonviolence, therefore, we can define the word "violence" broadly, without making the absurd claim that all destruction should or can be avoided. Personally, I define "violence" as: a rejection or denial of the unique and meaningful individuality of a being. Rejecting that another being has a unique and meaningful individual existence independent from our own can lead us to impose our wills or passions on them by force. Such force can be physical and cause physical injury or even death, but it can also be emotional, psychological or even spiritual. In her book Living With Honour, Emma Restall Orr talks about the Welsh and Gealic words for "face," and invokes the notion of "being face-to-face" as at the heart of what honor means in Celtic society. An act of violence against another is an act of dishonor, refusing to come face-to-face, diminishing and disempowering others, alienating and isolating them and denying them relationship with us, denying our interconnection.

We can also act violently towards ourselves; this kind of self-violence is more often emotional or spiritual than physical and so less often acknowledged. But if we remember the definition of violence, then we realize that any time we reject our own individuality as unique and meaningful, any time we deny our capacity for creative engagement with the world, we commit an act of spiritual violence against our own beings. This diminishment of our own being is why we so often seek to justify violence, insisting that it is actually inevitable or necessary destruction in which we had no choice or active participation. When we have the capacity and opportunity to choose, and yet forfeit that choice thoughtlessly, rejecting our capacity to act as a unique individual "face-to-face" with another, we act violently not only against the other, but against ourselves. For every act of violence, both victim and violator become "faceless," both are dishonored and diminished.

Pagan Values: Go Play Outside!

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"Go play outside," my dad would tell us on nice summer days. And my brother and I would go tumbling out the backdoor, ready to climb trees or dance through the sprinkler in the backyard, eager to splash through neighborhood creeks, scale old wooden jungle gyms, or chase after frisbees in the wide meadowy fields nearby. Never mind the scrapes and bruises (and two broken arms in one summer!), the muddy pant cuffs and worn-through knees, the sunburns and bug bites. "Go play outside." What a simple, wonderful command!

And it's one I'm still as eager to follow, as I am to give. Sometimes I think that simple, earnest suggestion, more than anything else, has been the most valuable and meaningful gift Druidry has given me these past several years. The encouragement and the permission to go outside and play; it's something that we need more as adults when so many Serious Important Grown-Up Things seem to demand our time and attention. Just learning to lighten up, be silly, climb a tree or collect pretty stones and weeds in the park, run or dance or skip or throw my arms up towards the sun--I need those things, those moments and opportunities to be child-like and joyful, to revel with complete abandon in the glory of living in a beautiful, messy natural world.

I don't know if other Pagan writers experience this odd whine of feedback ringing in their ears, when one desire comes too close to another, one value rubs up against another.... There are times when I want to fill this blog with that single, concise directive, over and over: Go play outside! You lovely people, for gods' sake, go play outside! Step away from the computer screen, get up from your desk, open a window, unlock the door, step into the beautiful world and breathe deep. But on the other hand: read my stuff! Stay here, listen, let us sit and think quietly and seriously for a while, let us exchange stories and experiences, see what we can learn from one another.

Of course, I want you to read what I write. I want us to communicate, to converse, to share and explore and ruminate together. I love the outdoors, the shorelines and the horizons and the twilights where I can slip into the liminal wildness of nature. But I also love to write. I could spend hours in front of a computer, tweaking and revising and chewing on my lip, working to say what I really want to say. I love the gritty feeling of satisfaction when I manage to write something interesting, substantive, maybe even poetic or inspiring. It's like the grit of dirt that reminds you these vegetables come from your own modest garden. So of course I want you to read what I write. It's a gift, it's why I write, so that I can give what I have written away to whoever is willing to receive. But then.... o, but then. If you're in here reading blog posts instead of going outside to play....

Hear it?! Hear that whine? The harsh ringing of a microphone too close to the speaker....

This week I had the honor, and pleasure, of being a guest writer over at Druid Journal. My post, "Pagan Values: Ecology, Environmentalism & Practical Pacifism", took many hours of struggle, writing and revising, thinking and rethinking, but through that process I discovered and explored some exciting ideas about the nature of creative nonviolence and its parallel in the environmentalist movement. I'll be expanding on some of those thoughts in this blog over the next few weeks, but in the meantime I would love for you to hop on over to check out this first enthusiastic plunge into the subject.

I know, I know, there are so many interesting things to read right now, especially on the subject of Pagan values, virtues and ethics. How can I bring myself to ask you to read yet another article online, when green fields and blue skies and warm summer rains are just waiting to be enjoyed? But I promise, I'll do my best to make my posts worth reading, I'll cram in as much thoughtfulness and controversy and clever turns-of-phrase as I can; if you promise that, once in a while, you'll take a break to just step outside, stretch your arms wide towards the sun and give a great big bear-hug to your favorite tree. Do we have a deal?

Relationship & Story: Exploring Ethics from a Pagan Perspective

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The beginning of June marks the beginning of the first-ever International Pagan Values Blogging Month, and I couldn't be more excited! I also couldn't be busier, as I juggle schedules, arrange for my summer vacation, plan for my up-coming birthday and help my boyfriend move into his new apartment. So, I hope you will forgive me if I kick off this month's posts with a review of two excellent books on "Pagan values" already out there in circulation and well worth reading: Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics by Emma Restall Orr, and The Other Side of Virtue, by Brendan Myers. Within the next few days, I'll also be guest posting over at Druid Journal on ecology, environmentalism and practical pacifism, as an introduction to a four(ish)-part series on the role of pacifism, violence and warriorhood in Paganism. I'll be updating here again to let you know when that post is up, so be sure to hop on over to check it out! Until then, enjoy the following review, first published in Sky, Earth, Sea: A Journal of Practical Spirituality (Spring 2009).

"The greatest achievement of spirit: the ability to transform nearly anything--even our suffering and tragedy--into art."

- Myers, The Other Side of Virtue

As the Pagan community continues to change and grow, establishing itself as a thriving contemporary spiritual tradition (or more accurately, traditions!), the needs of this diverse and somewhat chaotic community also continue to develop beyond those of first-generation neophytes looking for initiatory experiences and basic how-to guides. One aspect of this evolving need for a deeper, more complex engagement with the Pagan spiritual path--so familiar to those who demand "advanced" Pagan texts that move beyond the typical "Druidry 101," for instance--can be seen in the community's desire to establish its own unique sense of ethics and virtue apart from the divinely mandated good-and-evil dualism of a monotheistic mainstream. From the earliest modern practitioners of Wicca and Druidry, we find examples of moral formulations: the Wiccan Rede, the Law of Threefold Return, and the collection of Druidic triads, to name only a few. And yet many of us can see that these simple codes often leave much to be desired, faltering under pressure or deteriorating into self-justifying rhetoric. Two new texts published recently by O Books, however, rise to the challenge and take on the complex, wild and vital questions of ethical action and virtuous living, seeking new ways of approaching such ancient problems: Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics, by Emma Restall Orr, and Brenden Myers's text, The Other Side of Virtue: Where our virtues come from, what they really mean, and where they might be taking us.

Both texts center on the idea of relationship, more specifically that between the self and the world (and those in it), as the defining aspect of what we should consider an ethical or virtuous life. Emma Restall Orr sets out in her book, Living With Honour, to provide a clear basis for making practical (or "applied") ethical choices apart from the moral doctrines laid out by monotheistic religions and secular culture, which have tended in recent times to be dualistic and hierarchical. The result is a uniquely Pagan conception of ethics based on the primacy of "honorable relationship," an on-going, active engagement with the world and those living in it, guided by courage, generosity and loyalty. While Restall Orr focuses primarily on how this relationship with the world shapes our everyday choices and behavior in order to form a healthy interconnection with other beings, in Brenden Myers's work The Other Side of Virtue, the author trains his attention on the engaged individual, exploring how a self-aware relationship with Immensities helps each of us to discover, as well as to create, "who we are." For Myers, self-knowledge presents a philosophical "problem," and the work of resolving it cultivates a person's virtue in the form of human excellence. Both authors, however, recognize a core ambivalence about assuming such relationship with the world will always be safely benign, challenging the easy dichotomy between good and evil so common to monotheistic religions. In searching for an alternative ethical foundation, both Myers and Restall Orr evoke Pagan and Druidic notions of creative story-telling as the means by which we might shape our lives with a sense of meaning, beauty and truth.

Emma Restall Orr's text might be considered, for many readers, to be the more practical and down-to-earth of the two. She devotes the first half of this clear-sighted and articulate book to deconstructing common (and commonly misunderstood) terms such as "Pagan," "morality," and "honor", as well as developing a broad understanding of the many schools of thought that have contributed to the study of ethics over the centuries. Leaping over whole philosophical systems in a single bound, she is likely to leave some readers a little giddy with vertigo, but her treatment is invariably sharp and fair, seeking the central tenants and common threads that will be most illuminating without risking oversimplification. Her careful exploration of the multifarious foundations and processes that go into making everyday choices--from emotion and instinct, to reason and the rule of law--prepares the reader for the "applied ethics" of later chapters. Further, her brief description of various Pagan traditions and their unique moral formulations provides a place for the contemplative Pagan reader to find an initial foothold of familiar subject matter, while also clarifying (for Pagan and non-Pagan readers alike) how one can establish and maintain a functional ethical model outside of the doctrines of monotheistic religions and secular humanism. Scattered throughout these sections of analysis and dissection are Restall Orr's characteristic flashes of narrative--dancing in the rain, savoring an apple, reading quietly in the park--which give flavor and moving insight into the potential of engaged ethical living.

These more poetic moments become less common in the second half of Living with Honour, as Restall Orr buckles down to the nitty-gritty and addresses many contemporary social and political issues of our time. Exploring everything from suicide and euthanasia to animal rights and vegetarianism, parenting and romance to ecology and materialism, she applies her ethic of "honorable relationship" with intensity and consistency. Her approach puts the individual's ability to choose freely, no matter how difficult or convoluted the circumstances, at the heart of an ethical life, and eschews any reliance on socially-imposed "morality" or external rule of law. This text does not aim to rewrite the shared assumptions of a Judeo-Christian mainstream, but instead celebrates the anarchistic, pluralistic tendencies of the modern Pagan community as essential to developing a sense of individual responsibility ("response-ability") that relates more directly and receptively to a world that is always complex and in flux. Because of her intensity, however, some of her conclusions may make readers cringe (especially those passages which call for strict veganism or which challenge the usual notions of death); her thorough deconstruction of our potential for careless exploitation is pitiless, daunting, even at times overwhelming. One might wonder how it is ever possible to have enough knowledge or power to be capable of making truly effective ethical choices in the face of a huge and infinitely complicated world.

However, her unfaltering emphasis on personal, responsive relationship softens her own tendency towards moralizing, saving the text from becoming just another example of imposing doctrine. Instead, Restall Orr works tirelessly to remind readers that ethical living must be guided, above all, by an open and ever-changing experience of the world itself, here and now. In the third and final section of her book, she addresses the feelings of fear, impotence, inertia and confusion that often keep us from acting according to our own sense of ethics. As an antidote to such feelings, she suggests a kind of stubborn, loving integrity that seeks for a meaningful, empowering sense of self immersed in an infinitely beautiful world. In these final pages, she tells a story of scared awe and gratitude, in which the choice to act ethically is rarely ever a choice at all, but only the natural response that empathy and integrity evoke in a receptive individual willing to place honorable relationship above pure self-interest or familiar fears.

In some ways, this poetic conclusion to Restall Orr's work leads naturally to the first chapters of Brenden Myers's The Other Side of Virtue, which opens with a warm circle of storytellers gathered around a crackling fire, inviting the reader to join. While Restall Orr finds powerful, ecstatic inspiration above all in the wildness of the natural world, Myers is clearly moved and motivated strongly by the shared life and work of community and locates the beginning of his discussion of virtue in this setting. The first "movement" of the text (which is structured like a song or musical score) plays informally with images and metaphors to be developed more fully later on, asserting aphorisms and even making jokes. Reading along, it is almost impossible not to begin to engage the text directly, chuckling aloud or scribbling notes in the margin, developing a dialogue, a conversation of ideas and possibilities. While Restall Orr prepares the reader to enter into the thick of ethical analysis by first covering the familiar ground of Pagan tradition, Myers uses a different approach to his task of defining virtue: establishing a sense of community that will run through the rest of the book and give landscape and texture to the path it will trace.

In the following three movements, Myers proceeds to examine the historical development of the concept of "virtue," beginning with the tribal culture of Heroic societies, through the developing emphasis on reason in ancient Classical philosophy, following the various permutations over the centuries as they produced humanism, romanticism and contemporary examples, real and fictional, of honorable heroes and great men. Throughout this discussion, Myers includes useful details about the changes in society and politics, as well as myriad quotations from ancient texts, to give context and perspective to the evolving definition of human virtue. His examination of particular thinkers and writers, such as Shakespeare, Machiavelli and Nietzsche, provide stepping stones through history for the reader; however, at times they give the text almost too specific a focus, as though standing in for whole schools of thought without giving the reader enough perspective to see how these trends weave together in a broader theory. Meanwhile, the influence of Judeo-Christian morality and its redefinition of virtue as that of passivity and obedience, so intriguingly mentioned in the book's overture, is left almost entirely unmentioned. Here is one place where Restall Orr's sweeping but sometimes overly broad discussion of philosophical concepts can compliment Myers's more specialized focus and remind the reader of the "bigger picture" that might otherwise be lost in the historical milieu.

If the discussion of virtue's historical development, although very well-researched and highly informative, feels a bit dense or cobbled together at times, the fifth movement of The Other Side is where Myers really hits his stride. In it, he attempts to lay bare the "logical structure" of virtue itself, as he understands it, and the slowly-unfolding weaving together of seemingly disparate ideas from previous sections is by turns masterful, musical and mind-blowing. Here we are confronted in a kind of pure contemplation with some of the "Immensities" (Myers's term) that Restall Orr addresses more directly and practically in the later chapters of her own work: the Earth, Death (or Time), and Other People; as well as some of the responses their presence in our lives can evoke: wonder, integrity, and humanity. For Myers, the issue of relationship--the place of the individual within a community and landscape--comes to the forefront in "threshold" experiences whereby a person's sense of identity and self-knowledge is challenged, shaken to its core and thus transformed by an engagement with something both infinitely knowable and intimately overwhelming.

Unlike Restall Orr, who believes that an open engagement with the world usually renders the "ethical" course of action obvious and natural, Myers suggests that we develop our sense of virtue, or human excellence, precisely in those situations when an Immensity calls our most fundamental assumptions about the self and the world into question--that is, precisely when we are least certain of what we once believed to be obvious. His discussion of how these experiences shape us, however, is remarkably similar to Restall Orr's. He too emphasizes our inherent ability to choose as both a revelatory and creative act, at once revealing ourselves to our own self-awareness and helping to create those very selves. The choices we make are shaped by our sense of story (what sociologists might call, on a larger scale, our mythology, what Druids might call our "song") and the role we see ourselves playing as that story unfolds. There is no guarantee that Fortune will be kind or an Immensity benign--in fact, the potentially transformative nature of threshold experiences might be considered inescapably destructive, even traumatic to some extent. But with a strong sense of story, rather than a reliance on traditional definitions of right and wrong, we both discover and create meaning and beauty in our lives through the choices we pursue at such times.

Of course, the study of ethics and the exploration of virtue are not precisely one and the same. On the one hand, virtue is only one way among many to approach the question of ethics (including relativism, utilitarianism, deontology, etc.); on the other hand, there are certain amoral or nonmoral aspects to our understanding virtue itself (such as beauty, physical skills and even good fortune), so that it is difficult to see one as fitting snugly as a subcategory into the other. It may be a gross simplification to say that virtue concerns the effects of a relationship with an Immense world on the nature and knowledge of the self, while ethics is the study of how this relationship is expressed in our behavior and practical choices in everyday life. Yet it seems these two approaches are essentially the ways in which two remarkable contemporary Druid authors have chosen to explore a subject of vast complexity and vital relevance for every human being today. These two books, published so fortuitously within a few months of each other, should most definitely be read together, and read more than once. The questions they raise and problems they wrestle have continuing importance fundamental to our perception of ourselves and the world we live in with one another. And as our own stories change and evolve over the course of our lives, these texts will continuing to offer fresh new insight and possibilities for meaning, beauty, knowledge and truth.

• Brenden Myers, The Other Side of Virtue: Where our virtues come from, what they really mean, and where they might be taking us, O Books, 2008.


• Emma Restall Orr, Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics, O Books, 2007.