It's my 28th birthday today, and I'm up early, thinking. Usually on my birthday I wake up excited, but today I'm feeling quietly grateful and... older. I'm just thinking about time, how little of it we have and how much, therefore, we need to make of it. It's the first birthday in which I wake up seeing my future as a finite vista rather than an infinity of possibility. I don't think of this in a negative way; it just is: it's one more piece of the awareness that is our existence. I just didn't expect to be quite so aware of it on this particular morning.

My 27th year has been a big one. Life is always full of change, but this has been a particularly transformative year. Last year, on my birthday, I was in LA Chinatown having my last lunch with the literacy staff. I had just quit my job, a thoroughly mixed bag of satisfaction and stress. We knew we were going to move, but we didn't know when or where. I knew I wanted to make art, but wasn't sure how to go about it. In March we were in San Pablo, launching our new, self-employed, Bay Area lives... by being sick for a week, having no internet, and not going out because everything was rainy and grey. By June, my stomach problems had mostly dissipated, I had started gardening and crafting, and I took my first drawing classes in Berkeley. By September, Al had moved to Ithaca, Shra and Devin were engaged, I'd decided to do a family history, and I was in full-on preparation mode for my first craft fair. And here I am a year later, and my life is totally different. I have a shop. I can draw. I'm working on my family history, and I've started a novel. I take singing lessons and go to the climbing gym. I can dance again, more or less. I'm building up my new social life in the Bay Area, and I see my family regularly (but not too regularly).

All this sums up the changes that have taken place in this past year, and yet it doesn't. I feel different. I think partly it's because we're back in the Bay Area after having lived elsewhere. Partly it's that owning a business makes me see all kinds of things in a new way. And largely it's that, being self-employed and free to live as I please, I think a lot more deeply about my place in the world and how I'm spending my time. When I was in school, my life was planned by others; all the steps were already laid out for me, along an assumed trajectory, and as long as I followed those steps, I was supposed to be fine. When I was working, I also had a position and a purpose -- both the ones defined for me by the organization, and the ones I defined for myself within their parameters. But now, I'm about as much a free agent as a person can be in this world, and it's a 100% different life. I knew it would be awesome and liberating, and probably scary, but what I didn't realize was that it would be such a responsibility, and that I would feel this responsibility deeply and think about it all the time. I quit these other paths -- school, employment, even volunteering -- so I could make my own way and shape the place I wanted to hold in this world. Is that not scary?! That means I need to find my best place in the world and make my way vigorously toward it, even as my target is ever-changing, even when it seems impossibly far.

I guess what I realize today -- knowledge I've been slowly coming to for months -- is that in choosing to live my life by my own decisions, I made a commitment, with all the obligations and responsibilities that entails. And unlike some commitments, it's not one I can ever go back on; even if I went back to working for pay, or going to school, I'd still have this sense of responsibility to myself and to the universe, to use my time as fully as possible.

I was going to try and include here how my outlook has changed too, how I really do feel a dual sense of commitment to myself and to the world/to others, but I have to leave for yoga. I'll write more later. In the meantime... happy birthday, me.

I love you all. :)

Tags: call to action, deep thoughts
I'm Feeling: thoughtful

Shra and I were walking down a hallway someplace and we turned into a side room. It was made to look like the outdoors, full of half-trees and little fake creeks and things, like a cage in the zoo. As soon as we were about five feet into the room, a marmalade cat emerged and walked directly toward Shra. We both made kitty noises at it. Then another cat came toward us, and another, and another, until Shra was surrounded by cats. They made a circle around her and then all of them turned their heads to face me. They looked up toward the sky, and their eyes glowed green and luminous. It wasn't scary, but it was strange, and I asked Shra, "Hey, what do you think is going on?" Then I saw that Shra's eyes were glowing too, and she was also staring up at whatever the cats were looking at.

I couldn't turn my head, so I never saw the UFO, but I could feel its size and hear its hum, a low, foreign frequency. A voice spoke to the cats, and a couple of them levitated up into the UFO. Then a beam came down onto the first marmalade cat, and the voice said, "You may go." Then the UFO went away, and the cats and Shra went back to normal.

It turned out that whenever humans entered this room, if they met the cats' approval, one of the cats would choose to adopt itself to the first of the humans. Whenever this happened, the UFO would come down and shift the cats' population in some way. So the marmalade cat had chosen Shra, and now Shra had a space cat for a pet. He was the most amazing cat. He could read your mind, he was smart and subtly observant, he was extremely affectionate, he was clever and agile, and yet he behaved exactly like a cat. No one could ever tell that there was anything extraterrestrial about him; they just thought he was an incredibly lovable cat. We only told family members, who all enjoyed the company of this extraordinary cat. His name was Mo.

Tags: dreams, family, kitties
I'm Feeling: I'm sore everywhere, but content

My sister Allison's friend and sometime tennis doubles partner, Elena Cadet, was killed this weekend in a car accident. She was 18, a freshman at UC Riverside. I never met Elena, but I hear she was incredibly sweet and sunny, a tennis player admired both for athleticism and attitude. Over the past few days her Facebook Wall has swelled with tributes and loving messages from her many friends, a touching cyber-version of the impromptu outpourings of notes, flowers, and mementos that usually adorn more physical memorial sites (and I'm sure all these now decorate that palm tree near Riverside).

In spite of my not knowing Elena, her death has affected me in ways I'm not quite able to articulate. It's been a week of food and socializing; we've been staying with friends and family, and have been driving around and eating in restaurants and petting cats and taking walks in the sunshine. It's all been very pleasant and ordinary. But every now and then, since I heard about Elena, I have been getting these flashes of -- I don't know what; they come and go so quickly I cannot even put a name to the emotion. I'll be doing something totally normal and then for an instant I'll feel like I'm falling into a void, like there's nothing to hold on to, like I blinked and the world transformed around me into something I didn't recognize. And really, it kind of has. The simple psychological explanation is that I forgot that I live in a world where sweet, beloved 18-year-olds of my family's acquaintance can be killed for no reason... and now I remember.

Another, more complicated, layer of this explanation is that the death of others always reminds me of my own mortality. Hearing about Elena, Al's friend, made me think that it could so easily have been one of my sisters, my best friends, or me... could still be me. My own life or that of any of my loved ones could -- at any moment -- likewise come to a screeching halt some dark chilly night. We never know when it might happen, but we all know that someday it will. We're all born to die. Sometimes this thought reassures me, by teaching me to accept the inevitable. Sometimes it galvanizes me to do as much as I can in the time I do have: "rage, rage against the dying of the light," etc. And sometimes it's just too damn big and too terrifying to think about, both in the general sense and in the individual -- which is I think why I have only been able to process Elena's death in fits and starts, in these flashes of nothing and my subsequent meditations.

I have noticed in the past year that I feel things more deeply, now that I have begun these two practices: compassion and art. They go together; both teach me to remain open at all times, to be ready to receive whatever emotions and ideas come my way. So I'm a lot more creative and thoughtful these days, but the dark side is that I also cry a lot more easily, and feel more moved by more things.

These inexplicable flashes I've been having these past few days... I think they are some mixture of fear and panic and sorrow. The closest I can come to describing them is this: it's as if, watching a friend open a refrigerator and take out some food, I have a half-second vision of everything around me in advanced stages of death and decay. The walls are crumbling, moldering; clothes and linens are disintegrating and flapping in the wind; the food is rotting; the people are all skeletons. I don't actually *have* these visions, but I'm left as chilled and terrified as if this were what I saw. The flashes seem to say: "This is all a facade. You think this is normal, but it's not. What's normal is senseless death. The world you know is all a fake; it's all nothing, and death is the only real thing."

What keeps these flashes at bay is the understanding I've come to from my compassion and creativity practices: that the truth is both sides of the coin. Bland, quotidian, senseless life and frightening, unknowable, senseless death are both the norm. Living in wealth and security as we do, we're usually shielded from this, but this is the fact of life. It's not that life is any more meaningful than death; it's just that we like it so much better. In the grand is-ness of our existence, Elena's death makes just as much sense as my life; my comfortable, joy-filled being is just as random as her sudden absence... at least for those of us who have no afterlife concept to turn to when death enters our view. I don't know; this all sounds so terribly grim, yet I find it somehow comforting. I guess it reminds me how precious life is, and ultimately, if this life is all we get, this knowledge is the only meaning there is in anything.

Our lives are immeasurably precious. If this is it, and it may be withdrawn at any time, then what we have now has value beyond words, beyond emotion, beyond anything we're capable of even comprehending.

My love goes out to all Elena's family and friends, and to her too, wherever or whatever she may now be. May the love she embodied in this world go on loving.

Tags: call to action, deep thoughts
I'm Feeling: thoughtful

I really need to be writing more.

A few nights ago I dreamed that Lost bifurcated into two new seasons that followed two alternative endings, and I dreamed the pilot episode of both those seasons. In detail.

Last night I had a dream about escaping a T-rex by putting someone else's head in its jaws (!!) and locking them both in a chamber (!!!). I also dreamed the whole family went to Ithaca -- to help Shra -- and when it started snowing heavily, Mommy had to drive Shra and me somewhere, while Al, Erik, and Daddo stayed behind and would leave separately. I was terrified of the snowy drive across the gorges... I woke up and was surprised and so thankful to find Erik with me. :)

Not only are these my usual vivid dreams, but they're also dealing pretty heavily with fear, escape, threats, danger, and drama. Hmm.

Tags: deep thoughts, dreams
I'm Feeling: sleepy

Erik and I have both been having a very bleh day. Erik lay in bed this morning and complained about things, which he only ever does when he's feeling really bleh, and that can only mean the feeling has been growing for a few days. I've been a little off for a few days, too. Just now I went into the bedroom, where Erik was ticking away at his laptop, and flopped down next to him.

ME: I'm feeling failure-y again.
ERIK: Why?
ME: Because... I'm not writing, I'm barely drawing, and I'm not selling anything in my shop.
ERIK: That's not failure, that's just not-success-yet.
ME: Thanks.
ERIK: No, I'm serious!
ME: So was I; I wasn't being sarcastic.
ERIK: Failure would be if people left you comments about your shop screaming, "YOU SUCK" and "YOUR WORK IS TERRIBLE," and you were shamed into shutting it down. Failure would be if you gave up writing and burned all your notebooks.
ME: Yes, yes, you're right.

I thought about this for a minute, then flopped over again and continued whingeing.

ME: I'm feeling not-success-yet-y.
ME: That sounds like a monster!
ME: The not-success yeti!
ERIK gets up, to my utter amazement, and begins to wave his arms and do a dance.
ERIK: Not success yet! Not success yet!
ME: ...
ME: Why does a yeti make you think of dancing? Aren't yeti supposed to lurch around bellowing and roaring?
ERIK: No, they dance because people can't see them. It's like the Loch Ness Monster. It pops up, does a dance [he demonstrates], and one person goes, "DID YOU SEE THAT?!" and no one believes them because why would the monster be dancing?!

This is remarkably cheering. :)

Tags: non sequiturs
I'm Feeling: grimly amused

[x-posted from art blog]

This is the only drawing from last night that anyone needs to care about:

It's not that the others are bad; they're about an accurate representation of what I can draw on any given day. But the above sketch is particularly good. I'm very happy with it, even if I did forget all my soft pencils at home so the softest one I had to work with was a 2B.

A couple of weeks ago, Erik looked at my sketches and said I should think more about shading and less about line (he has since explained that this is because I'm already getting good at line, and should broaden my practice to include more things I'm not so good at). I tried to do that last night, and it was tremendously helpful, even if I remain a contour person in general. The thing about focusing only on the contours is that this leaves me open for placement problems: all the lines look right, but the surfaces in between are just these vast expanses of uncertain size, and that makes things hang together wrong overall. But last night, when I paid more attention to the surfaces themselves, those indeterminate expanses transformed into a series of specific tones with specific shapes; everything had more of a relationship to everything else. I think that's why the above drawing looks so cohesive. I guess it's also why I generally draw hair a lot better than the rest of the body; the hair is tones and there's pretty much no way to reduce it to contours alone.

This new way of drawing was rewarding, but hard to maintain. I had to really get into the zone, and once I stepped out, it was draining to try and get back in -- as I found out when we broke for snacks. After the above drawing, all my other sketches came out so-so, and I was also really exhausted. As with all my other creative pursuits, I probably just have to build stamina, but for now it's hard.

I'm so happy with this drawing because it feels to me like it's on a totally different level from most of my previous drawings. I feel like it's the next step up in my drawing ability, as if once I get better, that quality will become my average and I'll be able to move up still further from there. It's amazing to see how much I've improved in the months since we moved to the Bay Area. Here's a self-portrait I did right before we left LA:

At the time, this was the best drawing I'd done. I still think it's cute, and it has a comic-y attitude I like. But compare that to the one I did a week ago, which is itself not as good as the drawing I did last night:

Huge difference, right? (And look how long my hair has gotten!!!) I'm sure part of it is just getting more mature and sure as an artist, but I've also been practicing a whole lot more since our move. I started my weekly drawing class with Jeff at the beginning of the summer, took his portrait class after that, and then began this weekly uninstructed studio after the portrait class ended. So that's about 3 hours of solid drawing practice every week, since about June. That's not really a lot. That's about the same time commitment I put in to yoga when I started going regularly to City, but then, I saw incredible results from that, too, and frequently marveled about it at the time. I remember writing in my morning pages something like, "If I can improve this much from 3 hours a week, how much better could I be if I put in more time?" Of course, now that I am doing ten billion more practices in my life, I realize that 3 hours a week (or even 2) is sometimes all I can give to a particular pursuit. But it is just so startling to realize what an enormous difference even a little bit of practice can make.

Tags: art, call to action, deep thoughts
I'm Feeling: pleased

Several centuries ago, in England, there lived a hard-working woman named Mabel. Mabel toiled all the livelong day, taking in the rich folk's clothing for washing and mending. Twice each day she made the long, long journey up the hill to fetch the garments, and the long, long journey down the hill to the river, and the long, long journey back to her home where she plied her needle and thread. She bent her back and roughened her hands with scrubbing, she strained her eyes and pricked her fingers with sewing, and for all this she had little reward. Her husband, Wudd, was a drunkard and a gambler, and he filched all her wages for drink and cards. Each day poor Mabel found a new hiding place for her precious coins, but Wudd always sought them out and spent them while his long-suffering wife trudged up and down the hill.

One spring evening, Mabel was returning down the hill from the noble mansions. The long, long walk felt as though it would never end. The winter had been the hardest one the village had ever known, and though Mabel's hands cracked and bled from her long hours doing washing in the icy river, Wudd had been as bad as ever. He spent the fuel money on games, and as he slept cozily, warmed by ale, Mabel shivered and coughed, awake with hunger. As she continued her long homeward slog, she raged at the injustice of her situation.

As she made her way closer to the village, she saw a strange man going from door to door. He looked strong and well fed, and far more prosperous than any of her neighbors had been that winter. He looked up when he heard her approach.

"Well then," she said, "who are ye and what be ye doing here?"

"I captain a ship," he replied, "to sail to the New World. We be one crew member short. Would ye be knowing any able-bodied man willing to sign on for a year's journey?"

"Indeed," Mabel said slowly, "there be my husband, Wudd. He's a no-good layabout here in the village, but surely ye could make a good sailor of him."

"Aye then," said the captain. "If he has two arms and two legs, we can make a sailor of him, sure. Where be he now?"

"Not yet," said Mabel. "What will you give me in exchange?"

"I'll not be paid afore I make good in the New World," said the man. "So I've no more gold than yerself, now."

"That's no good," Mabel declared. "Wudd's a lazy good-for-nothing, but even so, I can't be letting him go for nothing in return."

"Well," said the captain, "this afternoon, as we was loading the ship, there was a couple o' fowls we couldn't fit aboard. We was bringing them across for livestock. Would ye take them?"

Mabel had barely eaten in a week, and had not tasted fresh meat in months. At the mention of the chickens, her mouth began to water.

"Sure, I'll take them," she said. "Give them to me now, and I'll send Wudd to ye afore nightfall."

The captain and Mabel went to his ship, where he handed over the birds in a basket. Mabel took them home and hid them in the yard before going inside.

"Oi, Wudd," she shouted. "A ship just arrived from Barbados, a-filled with rum. Tavern keeper says he'll keep a mug for ye if ye fetch a crate for him." Mabel told Wudd the name of the sea captain's ship, and sent him off, never to be bothered by him again.


The next day, a neighbor stopped by Mabel's home, only to find the lady of the house seated at table, feasting on a fine chicken dinner.

"Oi, Mabel!" the woman exclaimed. "How did ye get them chickens? And where be Wudd?"

"I sent him off to the New World," Mabel said triumphantly. "Traded him for these birds."

"That's no way to treat yer husband!" the neighbor said, "even if he was a lazy fool."

"No," said Mabel, "I was tired of being hungry and losing my wages to that useless lump."

"But to trade him for two chickens! It's not good enough!"

"I'm done thinking that way," Mabel declared. "I'm well rid of him, and I'm eating better than I have in many a year. At this point...

TWO HENS ARE BETTER THAN WUDD!!!"

Tags: non sequiturs
I'm Feeling: giggly

Remember that post I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how I was having an off-week, but realized that off-weeks generally precede really fruitful periods? Well, I called it -- I am feeling really, really great! I had thought that I might be all exhausted and apathetic after the FabMo exhibit, but it's the opposite that has proven true! Seeing everyone else's amazing creations has inspired me to create even more, and I'm feeling really excited about it. I have noticed that every now and then I am lucky enough to get into a mood of total inspiration, when the ideas just flow like crazy and everything seems possible; that's how I feel right now, and I love it!

It's really remarkable, the difference between feeling inspired to create, and just creating because I have to. They do both have merit, and are equally necessary. But my mindset during each phase is just so palpably different from the other, just like expanding and contracting in yoga (which I have written about before). We contract when we feel unsure, when we feel unsteady, whenever there is any fear involved, and the contracting can help us keep our balance. But we only grow when we expand, when we set fear aside and let our energetic joy and curiosity take over instead. And we really do need both. Contraction is excellent for day-in, day-out practice; it helps us feel safe, it gives us a chance to check our alignment and take things slowly; it's the way we warm up and try things out and get stronger and more sure. Then, when we're ready, the groundwork is already there for big, expansive, beautiful growth that can take us by delighted surprise -- or just come as the natural next step in the process!

So this is how I'm feeling about my crafting right now. If I hadn't put in the several diligent weeks of practice, I wouldn't feel confident and excited enough to try new sewing projects now. But since I do have those weeks of hard work under my belt, I am totally eager to play: to experiment, to try out new directions, to stretch and see what I can do. It's a highly enjoyable feeling and one that's especially welcome after the nose-to-grindstone work of the past few weeks.

Every serious artist knows this: that we must spend most of our time just working away with a grumbling, self-critical eye, and that those periods of exalted inspiration will come only rarely and stay only briefly. But when they do, it's just such a grand feeling!!


Oh... and my positive craft-fair experience has emboldened me to share with you just one more of my creations. Since February, I have been maintaining a private art blog that I've been using to track my creative achievements and progress on a near-daily basis. I now open this up to you for your perusal. I suspect that for most people, it won't be a very interesting read because I really do use it as a personal work log, but if you're at all interested in (a) what I do all day, (b) the day-to-day life of a beginning artist, (c) the creative process, or (d) what I write when nobody's watching* ;), you might find something there to hold your attention! The art blog also contains my thoughts on the craft fair.



*It's not completely unfiltered, but it is considerably less filtered than this journal!

Tags: art, call to action, deep thoughts
I'm Feeling: expansive, brilliant, excited

As most of you know by now, I have been hunkered down for the past couple of weeks preparing full-steam for the First Annual FabMo Art Exhibit this Saturday. FabMo has been around for about a decade and is the work of one couple from Palo Alto, who collect samples of designer fabrics, wallpapers, and trims from local firms and shops. Every month they pick up these samples and distribute them for free to local artists, schools, churches, and other organizations. It's an incredibly environmentally-friendly, super-affordable way to get crafting material, and I have been going to FabMo since spring of this year, picking up the most gorgeous and inspiring fabrics and wallpapers to play with. When FabMo announced it would be holding an event where artists could display and share their creations with each other -- which soon expanded to include selling to the public -- I took a deep breath and signed up. I thought it would be fun and low-pressure.

At first I didn't think too much about the FabMo exhibit; I figured I'd make a couple of things and that would be it. But as the exhibit rapidly became more and more of a big-deal, well-organized, public event, I got correspondingly deeper and deeper into it. The first step was figuring out what to make. When I started going to FabMo, I was still a beginning crafter, so I registered for the exhibit without even really knowing what I would be doing there. Before long, I was actively looking for ways to use my FabMo materials, from braiding rugs with long strips of fabric, to sewing eye pillows, to putting together intricate Japanese pouches (these are thanks to Tina, who opportunely -- and totally randomly -- sent me this great book). I've been thoroughly absorbed in these activities for the past few weeks, and that has been interesting, frustrating, and gratifying all at once. I basically had to learn to sew while I went, and all these projects were new to me, so there has been a lot of trial and error, and a lot of very slow going while I figured out how to do things. But I'm getting a lot better, and now, 10+ totes, 20+ eye pillows, 6+ Japanese pouches, 2 rugs, and a lot of smaller projects later, I feel infinitely more comfortable at the sewing machine, and just working with fabric in general. After the FabMo exhibit, I look forward to perfecting all these projects, and undertaking new ones (especially clothes!).

The crafting itself has been an insane learning process: after doing it full-time (and then some!) for several weeks, I now know that making anything by hand takes a long time, that it's satisfying on a very basic tactile/creative level, and that it's very very bad for the body. I've taken to stretching regularly (sometimes every hour, which feels much more frequent than you'd think) and lotioning my hands constantly (rug-making is astonishingly rough on the skin!), and have been clinging to my usual enough-sleep, healthy-food, daily-exercise routine with as much force as I can muster... which has translated, at least this last week, into ordering more vegetables when we eat out, getting half an hour less sleep than usual, and exercising every other day! All my regular projects have been set aside while I've been preparing for FabMo, and I'm itching to get back to them: the family history, the writing and drawing projects, the garden, even non-FabMo crafts. But it has been a really good "intensive," making such a crazy volume of crafts in such a short time.

Almost as soon as I started doing all this crafting, it became apparent that the mere process of crafting was only the beginning. In order to sell my creations at the exhibit, I would have to get a seller's permit from the state Board of Equalization. I also intended to use the exhibit as a way to jump-start and publicize my Etsy shop (which just launched yesterday!), which required a lot more official stuff: a business license ($100/year), a fictitious-business-name license ($30), and more. I spent a lot of time on the phone, online, and in the public library trying to figure out all the regulations. Besides all this, there have been a thousand and one other details to think of, and decisions to make, before selling online or at the exhibit; it's been like wedding-planning in that respect! Do I accept credit cards at the exhibit? How about checks? How will I ship my Etsy orders? How can I package my creations so they'll travel safely, while remaining as eco-conscious as possible? One of the books I read said that I should expect to spend about 80% of my time on managing my business, and only 20% of it on actually making the items; I am coming to believe this is an accurate estimation, which is disturbing (and yet it's reassuring to know it's not just me). And I'm not even doing this as a serious, full-time business! (Well, I have been for the past few weeks, but after this weekend I intend to return to regular life with gratitude!)

That I'm still sane after all this is thanks to many things. At one end is stuff like the massive yard/estate/garage-sale and thrift-shop craft supply hoarding I've been doing since our move (thanks to my avid yard-saling, I've had dozens of boxes, fabrics, and spools of thread at my disposal, for low cost), and my constant decluttering of my bookshelf through PaperBackSwap, which has familiarized me with packing and shipping items for someone else's use. At the other end I have the tremendous support of my family and friends, especially Jackie, who is flying up from LA to assist me and provide moral support at the exhibit, and Erik, who has been just the most extraordinary partner this week as I've been spending 12-hour days working away at my sewing machine. You could call some of this luck, but I prefer to think of it as synchronicity, a concept Julia Cameron emphasizes over and over again in The Artist's Way: when you send earnest wishes and goals into the universe, the universe sends you back just what you need to fulfill your dreams (however large or small!). I have seen synchronicity at work time and again since embarking on my creative life, and I've become a total believer. As Cameron puts it succinctly, "Leap, and the net will appear."

The FabMo exhibit is in 36 hours, and I still have many things to do before then. But I'm feeling good. It's always a gift to know there's something big and ambitious I wanted to do, and I jumped in and found I was capable. I've been discovering this about myself so frequently lately, I find my fear of big undertakings just gets less and less. I'm thinking bigger, crazier, and more impossible, and I LIKE IT!

Tags: art, deep thoughts, family, friends, shows and events
I'm Feeling: triumphant... and tired

Last week I dreamed that our yard was filled with rabbits, big fat rabbits who moved very slowly and seemed completely responseless to anything we did or said to them. They marched through our yard in single file, and those who came last were badly wounded. One of them had a big hole in its side and I could see its guts. My family and I gathered up these hurt rabbits to take them to the vet.

Last night I dreamed I was driving, and a guy crossed the street in front of me with two dogs, both unleashed. One of the dogs trotted along at his owner's side, but the other suddenly veered toward me and ran into my path. I was too close to stop, and I hit it. I pulled over as soon as I could, and got out. The dog had survived (and I knew it would live okay), but its owner was livid. He told his other dog to keep me away from him, so the dog (a big one) lunged at me, growling and snapping. I couldn't even get close enough to yell at him that it was his fault his dogs were unleashed on a busy street.

I'm pretty sure both these dreams have to do with all the thinking I've been doing lately about factory farming. Two nights ago I started reading Farm Sanctuary, and by the middle of the day yesterday I was crying as I read. I spent the afternoon feeling depressed and at first I didn't even connect the feeling with what I'd been reading. (And if anyone thinks I'm being foolishly sentimental, I challenge anyone with a conscience to read that book and not get depressed.) It's a good book, because it is very compassionate and not militant at all, which unfortunately also makes it much more painful to read.

It's always interesting how my thoughts manifest themselves in my dreams. Here, I had two dreams about suffering animals, and in both, the animals in question were those I do not usually think of as food animals. I guess most of us care more about "pet" animals than we do about the ones we eat, so it makes sense that in my dreams I'm translating my deep anguish about factory farming into relations with companion animals. But in the first dream, which happened before I started reading Farm Sanctuary, the animals came to us voluntarily, and we helped them. In the second dream, I was the perpetrator of harm to an animal -- albeit unintentional and unavoidable -- and I was not allowed to make amends for my action, which was the most wrenching part of it. This reflects my feelings about factory farming after reading the book; I feel so terribly complicit, and so powerless; our society is one where meat is so ubiquitous that not only do most people not think about it anymore, a great number of people actually take offense when asked to think about it at all! (I can't tell you the number of times I've been made fun of for not eating meat -- sometimes by people I didn't even know -- and I'm not even a full or very staunch vegetarian.) That's the part that gets me depressed.

I still stand by what I wrote earlier, which is that I can condemn no one for eating meat or not eating it, because our world is so built on suffering that our mental wellbeing depends on our ability to ignore it. But for me, though I don't plan to become an animal-rights activist or switch to full veganism just yet, I'm definitely moving more and more in the vegan direction. I read about the abominable cruelty done to living creatures in factory farms and I just don't want to consume anything to do with it.

Tags: call to action, deep thoughts, food
I'm Feeling: stressed -- five more days till craft fair