Gathering dust
In my closet, the
Feathered boa sits like a
Tin god waiting for it’s fabulous moment.
—————————————————————
Blatherskite
Foolish gibberish
recent posts
about
-
-
-
Apparently there is this thing called Inktober, where artists dedicate the month of October to drawing with ink. This is perfect because I am currently in an ink drawing phase!
here is something I drew the first day of October.
I’ve been learning how to use Adobe Illustrator at work and I learned how to turn a photo into a vector drawing. It was really cool because it helped me see the various shades of gray in the photo. I used it to help me with shading in this one. Here is the vector drawing I was working with:
-
I thought for today’s post it would be interesting to take a look at what I was doing 10 years ago. It seems crazy that I can do this on my blog. It is more than 10 years old at this point!
10 years ago I was contemplating becoming vegetarian. Again. Crazy, because here I am, exactly 10 y ears later, contemplating the same thing. I have been having Buddhist guilt (I don’t think there really is such a thing but there kind of is, if you know what I mean) about eating meat. I know that it is probably wrong for me to eat meat but I struggled with it because for a long time I really, truly didn’t think it was wrong. I think that for this to stick it needs to feel like the right thing to do in my heart, not just my head. And in my heart I didn’t think it was wrong.
However, I have had a change of heart in the past few months. The big turnaround was a few weekends ago when we first visited some cows on a free-range beef farm, and then the next day when we went to the fair. I forced myself at the fair to wander through the farm animal sections to see if it would have an affect on my feeling about eating meat.
It did. When we got to the area where there were pigs we were greeted, first, with this sign.
Meet your meat I have to say that I was not offended by the sign but it really made me think! It made me think about whether I really want to meet and make friends with my food. Or do I want to just go to the store and buy nicely packaged products and pretend that this wasn’t a living being at one time. As I thought more about it, I realized that it is wrong for me to do that, to buy the packages and go about my business pretending that this creature died for my nutritional benefit – and probably suffered greatly at the hand of a factory farm! The next question for me becomes, “if it is wrong to buy packaged meat at the store, am I willing to kill my own food?” The answer to that question, for me, is no. I couldn’t do it. I don’t do death very well as it is, I know myself. I know I wouldn’t be able to kill my food. I know people who do it and I have the greatest respect for them.
So here I am, a vegetarian again. With a new-found resolve. I have been vegetarian for all of 3 weeks now. Give or take a dinner or two.
-
“And, of course, what’s also routine is that somebody, somewhere will comment and say, Obama politicized this issue. Well, this is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic. I would ask news organizations — because I won’t put these facts forward — have news organizations tally up the number of Americans who’ve been killed through terrorist attacks over the last decade and the number of Americans who’ve been killed by gun violence, and post those side-by-side on your news reports. This won’t be information coming from me; it will be coming from you. We spend over a trillion dollars, and pass countless laws, and devote entire agencies to preventing terrorist attacks on our soil, and rightfully so. And yet, we have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths. How can that be?”
–President Obama’s statement on the shootings at Umpqua Community College, Roseburg, Oregon
There have been a number of news organizations who have done this very thing since Thursday. Here is a chart from CNN, for example. The result is staggering. It is time to do something about this.
My heart breaks for the families of those who died in this horrific way. I will be thinking about those who lost their lives and will do the Buddhist equivalent of prayer for both.
But now is the time to do something about this because it will only happen again, sooner than we think. It always happens again.
Blatherskite 