“Educating yourself does not mean that you were stupid in the first place. It means that you are intelligent enough to know that there is plenty left to learn.” ~ Melanie Joy
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Veganism is not a religion. It is not a diet or even a ‘lifestyle.’ Being vegan is, simply put, living the very values you already convey — nothing more. For decades, probably like you, I let others dictate many choices for me. Once I learned how to think and act for myself, vegan is what I became.
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One Square Inch of Silence is the book by Gordon Hempton I’m consuming at the moment. It is true what he says, that silence is an endangered species. The sound of people on the nearest road from me drown out everything else at all hours of the day and night. It never ceases.
Nature has her own sounds, her own words to speak, but we’ve somehow forgotten to listen. As we grow our population centers, fly in our airplanes over pristine spaces, build our roads to get to and from this place or that, and destroy more and more of their habitats to make way for more of ours, perhaps she might be trying to tell us something. Without the silence, we are unable to hear her message.
Krista Tippet of OnBeing.org interviewed him some weeks back which prompted me to read the book. Click on the link for the full interview, or listen to this excerpt from the Olympic National Forest in Washington, a place I’m hoping to visit sometime very soon!
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Is there room for wild nature on a planet with seven billion people? There are many of us who say unequivocally, yes. If you missed the series A New Wild on the first pass on your PBS station, don’t worry. It can be watched entirely right there on your computer screen. Homes, Forests, Plains, Oceans and Water, whichever you like first, you’ll want to watch them all, breathtaking and thought-provoking every one.
DirtNKids Blog 
beautiful post – I’m looking up the book now 🙂
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It’s a great read and might make you begin to question many of the things we do to our world. Thanks for stopping by!
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Shannon, I particularly enjoyed your comment about allowing others to make our choices for us. Much has been written about a society that increasingly keeps its members in a perpetual state of adolescence, a sort of childhood where we’re not required to make choices or take responsibility because this is done for us by others. This is why I find it so ironic that those of our neighbors who are truly unable to care for themselves and end up homeless are urged to “grow up,” to “act their age” and take responsibility for their own bad decisions. Those of us who are able to make our own choices should not allow others to subsume that duty. However, we need to recognize that there are those who will always be children who need to be taken care of, regardless of their age.
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Yes. There are so, so many who cannot function without a ‘parent,’ no matter how old they are. There are also others who are sleeping ‘in the bed they made.’ It is difficult sometimes to discern between the two, but humans are humans. We do dumb stuff all the time — that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still be loved and cared for. Thanks for your comment, Uncle Guac! I hope you have a wonderful New Year.
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Great post Shannon. 🙂
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Thanks for reading, Jet.
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Olympic National Forest is something, that’s for sure. I spent roughly half of my childhood in the country. When I moved to college I couldn’t sleep well for weeks due to the light and noise pollution.
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How very awesome for you! It makes me wonder how the heck you wound up in Texas…
The noise pollution here has actually gotten WORSE. I soooo long for the ‘noise’ of Olympic Nat’l Forest. Until then, I’ll just come to this post and listen to the recording instead. 😀
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Sunshine, is the short answer. And quite likely the most honest.
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