Fruits, Veggies and Honey Du Jour

I've been told being a non-practicing vegetarian, is, unpractical. That it isn't the same as being a non-practicing Jew and going to service only on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and your little cousin's Bar Mitzvah. That's it's more like being pregnant or not. Well guess what?

My world. My rules.

Let's, as Maria and the children would say, start at the very beginning. A very good place, indeed, to start.

I've always looked at meats with a glare of avoidance. Starting first in the womb with a mother who kept vegetarian during her pregnancy, and culminating in a childhood where I asked an ungodly amount of questions. I've never been able to separate the product from the process. As an adult I want to see the air filter my mechanic repaired and in what pipe it's connected, and through what pipe it's filtered to the engine. Understanding how things work makes me feel better about how much of a check my mechanic gets to cash from me, and trying to link the product to the process makes me feel like this world isn't totally chaotic. Because it mostly is.

The nuts and bolts. They are scientific. But the rest, it's not. Even through a seemingly tight relationship with God, I'm unclear why most of what happens to the world, happens. So what we have is trust. God and I have a trust among us. That I will do my very best. Even when the sewage of life has washed out to sea, what he'll remember is poise, and that I have done all I can.

I wake up this Thursday to a world that through it's great beauty gleams with a lot of tragicness. There is sickness and there is homelessness and pets that need good homes. There are continents of people who only wish for the things my continent takes for granted. So what does one do, when there's just too much to be done?

Anything.

I'm haunted by my demons like us all. And I like the 99 cent ice cream at Rite Aid. So keeping vegan always isn't easy. Instead I joke I'm a non-practicing vegetarian. But the truth is this. There is a peace about us when we are doing the best we can. There is a peace about me when I awake, and minutes before every meal, and a calm before bed. Because I'm doing the best I can. That few animals have to be inconvenienced by my life. That I can move around, happy and healthy, without leaving too large of a footprint on a globe already burdened by much else. So it's never going to be about preachiness, or controversy. Nor is it going to be changing what anyone else chooses to eat. Or giving Obama a hard time about swatting a fly. It's a personal choice. One that allows me to convey to God in a meaningful way, I'm doing the best I know how.

So it's not without merit or link that I see my eating choices, as a silent pact with God, on the day before this Rosh Hashanah. While Rosh Hashanah is the birthday of mankind, it's every moment that we reaffirm a wish to please God. As I wish you all a good and sweet new year, and I taste the apple and honey of another year to come, I ask that Jewish or Vegetarian, Vegan or believer in God, you see the tragicness and chaos of the world as your potential to bestow upon it the very best of you. For years to come.