Yesterday, I was very excited because my partner was taking me to meet a chicken.
I’ve had very little contact with chickens — unlike cows which is a large part of the reason I’ve become a vegan.
Because I follow a strict plant-based diet (for health reasons), I do not eat any animal products including eggs, chicken, dairy, and fish.
Also, I have found that the longer I have been on a vegan diet, the less likely I am to consume any animals or animal products or to consider that animals are here for human consumption.
In other words, I have more compassion for the animals — including myself.
But I initially stopped eating chicken because I was appalled at the way chickens are killed. I felt grossed out at what people put into their bodies. To make a long story short, the information on the way chickens are killed gives new life to the term “chicken shit.”
I’ve heard that eggs contain a huge amount of cholesterol — more than a Big Mac.
So yesterday, I went to the backyard of a large stone house in a nearby neighborhood excited to see the chicken coop. The people in the house kept hens for laying eggs.
What I found was several hens in a coop that maybe was about six feet wide and four feet deep. It might be considered humane by chicken coop standards, but I would not like to live in such a small space. The hens were really squawking at me. I wondered what they were trying to say.
Maybe they with telling me that they wanted to keep their eggs, to have them fertilized so they could grow into healthy and strong chickens. That would be a natural thing to want.
One of the chickens and I made eye contact and held it. It was a transcendent experience in that I saw the being-ness of the chicken.
To learn more about my recently published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:
A months ago this summer (of 2021) we received a notice from the City that a complaint had been lodged against us because of our overgrown backyard. Ultimately, we looked at it as a positive thing, since it motivated us to do things we’ve long been meaning to do. But clearing out the overgrown back of the yard wasn’t on the radar.
You’d think the yard might be too much for two senior lesbians — but thanks to our newish found healthy plant-based diet, we’re rising to the occasion.
Here are some photos from our journey:
We hired a crew of landscapers to clear out the back but my partner Barbara decided she wanted to cut down the wild bush above the back and on the side herself since she knows her way around a hardware store and how to use power tools.
Barbara also used a regular saw to cut down the wild bush. Look we can see the fence!
Since I can see these from my office window — on the second story on the back of the house — I call them “crop circles.”
This is the offending back of the yard that we had to have cut down. I used to imagine that the unicorn in my last novel lived back there but was surprised and appalled at what the landscapers found.
This is what the landscaping crew found. They took out hundreds of empty beer bottles. It’s ironic that same (American flag waving) neighbor who reported us throws big beer bashes on patriotic holidays. I imagine that it doesn’t help that we are lesbians. But as I said to the landscaper who showed me this, it’s a shame that people don’t respect nature.
Addiction is a complicated thing. The people suffering from them have to hate themselves before they hate others.
I send compassion and healing to all people suffering from addiction so the rest of us can be free.
After having the back cleaned out, we saw this praying mantis on the wall of the house. We also saw birds pecking in the dirt in the back — since they had better access to the worms. Also, at another time, we saw three outdoor cats that we hadn’t seen before — in the back to check out the new space. It could be that the creatures were looking for new homes. But I took their presence as telling us “thanks” for holding out so long in letting the yard grow wild.
To learn more about my recently published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:
This morning I took part in a really nice Unitarian Universalist tradition which is called Poetry Sunday. During the service, I read a reflection about how poetry influences my current prose writing. In particular, I read an excerpt from memoir — Now, from Antiquity: How to survive a father’s death — which I am writing now. I also read the noted poem from William Carlos Williams (who I just discovered was a lifelong UU), The Red Wheelbarrow. The YouTube videos of the readings are pasted below and below that is the text of the reflection. I hope the work has some meaning for you.
In hearing that the theme for this year’s Poetry Sunday is “anything goes,” I decided to reflect on my journey from writing poetry to prose and how it dovetails with my views as a Unitarian Universalist. I started out early in life as a secret poet. I say secret because I hid my poems in a journal in the doll house that my father made me when his union was on strike. I hid the poems because I was hiding who I was when in I lived in a sea of conformity. I also hid that journal because I had learned to be afraid of being my true self.
After the age of fifty, I became a member of this Unitarian Universalist congregation and learned that the first Unitarian Universalist principle was to recognize “The inherent worth and dignity of every person.”
By that time, the lines in my poems had gotten longer, often contained dialogue, and I had moved from writing poetry to writing literary fiction. But I am still informed by the image and by the capturing of the moment in poetry.
…
Recently, I’ve been working on a memoir about my life with my father, who died in 2017. The memoir is titled Now, From Antiquity: Surviving a Father’s Death. In reflecting on the life of my father, I remember our relationship with antiquity. In the process, I wonder if political differences can be healed and I wonder, perhaps most of all, who I am after my father’s death. In writing about my life with my father, I’m still inspired by the images of memory.
I’m going to end with a section from that memoir:
The other night after teaching a class nearby in the City, I encountered a pickup truck with a large American flag propped up in the back and waving at me. This is an unusual sight in my liberal neck of the woods. I looked at the flag and breathed in. Then I breathed out. I really did feel different. I felt more relaxed. I remembered my meditation when I breathed in the fear and suffering caused by the flag, particularly in those years after 2016, and breathed out compassion. I don’t know if this changes the world. But it changed me. I could feel that I was more relaxed. If nothing else, then it increased my capacity to do good in the world. For me – the American flag has lost the stigma of fear that some might want it to project. The American flag then could stand for something else. And if it could stand for something else, then it will. As the Unitarian minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker first said in 1853 – in a sentiment echoed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is his widely known “I have A Dream” speech which he gave in 1963, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
The autumn after my father’s death, my partner Barbara and I took a long-awaited trip to the beach. We like to go to a wildlife reserve that is somewhat close to us – about an hour and a half away. To get there we took Route 30, which is a two-lane highway, and went past the town of Absecon where my late Aunt (my mother’s sister) had lived. When she was alive, Barbara and I visited her often. About twelve years before my father died, I used to take him down to stay for long weekends at her home. On our ride to the shore, Barbara pointed to the churchyard where my Aunt was buried. We made plans to visit her grave on the ride home.
In the beach town next to the wildlife reserve, we drove to the end of the cement walkway, crossed the relatively wide beach and set up our folding chairs facing the ocean. We were sitting where the waves had rolled in earlier and wet the sand, making it a darker color. The waves crashed in in front of us. What looked like a freighter rode the distant horizon – the line between darker gray-blue sea and lighter sky. On the beach where the white tipped waves crashed, a gull took a solitary walk through sea foam. I turned my head to the right, looking past Barbara to where the buildings of Atlantic City were so small, they were virtually indistinguishable. All I saw was the ocean and the beach. The sun turned to silver as it glinted off the ocean in its autumnal reflection. The ocean, beach, and sun were so beautiful that the present moment was all that existed. Later, I thought, that is who I am, sitting there on the edge of the ocean – which felt like the edge of the world – where I could feel my being-ness most acutely.
I belong to the universe.
–Namaste–
To learn more about my recently published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:
Below is my review of Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death by Lillian Faderman published by Yale University Press. You can view the video on BookTube or read the review below that.
His death changed a lot of lives — including mine, including yours.
–Janet Mason booktube
When I first listened to the audiobook of Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death by Lillian Faderman published by Yale University Press in 2018, I thought I knew about Harvey Milk and would just be getting a refresher, something I could pass along. Harvey Milk is the gay leader who was assassinated in 1978 when he was 48. Having held a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for nearly a year, he was the first openly gay man to hold elected office in the United States. He was dubbed the Mayor of Castro Street — the gay neighborhood in San Francisco where Milk eventually moved and made his home.
As is described in the epilogue of the book, Milk was larger in death than he was in life.
His murder — along with the then San Francisco Mayor George Moscone — galvanized the LGBT community across the nation and the world. The anger that erupted after his murderer received a less than two-year sentence was too long-suppressed gay anger and it could not be denied.
His death changed a lot of lives — including mine, including yours.
The new information that I found in this book was in the details of his complex background and in the Jewish identity of this man who was raised in Long Island New York, a place that was rife with anti-Semitism during the holocaust when he and his family would listen to the news on the radio, fearful that the Holocaust could spread to America.
The book, which is part of Yale University’s Jewish Lives series, points out that Harvey Milk was informed by Tikkun olam — the Jewish philosophy of repairing the world. After he came out and was radicalized in San Francisco, he was always concerned about the disenfranchised and rose to elected office by building coalitions.
He was, in many ways, ahead of his time in understanding the power of uniting — or what is now called intersectionality.
He was accused by the (largely unsuccessful) gay establishment of the time as muddying the waters by focusing on the rights of all oppressed groups and not only on gay rights. But Harvey persisted. And he succeeded in furthering gay rights only as someone who was not concerned with “fitting in” and upending the status quo could. When I read Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death by Lillian Faderman published by Yale University Press, I knew I was reading about an important part of LGBTQ history but I didn’t know how important it was until the last page was turned.
This is Janet Mason with reviews on You Tube and Spotify.
To learn more about my recently published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:
Heart disease runs in my family. So I’ve been slowly reading Dr. Dean Ornish’s book Reversing Heart Disease (which is a tome). Dean Ornish is known as a pioneer for his successful work in reversing heart disease.
The book is excellent and quite comprehensive but because of the length of it I’ve been watching some talks by him on YouTube to get into it.
He said in one of the talks (a Ted talk) that people are motivated not by fear but by something positive. It’s true that I’ve heard people say that since they’re going to die of something, they’re going to keep eating animals or smoking or doing something else that’s bad for their health.
I went to a healthy pant based diet about a year and a half ago, and my initial motivation was to stay out of the hospital. I had emergency surgery for a large kidney stone and then an infection that nearly killed me.
My partner and I had been thinking about going vegan for a few years out of compassion for the animals. (I should say other animals since humans are also animals.) We are also concerned about the future of the planet.
Very shortly after I went to a healthy plant-based diet (within two or three weeks), I started to feel very good. So that is part of my motivation, too — to keep on feeling good.
Also in going to a vegan/plant-based diet I became part of a world wide community that is healing themselves through lifestyle changes.
Now my motivation is being part of the change.
To learn more about my recently published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:
Janet Mason, author 