The Unicorn, The Mystery and the #cat goddess Bastet — #amreading a #UU take

I am reposting this segment in honor of the passing of our beloved cat Felix and in honor of beloved felines everywhere in this world and the next.

This morning, I took part in a Unitarian Universalist summer service. In my talk, I reflected on The Egyptian Cat Goddess the Goddess Bastet (a part of my novel The Unicorn, The Mystery) and on the spiritual practice of gardening.

The link to the YouTube video of my talk  is below. The complete text of my talk is below that.  The service took place at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Restoration on Stenton Ave. in Philadelphia.

The Goddess Bastet Janet Mason

In the summer, I garden.  This is a common hobby for many, especially writers.  It teaches patience, attention, and relentless hope.  Not everything that we plant comes back – especially after a long icy winter.  Not every seed sprouts and not every sprout makes it.  In this way it makes me focus on the positive – on what does come back and on what does sprout.

Being a Unitarian Universalist gives me a spiritual context in which to think about gardening. Many of our flowers attract bees – such as bee balm, lavender and the butterfly bush. And bees, of course, are good for the planet.

Every now and then, a plant from my writing appears in my garden – seemingly out of nowhere but probably from a seed dropped by a bird.  Last year it was a tall flowering weed known as a “sow’s ear” which was also in the manuscript I just finished writing, titled The Unicorn, The Mystery which is set in the 1500s in France.  I was amazed, of course, at the sow’s ear in my backyard.

Recently, I planted catnip.  Cats love our backyard and often we see one sleeping there – most often in the shade of the young hazel nut tree that my partner’s sister sent us. Inside, my office looks out to the backyard where the garden is. Our old cat Felix has taken to sleeping on the inside back windowsill – no doubt protecting his territory.

have long been fascinated by the Egyptian Cat Goddess Bastet. In my novel, The Unicorn, The Mystery, my monk character (who in many ways is a Unitarian Universalist at heart) prays to the Goddess Bastet.

Goodbye Felix

I stepped slowly and softly as if the soles of my feet had ears.  I took another step. A branch snapped under my foot.  I winced. That would never do.  If my beloved unicorn heard that she would assume there was a human nearby – big enough to snap a branch under foot – and hide.  It seemed like I would never find her.  I decided to pray.  But I had prayed to the One God before and it hadn’t worked.  Who would I pray to? Who would help me?

Immediately, the Goddess Bastet leapt to mind. Bastet was an Egyptian Goddess who was half woman and half cat. I knew about her because when I was a boy, my mother would tell me the stories that her father had told her.  He had loved Greek mythology and found out that the Goddess Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, was related to the earlier Goddess Bastet from Egypt who came from the even earlier fierce lioness Goddess Bast, the warrior goddess of the sun.

The followers of Bastet ruled ancient Egypt for a time in the land where cats were sacred.  I remember that my mother’s emerald green eyes gleamed as if she were a cat herself when she told me about the Goddess Bastet who kept away disease and was the protector of pregnant women. The stories she told me about the fierce, soft, cat Goddess Bastet were so vivid that she made me want a cat for my very own pet.

My mother cautioned me, however, not to mention cats to anyone but her. People with cats were looked on with suspicion, she warned me. For some reason cats were looked down on by the Church as wily creatures associated with Satan. Again, my mother told me that it was very important never to anger the Church.

Surely, the Goddess Bastet would help me find my beloved unicorn. She of all the gods and goddesses would understand why I had to find my beloved unicorn to save her.

I closed my eyes tightly until I saw a slim woman, standing tall.  She had very good posture, with the head of a cat.  I knew it was Goddess Bastet, just as my mother had described her.

And so, the Goddess Bastet and other worlds – real, imagined and both – is something for me to mull over as I tend the soil and do the spiritual work of gardening.

Namaste 

To learn more about my recently published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:

https://tealeavesamemoir.wordpress.com/2020/11/22/the-unicorn-the-mystery-now-available-from-adelaide-books-amreading-faithfullylgbt/

Finding the Light — a #UU talk by Janet Mason #amwriting #inspiration

I am reposting this talk that I gave last year to mark the occasion of Hanukkah which this year started on Thursday December 10th and ends on Friday, December 18th.

The talk was a Unitarian Universalist (UU) service that was called “Ringing in the Light.”

I talked about my childhood memories of being touched by Hanukkah and my experiences in celebrating the Winter Solstice and with the Gnostic Gospels. You can see my words below on the YouTube video or read the reflection below that.

Janet Mason on Light – YouTube Author Janet Mason talks about finding the light through a child memory of a Hanukkah play, celebrating the solstice, and the Gnostic Gospels in a Unitarian Universalist context. www.youtube.com

As far back as I can remember, the light beckoned.

The sun was a ball of fire in the sky.  The light changed into vibrant colors in the morning and the evening.  It filtered through the branches of trees.  The sunlight had, in fact, shined down and helped to form the trees.  So the light was in the trees (along with the rain and the earth).

Even when it was cloudy, I knew the sun was there. Sometimes I could see the ball of sun outlined behind the gray clouds.

The first time I remember being drawn to the light in a religious context was when I was in elementary school watching a play about Hanukkah.

Despite its nearness to Christmas on the calendar, Hanukkah is one of the lesser holidays in Judaism. Hanukkah, also called The Festival of Lights, began last Tuesday at sunset and ends this Wednesday, December, 20th, at nightfall.

When I asked my partner what Hanukkah meant to her, she responded that it is a celebration of survival, hope and faith.

The holiday celebrates the victory of the Maccabees, detailed in the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud.

This victory of the Maccabees, in approximately 160 BCE –  BCE standing for Before The Common Era — resulted in the rededication of the Second Temple.  The Maccabees were a group of Jewish rebel warriors who took control of Judea.

According to the Talmud, the Temple was purified and the wicks of the menorah burned for eight days.

But there was only enough sacred oil for one day’s lighting. It was a miracle.

Hanukkah is observed by lighting the eight candles of the menorah at varying times and various ways.  This is done along with the recitation of prayers.  In addition to the eight candles in the menorah, there is a ninth called a shamash (a Hebrew word that means attendant). This ninth candle, the shamash, is in the center of the menorah.

It is all very complicated of course – the history and the ritual – but what I remember most is sitting in that darkened auditorium and being drawn to the pool of light around the candles on my elementary school stage.

I am not Jewish.  I say that I was raised secular – but that is putting it mildly.  My mother was, in fact, a bible-burning atheist.  Added to that, I was always cast as one of the shepherds in the school’s Christmas pageant since I was the tallest child in elementary school.

Also, I had Jewish neighbors – and as a future lesbian and book worm growing up in the sameness of a working class neighborhood — I may have responded to difference and had a realization that I was part of it.

Then I grew up, came out, thanked the Goddess for my secular upbringing, and celebrated the Winter Solstice with candles and music. This year, the Solstice falls on December 21st. The Winter Solstice (traditionally the shortest period of daylight and the longest night of the year)  is this coming Thursday in the Northern Hemisphere of planet Earth – which is where we are.

One of our friends who we celebrated the Solstice with is Julia Haines. Julia is a musician who has performed at Restoration.  She has a wonderful composition of Thunder Perfect Mind which she accompanies with her harp playing. You can find her on YouTube. Thunder Perfect Mind, of which I just read an excerpt, is one of the ancient texts of the Gnostic Gospels.

The Gnostic Gospels were discovered in the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945.  Originally written in Coptic, these texts date back to ancient times and give us an alternative glimpse into the Gospels that are written in the New Testament. They are so important that they are banned in some conventional religions.  And in my book, that’s a good reason to read them.

Reading them led me to think of myself as a Gnostic – meaning one who has knowledge and who pursues knowledge – including mystical knowledge.  The Gnostic Gospels have provided me with inspiration for my writing, particularly in my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders, soon to be published by Adelaide Books. And they also inspire me in the novel I am currently writing — titled The Unicorn, The Mystery.

I am inspired by the Gnostic Gospels in part because they let in the light.  In particular, they let in the light of the feminine.

As Julia says in her rendition of Thunder:

am godless

I am Goddess

So how does finding the light factor into my experience of Unitarian Universalism? Later in life, after fifty, I found a religion that fit my values.  I found a religion wide enough – and I might add, secure enough – to embrace nonconformity.

In finding a congregation that is diverse in many ways – including religious diversity – I have found a deeper sense of myself.

And in that self, I recognize that the darkness is as least as necessary and as important as the light.

As a creative writer, I spend much of my time in the gray-matter of imagination.

It is in that darkness where I find the light.

Namaste

To learn more about my recently published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:

https://tealeavesamemoir.wordpress.com/2020/11/22/the-unicorn-the-mystery-now-available-from-adelaide-books-amreading-faithfullylgbt/

“Logical Family” — reviewed and airing worldwide — “LGBTHistory — #amreading

This piece is airing worldwide this week on This Way Out (TWO), the syndicated LGBT radio show that airs internationally. Click here — http://thisway out.org — to hear the entire show.

(TWO is the first international LGBTQ radio news magazine.)

Armistead Maupin’s “Logical Family” is a comforting good yarn that combines queer cultural memory with personal odyssey (reviewed by Queer Life and Lit commentator Janet Mason).

Armistead Maupin — in the audio book recorded by the author — reads his often quoted ”Letter To Mama” originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle as part of his Tales Of The City series. Unfortunately the sentiments behind it still apply to too many today so I am publishing it here in its entirety.

Dear Mama,

I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write. Every time I try to write to you and Papa I realize I’m not saying the things that are in my heart. That would be O.K., if I loved you any less than I do, but you are still my parents and I am still your child.

I have friends who think I’m foolish to write this letter. I hope they’re wrong. I hope their doubts are based on parents who loved and trusted them less than mine do. I hope especially that you’ll see this as an act of love on my part, a sign of my continuing need to share my life with you. I wouldn’t have written, I guess, if you hadn’t told me about your involvement in the Save Our Children campaign. That, more than anything, made it clear that my responsibility was to tell you the truth, that your own child is homosexual, and that I never needed saving from anything except the cruel and ignorant piety of people like Anita Bryant.

I’m sorry, Mama. Not for what I am, but for how you must feel at this moment. I know what that feeling is, for I felt it for most of my life. Revulsion, shame, disbelief – rejection through fear of something I knew, even as a child, was as basic to my nature as the color of my eyes.

No, Mama, I wasn’t “recruited.” No seasoned homosexual ever served as my mentor. But you know what? I wish someone had. I wish someone older than me and wiser than the people in Orlando had taken me aside and said, “You’re all right, kid. You can grow up to be a doctor or a teacher just like anyone else. You’re not crazy or sick or evil. You can succeed and be happy and find peace with friends – all kinds of friends – who don’t give a damn who you go to bed with. Most of all, though, you can love and be loved, without hating yourself for it.”

But no one ever said that to me, Mama. I had to find it out on my own, with the help of the city that has become my home. I know this may be hard for you to believe, but San Francisco is full of men and women, both straight and gay, who don’t consider sexuality in measuring the worth of another human being.

These aren’t radicals or weirdos, Mama. They are shop clerks and bankers and little old ladies and people who nod and smile to you when you meet them on the bus. Their attitude is neither patronizing nor pitying. And their message is so simple: Yes, you are a person. Yes, I like you. Yes, it’s all right for you to like me, too.

I know what you must be thinking now. You’re asking yourself: What did we do wrong? How did we let this happen? Which one of us made him that way?

I can’t answer that, Mama. In the long run, I guess I really don’t care. All I know is this: If you and Papa are responsible for the way I am, then I thank you with all my heart, for it’s the light and the joy of my life.

I know I can’t tell you what it is to be gay. But I can tell you what it’s not.

It’s not hiding behind words, Mama. Like family and decency and Christianity. It’s not fearing your body, or the pleasures that God made for it. It’s not judging your neighbor, except when he’s crass or unkind.

Being gay has taught me tolerance, compassion and humility. It has shown me the limitless possibilities of living. It has given me people whose passion and kindness and sensitivity have provided a constant source of strength. It has brought me into the family of man, Mama, and I like it here. I like it.

There’s not much else I can say, except that I’m the same Michael you’ve always known. You just know me better now. I have never consciously done anything to hurt you. I never will.

Please don’t feel you have to answer this right away. It’s enough for me to know that I no longer have to lie to the people who taught me to value the truth.

Mary Ann sends her love.

Everything is fine at 28 Barbary Lane.

Your loving son, Michael

To learn more about my recently published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:

https://tealeavesamemoir.wordpress.com/2020/11/22/the-unicorn-the-mystery-now-available-from-adelaide-books-amreading-faithfullylgbt/

The Unicorn, The Mystery chosen as one of Q Spirit’s Top Books — #amreading #FaithfullyLGBTQ #unicorns

I was honored to find that my novel The Unicorn, The Mystery was chosen to be on the Top 28 LGBTQ Christian books of 2020 at the Q Spirit blog of spirituality and the arts.

“The Unicorn: The Mystery” by Janet Mason.

Experience a magical, medieval world through the eyes of a unicorn and the heretical young monk who is enthralled by her in this imaginative historical novel. Hunters are out to capture and perhaps kill the unicorn. The monk’s devotion may turn out to be the unicorn’s rescue or her downfall. Like a beautiful tapestry, the novel weaves together theological debate and unforgettable characters, including queer nuns and their secret cat companion. Mason blends myth and history to conjure up a spellbinding vision. The author is an award-winning creative writer and Unitarian Universalist lay minister. Her novel “They: A Biblical Tale of Secret Genders” appeared on Q Spirit’s list of the top LGBTQ Christian books of 2018. Published by Adelaide Books.

Read the whole list on the Q Spirit blog by clIcking on the link below.

Top 28 LGBTQ Christian books of 2020 named

#WorldAIDSDay — Surviving a Plague: When Literature Invokes Life

Note: I am reblogging this in honor of World Awareness Day on December 1st 2020..

This piece of commentary was previously aired on This Way Out, the LGBTQ news and culture syndicate headquartered in Los Angeles and published in The Huffington Post.

Every now and then comes that rare book that brings your life rushing back to you. How To Survive A Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David France (Knopf 2016) is one such book.

The book chronicles the AIDS epidemic from the early 1980s – when the mysterious “gay cancer” started appearing — to 1995 when hard-won advancements in research and pharmaceuticals made AIDS a virus that people lived with rather than a disease that people died from.

It was an epidemic of massive proportions. As France writes:

“When the calendar turned to 1991, 100,000 Americans were dead from AIDS, twice as many as had perished in Vietnam.”

The book chronicles the scientific developments, the entwined politics, and medical breakthroughs in the AIDS epidemic. AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) is a chronic infectious condition that is caused by the underlying human immunodeficiency virus known as HIV. The book also chronicles the human toll which is staggering.I came out in 1981 and while the devastation France writes about was not my world, it was very close to my experience.

In my book Tea Leaves, a memoir of mothers and daughters (Bella Books, 2012), I write about how volunteering at an AIDS hospice helped me to care for my mother when she became terminally ill:

“The only caregiving I had done at that point was tending to an old cat and reading poetry to the patients at an AIDS hospice, called Betak, that was in our neighborhood. A friend of ours, who was a harpist, had started a volunteer arts program for the patients. She played the harp, [my partner] Barbara came and brought her drum sometimes, and I read poetry. These were poor people—mostly African American men—who were in the advanced stages of AIDS and close to death. The experience let me see how fast the disease could move.”

In those days, the women’s community (what we then called the lesbian and feminist community) was mostly separate from the gay male community. Understandably, gay men and lesbians had our differences. But there was infighting in every group. Rebellion was in the air, and sometimes we took our hostilities out on each other.

Still, gay men and lesbians were also allies and friends (something that is reflected in France’s writing).

I’ll always remember the time my partner and I took a bus to Washington D.C. with the guys from ACT-UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, an international activist group that is still in existence) from Philadelphia to Washington D.C. to protest for reproductive rights. The women then went to protest with ACT-UP at AIDS-related protests. Remember the die-ins in the streets?

One thing that lesbians and gay men had in common was that we lived in a world that was hostile to us. At that time, many gay men and lesbians were in the closet because we were vilified by society and in danger of losing our employment, families, housing and, in more than a few instances, our lives.

AIDS activism necessitated coming out of the closet. Hate crimes against us skyrocketed.

There is much in this book that I did not know, even though I lived through the era. In 1986, in protest of the Bowers v. Hardwick ruling of the US Supreme Court (which upheld a Georgia law criminalizing sodomy – a decision that was overturned in 2003), about 1,000 angry people protested in a small park across from the legendary Stonewall Inn in New York City, where the modern gay rights movement was born after a series of riots that started after a routine police raid of the bar.

At that same time, Ronald Reagan (then president) and the President of France François Mitterrand were celebrating the anniversary of the gift of the Statue of Liberty.

“’Did you hear that Lady Liberty has AIDS?” the comedian [Bob Hope] cracked to the three hundred guests. “Nobody knows if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Ferry.’”

“There was a scattering of groans. Mitterand and his wife looked appalled. But not the Reagans. The first lady, a year after the death of her friend Rock Hudson, the brunt of this joke, smiled affectionately. The president threw his head back and roared.”

How to Survive A Plague is told in stories, including the author’s own story. This is apt because the gay rights movement was full of stories and — because of the epidemic — most of those stories were cut short.

Almost every June, my partner and I would be part of the New York Pride Parade and every year we would pause for an official moment to honor our dead. The silence was cavernous.

This silence extended to entire communities. A gay male friend, amazed when his test came back negative, told me that most of his address book was crossed out. He would walk around the “gayborhood” in Center City Philadelphia surrounded by the haunting places where his friends used to live.

And we were all so young then.

When I turned the last page of How To Survive A Plague, I concluded that this is a very well-done book about a history that is important in its own right. The plague years also represent an important part of the American experience. And an understanding of this history is imperative to the future of the LGBT movement.

o learn more about my recently published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:

https://tealeavesamemoir.wordpress.com/2020/11/22/the-unicorn-the-mystery-now-available-from-adelaide-books-amreading-faithfullylgbt/

The Unicorn, The Mystery — a Zoom #reading on December 28th

I’m very excited to announce that my new novel The Unicorn, The Mystery was recently published by Adelaide Books (New York/Lisbon). It is available where books are sold online, through your local bookstore, and can be ordered through your local pubic library.

Unicorns are real. (The unicorn is the national animal of Scotland.) They are known to go away in times of strife. I hope they are coming back soon.

The book can be ordered through the Big Blue Marble Bookstore by clicking here.

On Monday December 28th at 7 to 9 p.m., I will be reading virtually with Louis Greenstein at the Big Blue Marble Bookstore. Louis will be reading from his new book The Song of Life (Sunbury Press 2020). The Big Blue Marble Bookstore is in the Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia but thanks to technology you can attend the reading from almost anywhere.

To register for the free reading, go tohttps://www.eventbrite.com/e/new-novels-from-janet-mason-louis-greenstein-tickets-130732591701 In The Unicorn, The Mystery, we meet a unicorn who tells us the story of the seven tapestries, called “The Hunt of the Unicorn” from the 1500s on display in “the unicorn room” in The Cloister in Manhattan, now part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The tapestries tell the story of what is still called an “unsolved mystery.”

Experience a magical, medieval world through the eyes of a unicorn and the heretical young monk who is enthralled by her in The Unicorn, The Mystery by Janet Mason. Hunters are out to capture and perhaps kill the unicorn. The monk’s devotion may turn out to be the unicorn’s rescue or downfall.  Like a beautiful tapestry, the novel weaves together theological debate and unforgettable characters, including queer nuns and their secret cat companion. Mason blends myth and history to conjure up a spellbinding vision.

–Kittredge Cherry
Publisher, Qspirit.net

Happy Thanks Living — #VeganThanksGiving

For this Thanks Giving — or ThanksLiving — we had a delicious dinner of Do No Evil turkey (proceeds go to support a farm animal sanctuary), organic yams, and cranberry sauce. Earlier we had a kale salad and split an individual nondairy “cheese” cake.

I commented that veganism is the diet of the future and some day people will look back in disbelief that “farm” animals were once considered food.

Both my partner and I love to eat and neither of us feel deprived.

There’s a growing movement of people who have gone to a healthy plant based diet for health reasons. For more info on the health benefits that I have experienced, click here:

https://tealeavesamemoir.wordpress.com/2020/11/01/world-vegan-day-freedom-for-humans-and-animals/

There are other reasons to go to a plant-based diet, which include a healthy planet and the animals.

From a Buddhist perspective, it makes sense that what is good for the animals and the planet is good for us.

to learn more about my recently published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:

https://tealeavesamemoir.wordpress.com/2020/11/22/the-unicorn-the-mystery-now-available-from-adelaide-books-amreading-faithfullylgbt/

The Unicorn, The Mystery now available from Adelaide Books — #amreading #FaithfullyLGBT

I’m excited to announce that my novel The Unicorn, The Mystery was recently published by Adelaide Books (New York/Lisbon).

In The Unicorn, The Mystery, we meet a unicorn who tells us the story of the seven tapestries, called “The Hunt of the Unicorn” from the 1500s on display in “the unicorn room” in the Cloisters (at the westernmost tip of Manhattan), now part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The tapestries tell the story of what is still called an “unsolved mystery.” The story is set in an abbey in France not far from the barn in the countryside where the tapestries were discovered. Pursued by a band of hunters, the unicorn is led along by observing birds (some of them chirp in a language that the unicorn understands), smelling and eating the abbey flowers and fruits (including imbibing in fermented pomegranates), pursuing chaste maidens (there is one in the tapestry) and at times speaks to other animals such as the majestic stag.

In The Unicorn, The Mystery, we also meet a young monk named Apolo who tells us his story. Once he was pure of heart, so much so that he saw the unicorn several times (most notably as a lad and then as a young monk). But when he comes to live in the abbey, he gets swept up in the politics going on around him. His betrayal starts when he tells the Priest he meets with regularly that he saw the unicorn.  The priest scoffs and says that the unicorn is both a mythical and pagan animal.  But then he suggests that if Apolo can prove the unicorn does indeed exists, that it would be worth his while. Apolo subsequently plots with the sundial wrist-band wearing Bishop who is eager to trap the unicorn to please the King. Realizing his error in betraying the unicorn, Apolo leads us through a labyrinth of the Middle Ages, including story, myth, philosophy, numerology and alchemy. Can he regain his purity and at the same time get ahead?

Three short fiction excerpts of the The Unicorn, The Mystery were shortlisted for the Adelaide Literary Award 2018 (short stories, Vol. One).

I also included some excerpts of The Unicorn, The Mystery in my talks at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Restoration in Philadelphia. You can watch the YouTube videos or read the text of these talks by clicking on the links below.

By the way. unicorns did exist according to the bestiaries passed down from ancient Greece and unicorns are mentioned by name in The Hebrew Bible.  They can be seen depicted in images of collections from the Middle Ages when people commonly believed in the existence of unicorns. As my monk narrator says to a skeptical priest, also his Latin teacher,

God believed in the unicorn.

Click here to find about more about the excerpts from The Unicorn, The Mystery that were shortlisted in The Adelaide Literary Award.

https://tealeavesamemoir.wordpress.com/2018/12/26/the-unicorn-the-mystery-shortlisted-for-the-adelaide-literary-award-amreading-literaryawards/

The following excerpts were part of my talks at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Restoration:

A recent UU talk on origins of The Unicorn, The Mystery:

https://tealeavesamemoir.wordpress.com/2020/05/18/you-are-the-hero-of-your-own-story-uu-amreading-magic/

Here is my debut of The Unicorn, The Mystery:

https://tealeavesamemoir.wordpress.com/2018/05/27/the-unicorn-the-mystery-a-novel-debut-by-janet-mason-uu-amreading/

This excerpt is from Poetry Sunday:

https://tealeavesamemoir.wordpress.com/2018/07/22/love-can-lead-to-goodness-reading-from-sappho-and-the-unicorn-the-mystery-poetry-sunday-a-uu-tradition/

This excerpt features the Egyptian cat goddess, Goddess Bastet:

https://tealeavesamemoir.wordpress.com/2018/07/01/gardening-and-the-egyptian-cat-goddess-bastet-a-novel-preview/

The Unicorn, The Mystery is sold where ever books are sold online and through your local bookstore. You can also order it through your library.

November is National Vegan Day — working with the next presidential administration

November is National Vegan Month. Now that we have a new administration in Washington D.C., I’m hoping that there is more action and awareness about healthy plant-based diets and the positive impact that they have on people’s health as well as the cruelty that is inflicted on the animals and the benefits to the planet. My hope is that Senator Cory Booker (who is a vegan as well as a Rhodes Scholar and an excellent politician) is appointed to a position in the White House where he can make a difference.

Going to a plant-based diet, which I did for health reasons at the advice of my acupuncturist, saved my life. You can read about the health benefits here https://tealeavesamemoir.wordpress.com/2020/11/01/world-vegan-day-freedom-for-humans-and-animals/

And I am not alone — hundreds of thousands of people are experiencing the health benefits of going to a plant-based diet. The vegan movement is growing! But many more people can benefit from it.

I’m thought you might like this very short YouTube video of Dr. Neal Barnard talking about the commitment to working with the next administration to spread the word about the benefits of a health plant-based diet.

Meanwhile, happy Vegan Month!

Remember, everyone’s a little vegan (if you eat veggies) and even small changes make a difference.

How the Next Administration Can Prioritize Health | Dr. Neal BarnardNow that the election is over, there are many questions about what the next four years will hold. More than ever, many of these questions center around health. Dr. Neal Barnard is at the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., to talk about what this will mean for our efforts to promote health, good nutrition, and ethical research. — About …www.youtube.com

Save me and save yourself!

To learn more about my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (published by Adelaide Books New York/Lisbon), click here.

We Did It! — #BidenHarris2020

What a difference a day makes!

I was meeting with the Unitarian Universalist lay leaders this morning when I heard my partner Barbara drumming loudly and whooping for joy.

Apparently, I didn’t know how bad the last four years were — until I experienced the elation of the day.

We went out driving around to join the Biden Harris parade of beeping and waving. On nearby Germantown Avenue we ran into an old acquaintance who gave me red, white, and blue crepe paper streamers which I flew from the window. Thank you America! We’re back.

People lined the streets and climbed the light poles. Our favorite slogan was “Philly Saves The World!”

Here are some of my favorite signs.

To learn more about my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (published by Adelaide Books New York/Lisbon), click here.