today is Earth Day
Grays Harbor sunset, April 18 2025 Today is Earth Day! For my part, I live, work, study, and provide practical programming to make ethical veganism accessible. I live in, volunteer in, and serve a marginalized community. I live a minimalist life and I purchase, consume, "donate", and throw out far fewer items than my American peers. I am always looking for more ethical and ecological ways to live. I am committed to - almost obstinate in - these endeavors, but I am not frantic. I am passionate, and good-humored. I doubt those things will change much in my lifetime. I reject fully the doctrines of those who say our personal actions and our personal ethics do not matter. I fully reject the popular sentiment that "systemic" change is needed - and that it is someone else's job to do this work. It is my job. And yours too. *** I am a full-time graduate student in Engaged Jain Studes with a concentration in Veganism, Animals and Ecology. This year as part of my mutualist, third-space yoga project I've launched an LGBTQ+ and Friends Yoga event, a Community Meditation monthly event (with a wonderful instructor), and a plant-based learning course called Plant Power Hour. I balance my passionate ecology and liberation praxes with my warm and loving relationship with my family which includes my partner, our children, our children's partners, and our companion animals. I have many friends but only, realistically, one whom I am very close to. My community's varieties of kindnesses and passions, my partner's intelligence and ethical soundness, my best friend's native goodness, and my children's strengths sustain me a great deal. I invite anyone reading here to take ethical vows. The steadfast application of a multivalent ethical path is - to paraphrase a very influential book in my life - "a limitless lode which will pay dividends only if we mine it for the rest of ours lives". You can invest in your ethics as they make you stronger, and they are there for you when a lot of other things let you down. In a world being drowned out by consumer-capitalist messages to buy-buy-buy, consume-consume-consume, and hoard-hoard-hoard - ethical commitments are at once a lifeline and also a creative brainspace to escape the frankly boring acquisitional hamster wheel that is a major aspiration of residents of the Western world (and probably other places, too). My inspirations - human and non-human animal - are too many to list here. I try to name and thank you directly as often as I can. Thank you for being here, and thank you especially for leaving a comment or a Like; these things are hard to come by as social media has stripped us from literary quality connection.