This blog is called "Kindred of the Quiet Way": well, you know that. But the kindred, the kinship, is not only between human beings, but a kinship with every created being. To walk in the Quiet Way implies looking with a quiet eye, noticing the beauty, dignity and holiness of all creation.
The Bible story of Noah's Flood speaks of God making a covenant with all creatures after the flood subsides, and the Psalms tell of lions roaring in prayer to God, asking for their food for today, and tell of the young ravens calling to God for their food. It is not only human beings who lean upon Providence and walk in faith. Everything that lives sings along the silver threads of creation to the heartbeat of grace at its centre. All life is blessed - or so the Bible says.
And so bonds of kinship are the bones of the body of life, the framework upon which the web of life is woven.
Because of this, time and again I am tugged back to the vegan way. I go along for a while, fall off the wagon because of my own indiscipline, and am drawn back irresistibly in time. This winter, discovering myself to be dairy-allergic feels like a blessing: finally, a definite non-negotiable imperative to give up dairy from my diet! Meat I knew I had to leave behind eventually: as Stephen Gaskin said: "Getting the world together has got to include dietary reform, and it means we're going to have to get into inexpensive stuff that doesn't have to be manufactured a lot, because lots of manufacturing costs lots of money. And you don't eat meat because if everybody eats meat, there's not enough food for everybody. But if everybody doesn't eat meat, there's enough food for everybody". Makes sense to me.
I felt okay-ish about eating fish - although it stll seemed a shame to take a beautiful creature, smack its head on a rock and eat it for supper, when soya beans would have done just as well. Also who wouldn't feel uneasy about the hinterland to our fish habits of great nets trawling the sea, of dead inedible creatures caught in their hundreds and thousands and flung back as incidental waste? I ate a crab last Saturday, and ever since I've flashed on images of the black beady eyes of a living crab, and wished I'd left it to run free.
So with all these thoughts in my head, and finding my feet tentatively on the vegan path again, I was running along the groove of thinking about responsible eating and our kinship with all creation.
From time to time in recent months I've paused perplexed over the whole issue of packaging. A tiny dessert, just a few mouthfuls, presented in a plastic container that will last Lord knows how long in the land-fill site. So I throw up my hands in frustration and distress and do - nothing!
What I hadn't done properly was the joined up thinking to make the link between packaging and keeping faith with the kindred of all creation. I mean, I knew about the grim collateral damage caused by our addiction to over-packaging: but like most people I get a bit swamped by issues to take on board, give up and stop thinking about it at all after a bit.
Then today on Jim Otterstrom's wonderful Earth Home Garden blog, I saw this YouTube film that stopped me in my tracks.
The information wasn't new: but the film said to me: "Well? Are you ever going to do anything about this?" I guess I know me well enough to accept that my response is never likely to be more than half-way there and approximate: but I realise that I have to order my priorities better: to buy veggies and bread and baked goods sold in paper bags not plastic; to buy pulses sold in cellophane bags: and to cut right back on all plastic packaging in all forms.
Oh, glory! This is so important, and feels so difficult!