In these times of complexity, balance, and change, I come to Mary Oliver’s book Upstream.
Out walking, she comes upon a hawk beginning the process of tearing apart and consuming a pheasant. Though she prefers to be a vegetarian, a craving for meat will strike, and she considers how the pheasant could be her dinner. Then, re-considering, she walks on.
“But I know how sparkling was the push of my own appetite. I am no fool, no sentimentalist. I know that appetite is one of the gods, with a rough and savage face, but a god all the same.
Teilhard de Chardin says somewhere that man’s most agonizing spiritual decision is his necessity for food, with its unavoidable attachments to suffering. Who would disagree.“
