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.“