Is probably one of the most asinine set of words ever stringed together. If you're of a certain age you'll likely remember where this line came from, but if not, well, never mind. Suffice it to say that I tend to consider Valentine's Day just as senseless (as I do any holiday that celebrates something that ought to be recognized and validated more than once a year -- think Mother's Day, for example), but what the heck, let's take the kernel of this schmaltzy, sentimental, overly hyped, marketed, and commercialized day and do something useful with it. Let's look at love from a vegan perspective.
So what is love? I'm no expert, but thought I'd start a list. Feel free to add.
True vegan love means:
- saying sorry whenever you've goofed up, which means you'll be saying sorry many more times than never (and if you're the exceptional human who rarely slips up, you could always say a general sorry on behalf of the rest of us)
- respecting your animal companions (this means not declawing your cat, docking your dog's tail or ears, or any other number of practices that don't benefit other animal household members in the least)
- extending your respect and compassion to sentient beings not viewed as companion animals (just because they don't happen to live in someone's home doesn't mean they shouldn't be present in your area of concern)
- getting out of your comfort zone to assist other sentient beings in concrete and off-line ways
- remembering that "other sentient beings" includes the human kind
- not holding yourself or other vegans to impossibly perfect standards
- not getting too hung up on what label (or non-label) other vegans use to describe their identity or advocacy if they're actually doing something helpful
- being patient and kind with non-vegans even (or especially) in the moments when a part of your brain feels that violence could be a valid and useful tool
- recognizing that love, respect and compassion towards all are supposed to be the cornerstones of being vegan
- remembering those cornerstones when you're having difficulty feeling love, respect and compassion because someone or some group is pissing you off
- seeing that "love" works better as a verb than a noun
- preparing food that sustains rather than hurts (whether in sourcing or consuming)
- accepting that you can only change yourself, provide information without demanding results, and lead by example
- realizing that veganism is a means to an end, not an end in itself (the real end is for the need for veganism to become obsolete*), and ultimately about other animals and not ourselves
- disagreeing without hurting and agreeing without competing (this, if I remember correctly, was a line -- I've roughly paraphrased it -- by Lee Hall that I saw referenced in one of veganelder's posts or comments a couple of years ago, and it stayed with me because it struck me as possibly one of the most difficult things for members and factions of the vegan movement to do)
- remembering to take the time to take care of yourself
- being willing to have an open mind when new information presents itself
- being willing to have an open heart when new feelings present themselves
- forgiving others
- forgiving yourself
- learning from other species who in some ways are much smarter than we are
- showing gratitude for what you have and anything that IS going right
- knowing that real change will likely take far more time than you'd like
- pacing yourself for the long haul, and
- did I mention being humble enough to say you're sorry? ;)
* obsolete in the sense that we longer need to convince folk to go vegan as animal use and consumption will be a thing of the past, hurrah!
