I Can Eat Sausage!

I Can Eat Sausage

I look around and see no path. Nothing leading me where I want to go. What I’ve been thinking is that religion is a search for who or what is responsible for the deplorable state of the world and all its sorrows. Who or what takes all this beauty and brings it to rack and ruin? Who is making it so that many of us cannot draw an un-medicated breath? I am in a New York frame of mind, when it comes to what is called ‘the environment’. There is no environment, there is a world. I feel like being very direct with myself and with you.

For whatever reason, maybe it’s just all I know, I see such relevance in Christianity and other religions in the BP Gulf of Mexico crisis. I see parallels. I see suffocation, I see suffering, I see death, I see the Slaughter of the Innocents. I imagine what it is like to be a fish or a turtle or a bird, just minding my own business and then being washed over by the oil… and I die gasping. I see Everything that never had to be destroying everything that ever was.

I have come to see the useless destruction of a blameless victim. I look around and I say, “Who’s in charge here?”, and I realize that I am. And it is you, whoever you are. I say, looking at the dying bird, “Who smothered this wonderful creature?”, just as I said, as a child, who killed Christ and why, and what does that mean to me. Historically, when bad things happen to good things, we look around for someone to blame, a poor, miserable, confused scapegoat running pall mall through the storm of accusation and blame, this sort of thing can turn into a Holocaust. Unless I realize that I am responsible.

I look around and I say who, dear God, who is to blame? And I realize that I create and sustain a thing like a British Petroleum through my own stupid consumerism.

I know that since through my actions I uncorked the well that sends the black cloud through the sea, I know I am the only one who can put it back. I can use less of everything starting with my car and my dwelling. I have been in the throes of doing this and by God, this is really hard to do. Trust me. I have no where to set my ‘stuff’…it is suffocating me! I am hiding my shame under a giant pile of things I haddahave. What does the suffering and death of a bird say to me? It says, yes…


You can eat sausage.

Yes, sausage. I was raised to be a carnivore. But not a mindless carnivore. My father and other New Yorkers of my youth ate the whole thing…tongue to tail. They ate tongue sandwiches and sipped oxtail soup. Liverwurst was big. Bologna.Something called Taylor ham. They boiled every chicken carcass. My Dad made not-so-toothsome concoctions after the holidays---Big pots of grey soup. He had been hungry before, you see. He was implacably opposed to the wasteful ways of his children.

The making of a mindless carnivore took an advertising industry working with me, a complicit and lazy carnivore. I have always felt that I deserved a break today, not a beak today.

I do not have a thing about meat. But I think eating a pile o wings off of 16 probably tortured birds is a little buggered up. I can choose to be responsible for the whole thing that sacrifices (doubtlessly unwillingly) for my sustenance. I can eat the whole thing through my choices of foodstuffs. I can get real and eat sausage, for example. I can no longer conscionably pick and choose to consume only parts of what I have caused to be killed. Like a good Indian.

To me, suffering as I do over the Gulf Crisis Du Jour, and as I am sure you do, over the Gulf Spill, over having to have a Memorial Day for the Gulf of Mexico and the Turtles and Birds who gave their lives (we need an Eco Gettysburg Address to honor these noble dead) I must now make choices in every aspect of every day of my life. Nothing less can be expected of one to whom so much has been given.

Yes, I cringe over my own hypocrisy. I blush to toss away that bit of plastic that I should never have had in the first place. I cannot believe I am cooled as a corpse in a morgue twenty-four seven. I know that no make up covers the multitude of my vainglorious sins as expressed through my consumerism.

But I can become deeply conscious that how I treat this planet and its flora and fauna, is a spiritual, a deep soul issue. It is all about mindfulness.

So I cry on and do my best, and make myself see what I have done and am doing.

I remain a “Little Sister of the Wilderness”….