Food, Justice, Hope

 

 

Recently as we Unitarian Universalists seek to bring justice to the world through food, I have heard pain and discouragement regarding how much we wish for the well being of all humans and nonhumans, and how far off that dream of the beloved community seems. Even after the passing of the Ethical Eating SOC, or especially so.

I know intimately this despair regarding the challenges of nourishing a world, let alone my companions in Unitarian Universalism.  For the hope of offering support to you, I would like to offer these words. I was going to speak them from the “pro” plenary mike in support of the statement, but we ran out of time right before my turn. Here are those words, only slightly changed to account for a future not asking for the passing of the statement, but for the implementation of the statement.

 Hello. I am the Rev. LoraKim Joyner and I am a delegate from the UU Fellowship of Gainesville.  I come before you today as a Community Minister in Multispecies Ministry and Compassionate Communication. I have also served as the president of the UU Animal Ministry for 8 years and am their current Reverence for Life Coordinator.  I also enjoy serving on the Ethical Eating Core Team.  In addition, I am a wildlife veterinarian working largely in Latin American conservation. I say all this to let you know that I know how difficult it is for us to talk, and to take action on food.  We doubt that we can love enough to take care of all beings given what we perceive as a perponderance of needs and claims that compete with one another. 

They do not.

I have just come from 2.5 months working in Latin American to support environmental justice and conservation of birds.  The people there who live close to the land know that their well being is tied closely to the well being of animals. One group of indigenous people with whom I work, the Miskito people of Honduras, are literally dying to protect their wild birds, while they themselves do not have enough to eat.  To insure that they have enough to eat and can nourish their families, birds, and trees, they have opened their hearts to protect all life, together.  Everything is at risk they told me, and so they are willing to risk everything.

Their hearts are big enough.

Our hearts are big enough. 

The needs are urgent; there is no time to lose.

Everything is at risk.

So let us risk everything we can today.

Let’s implement this statement by using it as a tool to crank open our hearts so that the world can fall in and fill our lives with ever increasing love and compassion.

I and others remain dedicated to what is not just a 5 year Study Action Item process, but an effort that will span our lifetimes. 

We will find a way to breathe hope and justice into this statement, making it a living covenant with all of life.

 

Compassionate Communication with All Beings

Dr. Ursula Aragunde Kohl, me and participants at the CC Workshop in Puerto Rico

 

 

Last weekend I was in Puerto Rico offering two separate workshops on Compassionate Communication. One was to the Puerto Rican Parrot Recovery Project and the other to a conglomeration of animal welfare, social services, and faith organizations in San Juan. This was the first time I had chosen to concentrate on organizations that deal with nonhuman animals. My goal in so doing was to support and nourish the humans so that they in turn could help all beings flourish.

In my home faith tradition, Unitarian Universalism I am also gearing up to offer workshops in Compassionate Communication to those interested in the interweaving justice issues that include nonhuman animals. I will do this as part of the Reverence for Life Program that the Unitarian Universalist Animal Ministry is offering our congregations. Now is the time to struggle with how we covenant with earth and her beings as our association of congregations deals with the Study Action Item: Ethical Eating and Environmental Justice. In the last few weeks congregations and list serves have been abuzz with commenting on the Draft Statement of Conscience that deals with this compelling and complex topic. Comments on the draft are due February 1st and we as an association will vote on the final draft at General Assembly in June, 2011.

How shall we come up with a statement that includes the wide diversity of who we are and yet challenges us to hold the needs of all species ever more tenderly?

My response to this question, at both the workshops and to my fellow Unitarian Universalists is this:

It’s important to think of how animals feel and suffer, how their evolution has brought them to where they are , and what they are thinking as we research how their brains work. Yet, we can never know what is “best” in the morass of ethical vagueness that cloaks humanity. Let this complexity be not a death shroud for any. Instead, let us lift up the few things we can know:

    All beings have needs that connect us in an interdependent web of inherent worth and dignity.

    We can bring kindness to every moment.

    Everything is a practice ground for the skills of compassion.

 

May this be our prayer in intention, word, and action in the months to come.

Companions and Compassion

 Exodor 

I
lived with a Nanday Conure by the name of Exodor for 23 years.  He died in 2003.  I still have his egg and have an image of one
of his feathers as a tattoo.  More than
anything the image of his beautiful and graceful self is engraved in my heart
for ever.  He had such spunk, courage,
deep intelligence, and loyalty. He lived with me all over including California,
Alaska, Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, and Guatemala.  There are hundreds of stories I could tell
that would testify to his inherent worth and dignity, but perhaps more than
anything I recall is the beauty of his flight as he flew across the room to
join me with that high pitched call that screamed out "I'm so alive, I'm
so glad to see you, I'm such a conure!"

Because
of my deep bond with him I am especially attuned to others of his species.  A few years ago I was in St. Petersburg. I
heard a squawk and my heart leaped. Sure enough there was family of Nandays
coming in and out of a nest cavity in a palm tree in a parking lot.  I was so enamored with them that I took my
spouse back there a few months later to celebrate our anniversary what we now
fondly know of as "St. Parrotsburg." 
We spent the day walking around the down town area chasing Nandays,
Quakers, and various other kinds of free flying parrots that were far from
their original lands. 

 

Nandays in Sarasota 

The
countries of origin though don't seem so far away now that I have known
Nandays.  Through Exodor I am forever
called to pay attention to wild parrots, and care for them.  For now I know how they are like feathered
angels, gifting us with a picture of heaven on earth where all beings
belong. 

 (photo by Robert Blanchard) 

Others have been
gifted to with this connection of wild and companion birds.  Recently I have become friends with Marc
Johnson and Karen Windsor of Foster Parrots. 
I am so taken with them and their projects in in
Guyana.  I interviewed them and highlighted their work on my other blog, Lafeber Conservation and Wildlife.   Here's is what I found.  They know power and are yielding it well, if
not with discomfort and pain on their part. Because in their work with
companion birds where they love them, care for them, sacrifice for them, and
witness to their beauty and their suffering, they can draw on authentic  motivations to address the situation of the
free flying wild counterparts in Guyana and other countries.  They do not
keep their heart and dedication enclosed into a box, but extend it out to other
species, including their fellow great apes - humans.  This is perhaps the hardest piece, loving our
human neighbors as ourselves in our mixed species communities. 

I have
struggled mightily with this, for I wish to blame someone for the pain and loss
of our beautiful world.  Somehow, though,
I know that blame is not the answer. For simply, if there is not enough love,
compassion, or beauty in the world, then I will do everything I can for there
to be more, and not less.  This means
that I must undertake to see the beauty in all of life and in the whole. This
includes we humans.  We need us all at
the table so we can nourish one another, so that the earth and all her beings
may flourish. 

A
simple message, but a most difficult one to follow through on.

So I
write here to gather us all together so that we might support one another
towards a more compassionate world - liberating ourselves as we liberate the
birds we love.

Thank
you Marc and Karen. For through your work, you give we humans the opportunity
to be who we are and were always supposed to be.

 Marc Johnson, Karen Windsor, and Friends 

Welfare from A Bird's Eye View

Nancy Burke Loving a Hundred Year Old Yellow-crowned Amazon Parrot

  

I have
recently returned from several weeks of being among bird people, attending a
bird veterinarian conference (the Association of Avian Veterinarians), a bird
owner/breeder conference (American Federation of Aviculture), an avian
veterinary clinics (Bird and Exotic Pet Wellness Center) and pet bird owners of
flocks. There was a time when I could not have spent enjoyable time amongst
them, for I thought they were "wrong" for keeping wild birds in
captivity.  Through the deep work of
Nonviolent Communication that I translate into Compassionate Conservation, I am
learning to see that these people are not wrong, nor am I.   Life
flows through them just as it does me, striving to bring appreciation, beauty,
companionship, and nurturing to their lives. 
They love birds, I love birds. They care for birds, I care for
birds.  They choose to do so by keeping
birds in cages in their homes, or treating captive birds in their clinics,
while I choose to work with wild parrots in Latin America.  Our strategies differ, but we are interdependent
with one another, not separate, but worthy and lovely.  We share life.  Because I appreciate our common humanity and
might empathize with them, I can be among them,  and even more important to me, love them for who they are
and keep my heart open to the beauty that is their lives.  This
does not mean that I do not mourn their strategies. Indeed, after several weeks
of being among captive birds and hearing of their hard lives in captivity, I am
ready for a break.  My heart hurts to
witness such suffering. 

Striving to
relate through common needs also doesn't mean that I don't tell others what is
going on in my heart.  Indeed there were
many such discussions.  In that sharing,
my aching heart does find relief, for at the level of universal needs, of
mattering and seeing that other species matter, we were able to connect.  By seeing our discomfort as being at the
level of strategy, and not at the level of universal needs, we find ways to empathize
with one another, support one another, and hopefully  help one another see that we matter so that
we can work together in ways that reflect the needs of all beings.

This is my
dream and my prayer for we who share our lives with birds, especially this year
as we work together to develop guidelines for birds under the Animal Welfare
Act.  I strongly believe that we need all
of us at the table, so that we might nourish birds, ourselves, and the world we
share with them with our creative, loving, synergy.  May this be so.