Two Great Quotes

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth." - Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928

I've included the Beston quote, because it's always been one of my favorites, and somebody over at the GoVegan forum reminded me of that fact. So, it's here now too.

My grandmother is down visiting, and she said this thing the other day that really stuck with me. I had been making some comment about karmic retribution, when she said, "I'm really careful about what I put on my wheel." And then she went on to explain that when she was younger she put stuff on her wheel that came back around to her, in other words, she did some things she regretted and they came back around and bit her in the ass. Well, I think it's wise. You may have some fancier, more grandiloquent way of saying the same thing, but I like the simplicity of what my grandmother said.

And I'm trying to be really careful about what I put on my wheel.