Articles Reflecting a Vegan Lifestyle From All-Creatures.org

Shock Waves and Collateral Beauty

From Judy Carmen, Peace to All Beings - Response from Tami Hay
July 2024

We had opened our hearts to the animals, and the grief seemed infinite, bottomless, and unbearably heavy.

My dad was a surgeon with such a grand reputation that I felt he could do just about anything. People spoke of how he had saved their lives and how kind he was. I was awestruck by him. Now, co-existing with his image as a great healer was his passion for hunting and killing animals from the biggest elephants and polar bears to the smallest quails. Meanwhile, I had two uncles who had big responsibilities at the Kansas City Stockyards. Their exploits there were talked about with pride in our family. In my young mind, I concluded there was something important about them too. And, like so many of us, as children, I adored animals. They were my friends. So the cognitive dissonance stretched me from admiration to horror and grief. But in my young world that grief had no cultural validation.

Fast forward to young adulthood—loving animals and nature, as I did, drew me to the growing environmental and peace movements in the ‘70’s. Many of us discovered vegetarianism together, and it fit perfectly with our passion to save the earth and bring peace to the world. It was an inkling that giving up eating animals was part of that grand vision. A lot was going on in the ‘70’s and really for centuries before that, regarding animal rights, but it was People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), founded in 1980, and many other new animal rights groups that took me beyond the general notion that we had to stop killing animals to the brutal truth of what was actually happening to animals daily on a massive scale around the world. As the movement grew, undercover videos of the horrors animals endured were shared, and I wonder if we could say that it was the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s when the worldwide grief for the animals began to take hold of millions of us.

But what could we do with our grief? We were learning about unimaginable torture and death from magazines, letters, films and books. And then the internet entered our lives, and each day a new atrocity came to our attention. I remember learning with shock and despair about the bears being confined in tiny cages their entire lives so that their bile could be sucked out of them for so-called medicines. The news of how sheep were sheared leaving them bleeding and traumatized, how geese were relentlessly force-fed to make foie gras, how children were left sobbing when their 4H animals were taken from them and sent to slaughter, how slaughterhouse workers and their families’ lives were ruined by the death work they did—all these and the endless other horrors assailed us. We had opened our hearts to the animals, and the grief seemed infinite, bottomless, and unbearably heavy.

Perhaps, we can only take in so much at a time. It took me ‘til the ‘90’s before I allowed myself to see what cows and “laying” hens endured. That’s when I went vegan. How much can we bear? And knowing this about myself, I have so much compassion for those who have not yet gone vegan. We are asking them, not only to question the very culture in which we live, but also to share in our profound grief and to hear the cries of nature and the animals.

Nevertheless, while there is deep sadness, there is also great beauty hidden within these many layers of grief. One who has allowed their heart to break has come face to face with Unconditional, Universal Love, the Divine within each one of us. And this is what sends us on our missions, our callings, whatever they may be, to take some action. The heaviness of grief gives way when we tap into our Divinity and move toward healing. And because we are all so intimately connected—animals, nature and all of us—that healing blesses them and us as well.

When my oldest daughter died of cancer in 2018, I wondered how my heart could break even more than it already had and still go on beating. And how could the world go on without her as if nothing had happened? By her passing from the material world, she taught me how deeply connected she and I could be beyond “death.” I also found some comfort in a movie called “Collateral Beauty.” In the film Helen Mirren’s character notices a woman sitting in the hospital as her little girl is dying. Helen’s character sits down beside the mother and simply says, “Don’t forget to look for the collateral beauty.” This has become my daily companion as I feel the loss of my daughter and the relentless killing of the animals. It is a reminder that we are Divine beings living in a material world. There is Unreasonable Joy and “Peace that passes all understanding” available to us. As we practice the presence of Divine Love which is always with us and in us, we gain increasing access to non-duality, inner peace and a Universal Love for all creation. And in that way we find the strength, intuition and guidance to continue to work for a world of nonviolence, ahimsa and vegan living for all life.

Judy McCoy Carman, M.A., earth, peace, and animal activist, is the author of Peace to All Beings: Veggie Soup for the Chicken’s Soul and the new book,Homo Ahimsa: Who We Really Are and How We’re Going to Save the World. She is also co-author of The Missing Peace: The Hidden Power of our Kinship with Animals. In addition to animal rescue work, some current projects include the Animals' Peace Prayer Flag project; Vegan Spirituality interviews; and co-founding the Circle of Compassion, Prayer Circle for Animals Facebook and the Interfaith Vegan Coalition. She appears in the film, “A Prayer for Compassion,” and received the Henry Spira Grassroots Animal Activist Award in 2014. Her website is www.peacetoallbeings.com.

 

RESPONSE FROM TAMI HAY

After reading Judy's essay, I watched the movie Collateral Beauty. I've always loved Will Smith's way of expressing grief and inner pain as an actor. I was also able to fully relate to the idea of Collateral Beauty, the intense, life-affirming beauty to which we may gain access after the shock and damage of a loss. I have been able to perceive it ever since my son, Ryan, passed in 2017. The full awakening of that new sense in me may have begun with the birth of my grandson, Phoenix. Because my heart was so very raw, I was able to love this new, precious life all the more intensely! Within that tiny little body was held the remembrance of light, unconditional love, vulnerability, and the interdependence of all life. New life helps us all rise from the ashes, as Phoenix helped me, thereby living up to his namesake.

But my sense of collateral beauty only expanded from there, as new shocks hit my heart: the sight of wetlands destroyed, the news of ancient forests bulldozed. The feeling of beauty that correlates with the pain of loss gave me a deeper well-spring to draw from and greater inspiration for creative action.

This is my understanding of collateral beauty: it happens when our heart is broken so wide open that we have the potential to be more heart-centered, to feel more love, interconnection, and vulnerability. In grief we may cultivate the empathy needed to see in the face of another their unacknowledged pain, their protective cover-ups, their deep, unprocessed sorrow. Beyond that, because we have been there, we may feel a compassionate calling to mitigate the other’s suffering—and not just the suffering of other humans, but the suffering of all sentient beings, including those who live out their brief, pain-filled lives behind the walls of factory farms. Perhaps this is the surplus that a compassion born of grief brings: whereas empathy merely resonates with the pain of another, compassion intervenes to try and relieve it.

By contrast, unattended sadness, if it doesn’t simply leave us unable to feel for another being’s suffering, often manifests as irritation and anger. And while anger, unlike apathy or depression, can get us moving, it burns hot and is a fuel that can be quickly exhausted, leaving us burnt out and incapable of further action.

Both anger and depression may be signs that we have not been held long enough, deeply enough or at all. If it is felt with the heart of an unheld inner child, activism simply accumulates more pain and trauma. So, how can we allow our hearts to break wide open without fear that they will spill out our very life force? The answer is that we must be held long enough and compassionately enough within the heart-filled care of another, nature and the divine, until, slowly, we are able to take a full breath again. Only when we are finally held will the scattered pieces of ourselves that we abandoned along the way be regathered. Only when we are properly held will our inner child know we are big people now, who can take care of the pain. Only then can the shock waves that threatened to shake our bodies apart cohere into ripples that expand out into the world and gently rock it, changing its wavelength.

The last conversation I had with a friend before he took his life included these words: “I cannot be in a relationship right now. I am too unwell. I just wish there was a place I could go where I could just be held for a very long time.” Imagine if there were a place for us to go to be held in this way: a recovery center to heal our trauma from the shock of animal agriculture and planetary annihilation. After the shock of realizing what has been REALLY going on, we could go into treatment and be held, given healing bodywork, fed nutritious vegan meals, offered access to individual and group talk and somatic therapy, granted the opportunity to plant gardens and trees, feed other animals and people, and support them in their grieving. Imagine a world that supports traumatized beings so that they can engage in environmental and animal activism from a place of wholeness. Maybe one day!

Maybe one day we'll have a heart so broken open wide that we will be like Amma, the great hugging mother, to whom people flocked from miles around just to be held, their floodgates opening.

Until then, let us begin by seeking the collateral beauty in our grief. Let us witness the shock and pain in each other, embrace and be embraced in compassionate community so that, together, we can bring the love-based, Ahimsa world into being. 

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Posted on All-Creatures: July 15, 2024
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