honesty and animal products

I realized this week that I am becoming the kind of vegetarian that I used to look upon scornfully.  By this, I mean that I have eaten pizza with bacon on it and lasagna with meat in it just in this week alone.  Contrary to what you might think, this is not to say that I'm forgetting or ignoring or giving up on my beliefs.  It just means that I'm becoming more relaxed about things.  I've come to understand very deeply the reasons why I choose not to eat meat, and with that understanding comes the acceptance that there will be times when it is okay to make exceptions.  I think in life it's best to be adamantly sure about some things and easygoing about others -- otherwise you just end up with a bunch of halfway ideas.

Anne Lamott is amazing, and you know why?  It's because she writes so honestly and freely about her own struggles and shortcomings.  Unlike the other 99 percent of the human race, she doesn't pretend to have it all together.  And she's not like those people who acknowledge that we have problems but don't really like to go into detail, either.  Most of her writing revolves around the times when she has to work hard to be okay, and she tells her stories with humor and also with reverence for what is beautiful and true.
This is one of my favorite parts from Grace (eventually), which I finished this week, and it kind of sums up the way I feel about working with kids.

Children can connect you to the child inside you, who can still play and be silly and helpless and capable of wonder.  This child does not have to be yours, of course.  It can be a niece or nephew, or the child of a friend.  But living with a child makes the opportunity for this more likely.  Having a child, loving a child deeply in a daily way, forces you to connect with your mortality, forces you to dig into places within that you have rarely had to confront before, unless you have taken care of a dying parent or friend.  What I found way down deep by caring for my father during his illness and then by having a child is a kind of eternity, a capacity for -- and reserves of -- love and sacrifice that blew my mind.  But I also found the stuff inside me that is pretty miserable.  I was brought face-to-face with a fun-house mirror of all the grasping, cowardly, manipulative, greedy parts of me, too.  
I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from.  Now when I watch him sleep, I know that he somehow came from life, only I cannot put it into words any better than that.