No Man Is An Island

It's been a good vegan week.

I was in Vegas for a few days and this year I found a huge variety of kombucha available on the Strip (not necessarily a vegan thing I know, but I love the stuff and couldn't find any last year). Progress!

I went on a bus tour to the Grand Canyon, and a buffet lunch was included in the ticket. This lunch was in Williams, Arizona and I had already resigned myself to the fact that I'd spend the day starving. Instead, there was a good selection of food for me. I happily stuffed myself and wasn't hungry again till well into the evening.

My hotel in Vegas had a Ben and Jerry's with multiple dairy free selections. I think I may have eaten my body weight in ice cream!

A “regular” restaurant in my city introduced a full vegan menu alongside their regular one today. We went there for dinner tonight and the meal was amazing! So often I can only choose one thing off a menu – to have choices was a luxury I rarely find. I felt like a little kid on Christmas morning. More progress!

Tomorrow two real life vegan friends (boy those are hard to find) and I are going to a nearby town to a paint night to raise money for a local animal sanctuary. The woman who runs it does amazing work, she's been ill recently, and I'm so psyched to be doing this for a good cause. I don't have an artistic bone in my body so this should be all kinds of interesting and most likely embarrassing! I'm excited nonetheless.

All this makes me happy. So often it's like trudging uphill with weights on your shoes. Trying to eat out, always feeling the need to explain yourself, trying not to appear difficult while sticking to your guns, looking for vegan clothing/shoes/accessories is most often a challenge as well. I found two pair of shoes in Vegas this week and I'm over the moon about that. I'm on a roll!

Earlier this week I was in my favourite yoga class. Yoga is an amazing thing for me – that whole mind/body connection. This is a meditative Kundalini class with a woman who I believe may be the best yoga teacher in the universe. Half an hour into the class I became overwhelmed and struggled not to cry. This has happened to me before in this particular class. It's a good thing. I wish it happened more often. It's this feeling that everything with me is as it should be, that I'm heading in the right direction, that all is well (even though my life is horribly stressful right now), it's a feeling of being at peace with myself and everything else. It doesn't happen often, and it's fleeting, but it's such a wonderful thing. Synergy and connection, and the universe and all that crunchy granola stuff! It's hard to describe, I think maybe for just a moment or two I'm in touch with that part of myself that is the real me.

So all in all a stellar week. It's a wonderful thing to see positive change happening, and to be a part of that change; to feel it internally and to see that the effort that so many of us are making is starting to invoke some change in the world, even if it's only little things like restaurant menus – it all adds up and pretty soon that tiny snowball is a huge boulder of snow rolling down that proverbial hill gaining more and more momentum as it gains speed. And that my friends, is good for everyone, the people, the animals, the planet – everything affects everything. In the words of my favourite poet John Donne: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Wise words to remember.....

Gwen