College

This semester, I'm in a class called Child Health, Safety and Nutrition. I'm lucky to have a teacher who is also on a plant-based, non-dairy, whole foods diet. After being diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer, she decided to radically change her diet! It's been four years now and she says that she would never go back to the diet she once had. She was careful not to say that she was vegan in class even saying as much.  I don't understand the distinction, the way she defines her diet is veganism. Oh well, some people are scared of scaring people. Vegans are super scary, dontcha know?  B O O !

My research paper is covering vegan diets and while I was researching the subject, I discovered that a poet I admire was pretty much the first vegan celebrity! Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Love's Philosophy

The fountains mingle with the river   
And the rivers with the ocean,   
The winds of heaven mix for ever   
With a sweet emotion;   
Nothing in the world is single, 
All things by a law divine   
In one another's being mingle—   
Why not I with thine?   
   
See the mountains kiss high heaven,   
And the waves clasp one another; 
No sister-flower would be forgiven   
If it disdain'd its brother;   
And the sunlight clasps the earth,   
And the moonbeams kiss the sea—   
What is all this sweet work worth 
If thou kiss not me? 

Read more poems here.

In the vein of 'Love Week,' here is a decidedly morbid tale. Mr. Shelley drowned before the age of thirty while sailing home from Livorno, Italy. His vessel, dubbed Don Juan, was caught in a storm and he did not survive. His body was identified by the book, Lamia by Keats, which he always kept in his pocket. When Mr. Shelley's body was cremated, his heart did not burn due to a condition that caused his heart to calcify. The heart was instead given to his wife, Mary Shelley who legend has it, kept the heart in her desk drawer. The heart was later buried with their son.  Source.