new world

I don't know if I've mentioned this, but

I love to learn new stuff.

I'm sure you couldn't guess from, oh, the title of this blog, or the things I talk about. Like our homeschool discoveries, our freedom experiment, our journey into life learning, and choosing a life of As-Much-Yes-As-We-Can-Stand. In fact I'm sure my announcement comes as a complete surprise!

Well…
now you know. :)


So it has come as quite a shock to find that our New Adventure Into Veganism

hasn't been 100% fun.

Since starting homeschooling, I've come to find—to my delight—that learning on our own terms, almost always brings joy. So I'd come to think learning would always do that. Bring joy. Lift us up, fill us, bring us light.

So I wasn't expecting this new journey to feel so hard. Or for my body to take so much time to adjust, in every way.

It's had to adjust to learning challenging, difficult things,
to not eating things it had come to love,
and to be occupied for days with things Serious and Life Changing.

I've never been great at the Sad/Serious Stuff. I take it so much to heart; I take it on board. I sometimes let it collapse me. This time has been no different.

And yesterday, as strong as my resolve has been,

I felt close to caving.

We went out for the afternoon to buy some goodies from the appliance store, and

we got SO hungry! We forgot to bring snacks, so we drove home, tummies rumbling, and we still had to get some vegan-y stuff at the shops. Which involved going down the dairy aisle to see what sort of tofu and soy yoghurt we could find (that had no GMOs, was not overly processed, etc), and

Oh.

We saw the cheese.

The cheese! Glowing there, the cambembert, feta, cheddar, ricotta.

Calling their sweet siren calls. They looked just gorgeous there, on the shelves.

And Oh!
The Instant Pining! 
The Terrible Longing! 
Hungry now more than ever! 
Oh!


In a way it was kind of funny, our drive home from the supermarket (having resisted, just). All my son and I could talk about was cheese.

We simply could not stop talking about cheese.

What cheese we'd eat. How much cheese we'd eat. How we'd never stop eating the cheese if only, if only, we ate cheese. It was pitiful!

(My daughter and husband were strong. Somehow (perhaps they'd had tofu stuck in their ears?) they hadn't heard the Song of the Feta, the dulcet tones of the Edam, the Call of the Brie…they made it through the dairy aisle hungry but unscathed—they were the lucky ones!)

So what did we do when we got home?

After we crawled in, sand in our mouths, there on our hands and knees, just about to crack, hungry to our very depths…?

Well, we ate, of course.

We ate fresh-made, still warm, gluten free bread I'd baked before going out,

with delicious dairy-free spread and organic apricot jam.

I made a fruit platter of pear and apple and orange and strawberries and we discovered that a strawberry eaten together with a pink-lady apple is seriously divine.

We gobbled up pistachios

and then I made air-popped popcorn in our new, just bought, handy-dandy air-popping-popcorn maker!

It was all so scrumptious. Utterly filling.

Slowly we uncurled. Slowly we unclenched, and slowly we returned to our Selves.

And we looked about in this new world

and we called it

Good.



And today

my son and I hardly thought about cheese at all!

:)



(having read this over, I can hear people out there saying, "Dude. Why didn't you just eat the dang cheese?" Well, we've decided we don't want to. It's complicated. We don't want to eat anything that's connected in any way to the suffering and/or eating of animals. And even in the most humane circumstances, dairy food is connected. So that's us, what we've chosen for ourselves, and that means we aren't eating the (lovely) cheese.

I found a recipe yesterday though, where you can make your own. How exciting! You just need agar agar powder, and nutritional yeast, and the feather of a gryphon and the eyelash of a fairy… It'll be a piece of cake to make. Now, where's my chef's hat?)