Mine is not to exhibit my beliefs, but to inhabit them.

I am participating in #Trust30, an online initiative and 30-day writing challenge that encourages you to look within and trust yourself.

Prompt #3: It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

The world is powered by passionate people, powerful ideas, and fearless action. What’s one strong belief you possess that isn’t shared by your closest friends or family? What inspires this belief, and what have you done to actively live it?

(Prompt by Buster Benson)

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Katina gave birth in a closet, then tried to hide her babies to keep them safe. She mourned their leaving for weeks when that time came.

Lasso opened kitchen cabinet doors after my father died, looking for him.

Mason was swept up in a tornado last month in Alabama and crawled home three weeks later with two broken legs to be reunited with his family. He found them.

SimSim sits next to Emma every time she is sick. She uncharacteristically leapt from the front porch into Emma's arms this past weekend after Emma's horse, Matty, died.

Matty was an individual being with a personality.

Animals know. They know their young, they know when we are sick. They know who their family is. They know when tsunamis are about to hit. They save each other and when they can't, they sit quietly near their dead partners, mourning them. They know fear.

I believe animals have feelings, love their young, and hurt greatly when we murder them for food. And not just domesticated animals, but all animals.

That is why I’ve been a vegetarian since 1976. I wouldn't eat my dog, Blue, and I won't eat a pig whose name I don't know, who doesn't have a name. I worry about cows who have to live outside in the cold.

My decision not to eat meat was a moral decision–would I murder another living being to eat the veins, the tendons, the flesh of that animal? Would I support an industry that tortures animals and kills them in unthinkably inhumane circumstances? Would I support an industry that is enviromentally devastating? Would I hold myself so far above animals that I was guilty of speciesism?

No, no, no, and no.

Many of my friends and family don't share this belief, though I have raised my two children to be vegetarian in a world that is far more tolerant to this choice than it was in 1976. I am clear about my choice, and yet cognizant that everyone makes their own decisions, the ones that are right for them at that moment in time.

Mine is not to exhibit my choices and impose them, but to inhabit my beliefs. I write about them, I talk about them, and I live by them.

I still demonstrate some vestiges of speciesism, being not yet 100% vegan. That will come.

I don't intentionally kill bugs. I don't kill animals and eat them. I don't kill.