I imagined that my first “post-introduction” post would be something of a Paganism 101-type thing so as to help myself (and any other baby Pagan who wanders by my blog) figure out just where I am and where I seem to be heading along the Pagan path.  But as I was working in my vegetable garden today, I started to think about the lettuces I was harvesting.  As I tugged each leaf away from the base of its plant, I thought about the energy (both mine and the Divine) that went into growing it all.  Then I started to wonder how much longer I could expect to be able to harvest from these plants before they start bolting in the glorious summer warmth that is here in the Pacific Northwest at last.  On the heels of that thought, I began to muse about the cycles in nature.  Jumbled in with all of that was a thought about a post I had read somewhere recently (gee, I guess I’m going to have to get better at marking these things so that I can link to them in my posts) regarding the ethics of meat-eating for Pagans.  The gist of the post, as best I can remember, was that meat eating didn’t seem to be in line with Pagan reverence for all life.  So then I continued to think about whether what I was doing at the time (disconnecting lettuce leaves from their source of life) showed reverence for life, and what I came up with (this is going to sound trite, I know) is that my family and I are life forms that need nourishing, too.   Not only that, but we enjoy a little meat, fish, or fowl every now and then.   

I guess some arguments Pagans make against eating meat might have some validity, especially those that focus on the amount of meat we Americans tend to eat (often way too much) or the gruesome conditions many animals bred for our eventual consumption are kept in.  But objection to meat eating simply on the basis that it shows a lack of reverence for some forms of life is a false argument, in my opinion.  For assuredly, the lettuce leaves I harvested and my own body are just as imbued with Divine energy as the animals which contribute to my omnivorous diet.