How Going Vegan Made Me a Kumbaya Singing, Hemp Shoe Wearing Hippie (many hemp shoes on my cool vegan shoes pinterest board these days)

Have you guys ever read the book The Road?

It is one of my favorite books of all time. It is so easy to read. Really, you can’t stop reading it. It is effortless to read because you HAVE to read it. You can’t put it down. And yet it is also extremely deep. It made me think about the meaning of life.

The end of the book is one of the best endings ever. The last paragraph of the book is always coming back to me.

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

The Road
Cormac McCarthy

Isn’t that beautiful? Of course in the book it is contrasted with the aftermath of nuclear war. When earth and all the beautiful things about life were mostly wiped out. But in the book the guy still remembers what earth used to be like.

Being vegan has made me realize the beauty of nature and of life.

Total hippie speaking, hehe.

No but seriously. I think about how perfect and beautiful animals are. And how perfect ripe fruits are, being fruitarian. And isn’t it great that fruit trees always are short and close to the ground so that humans can reach up and pick the fruit, and experience “banana island” levels of running ability and happiness.

I think about the garden of eden a lot, the peaceable kingdom, noah’s ark a lot– basically nature.

It doesn’t help that I’m living in New York City and haven’t been in nature in a long time.

The other day I thought about that paragraph from The Road again thinking about how I grew up in nature. I remembered sounds from the spring time in my childhood. This ditch in the yard would start running with water. We would dig at it with sticks and move the rocks away till it was a rushing stream. There were ponds in the woods with brown leaves and real frogs on them. Salamanders too. I had a vision of yellow in my mind, and then I remember forsythia. These scraggly brown bushes suddenly bloomed with tiny yellow flowers everywhere. Spring time! All the trees suddenly burst into flowers. You didn’t even remember trees could have flowers on them. There were robins hopping in the grass. I went barefoot everywhere. I remember how cold the ground was. It would get your socks soaking wet and freezing cold. The sky was so blue and the clouds would rush by overhead blown by spring winds.

I’m so happy that being vegan has brought me closer to nature. It reminded me that I should respect animals, and that animals share the same love of life and springtime as I do. It also made me feel more connected to nature by eating only plants and fruit. How cool is that. I think it’s cool. Being nourished by only stuff that grows out of the ground, naturally.

It also gave me a distaste for civilization, lol. Don’t know what to make of that yet. Maybe it means I need to get back in nature for a while.

Have any of you ever read the book The Road ? And I am curious do any of you feel like becoming vegan made you feel a longing for nature and closer to nature? 

oh and check out all the once ridiculed hemp shoes on my cool vegan shoes pinterest board these days

If you want to see pictures of smoothies/fruitarians I follow on instagram i am @greenelover.

MyNonLeatherLife on Facebook too