I have made an important decision that so far I have been very good at sticking to. I want to reduce my time on facebook significantly and to use facebook with clear intention of inspiring and offering healing. I have been spending the last few months on facebook reading so much about factory farming and looking at the violent images and the unimaginable cruelty of the factory farms. And then I post to facebook. When I post I am so angry, so distraught and so emotionally drained from the violence and the suffering that I expose myself to. I am stopping with this. Stopping because I no longer want to suffer from anger. I no longer want to walk around in this world thinking that everyone is selfish and inconsiderate. I am tired. I want to return to compassion. I want to believe that people are kind. I want to inspire people to choose compassion. I don't want the anger or the blame anymore. I want peace. I need peace.

We lost Tammy Bergrstrom to Pudendal Neuralgia.  I painted this angel for her two children, Anna and Cole. Anna is 5 years old and Cole is 3. I will send this to Anna and to Cole sometime soon.
Painting the angel helped me process Tammy's loss. I am tired of losing people that I care about. It has been such a long and harrowing summer.

Project Angel seems to have come back to life at least in terms of what is expected of me. Being called to serve again has woken me from my depression. There seems that there is too much to do again. The fact that Abba is in the hospital suffering from psychotic depression is not an excuse to give up. Nothing is. Tardive Dyskenisia isn't. The despair I feel for the animals isn't. The fear and anxiety that I feel over all of my health challenges.....None of these can be excuses. There is too much work to do and too many of us continue to die from these conditions.

Mary Frances did a beautiful job on her short documentary about Project Angel.

https://vimeo.com/186303327

And my short documentary on Sunny Meadow Sanctuary came out lovely as well.

https://youtu.be/-ThkVsoOaZw

The veggie festival is coming up this weekend and I look forward to that. On the 5th of November I will be exhibiting Project Angel at the Pudendal Neuralgia Association's medical conference. This is a great honor and a leap forward. Somehow Tammy will be with me there. We don't know yet if she committed suicide or if she died from a complication from the surgery. Either way PN kills. 

My angels are starting to make it into more and more clinics all around the country. Progress always feels slow to me but I still recognize it.

Atara

You can heal everything.

Each broken part of yourself.

Can be mended.

You have the power to heal yourself with acceptance.

With love.

With kindness.

With patience.

Each broken part can be mended.

This is your art now.

This is you now.

You can become the wound and the balm at once.

You can hold them both as you would a crying child and see the perfection in the holding itself.

You can hold your own suffering.

For as long as you need to.

You can hold it in the arms of your own healing.

              -Atara Schimmel

My greatest challenge is to keep my heart open to humans. I must practice compassion towards humans daily.

June 26, Artist Deanna Yildiz created this for me after I posted the nasty comment that a woman from the Provincetown Community Facebook group sent to me. Yes, someone actually sent this to me as a message via facebook. Hatred of vegans. Hatred of animal rights activists.

June 29th

The suffering of the animals causes me great suffering, great pain, great sorrow. The numb disconnectedness that the majority of us chose TERRIFIES me. I am scared of what we have become. Scared of how lost we are. Of how far we have ventured away from our own souls. My only desire is to bring unity and compassion so that we can be whole again. So that we can be who we are meant to be. So that we can live in peace with ourselves. We, we, we, we have lost our way. We have fallen so far from our ourselves.








July 8th

Being vegan is not a choice. It is an obligation and a responsibility. Holding ourselves accountable to the suffering that we are creating is the first step in our spiritual emancipation. As long as we continue to torment animals we will never become whole, we will never heal, we will never know peace.


July 20th post from facebook

The pigs in the factory farms literally go insane from being confined for months on end without being able to turn around. They bite obsessively into the iron bars until their teeth break off. They bang their heads into the bars to no avail, desperate and in perpetual and relentless agony. Can you imagine what it is like to be confined in a space the size of your own body for months? I pray every day that people connect to their compassion and leave the flesh of these sensitive and deeply humble animals off of their plates. Every new vegan is a blessing of peace and hope to this world.


July 20th  post from facebook

All of the animals in the factory 'farms' suffer from chronic pain, profound depression and deep despondency. I know how deeply they suffer because I have suffered that deeply myself. I know because I know what it feels like to be chained to pain. I know what it feels like to be caged in my own body. I know because I know what it means to live in a body that is my own torture chamber. I know because I know what it feels like to be denied compassion, to be denied help, to be denied care. I know because I know what it feels like to be abandoned by people that claimed to love me, that claimed to be my friends. I know because I know what it feels like to be invisible, utterly and completely invisible when my screams were loud and clear. I know because I know what it feels like to beg for help, to plead to be seen, to be recognized, to be saved....and to have the very people that were supposedly there to help me turn and look the other way....I know because I know what it feels like to suffer so profoundly and relentlessly and to wish and pray that I just be granted death. We all know. And we can choose to do to them what so many have done to us or we can choose to be for them what we had wished others would have been for us.

July 20th post from facebook

This post is for my friends with Pudendal Neurlagia and other chronic genital and nerve pain conditions. I have a question that I was thinking about last night and I would love it if you would share your thoughts with me. We have all suffered so much and some of us continue to suffer relentlessly oftentimes in isolation. Many of us have felt abandoned by loved ones, denied the care that we needed and blamed for our own suffering. We all know suffering. We all have lived in realms of hell that most people could never imagine. This is my question to all of you. If you knew that the animals in the factory 'farms' were 'living' in the same realms of hell as you have or are still living in would you fight to release them from that hell? If you knew that for that animal to reach your table they had to live through months and sometimes years of torture, grief, isolation, chronic pain and utter despair and despondency would you keep them off your plate?

July 6th, 2016 post from facebook

At the farm sanctuary I cried with the cow and i promised her that I would fight with all of my heart and soul. She is suffering from ptsd from having had her horns severed from her. She doesn't trust humans, she cowers when humans go near her head. I looked into her eyes, into the depth of her soul and I promised her that I would do everything I could to help the the cows. The animals have strengthened me. Being near them, feeling their sanctity, their kindness, their humility has strengthened me. I can speak in front of hundreds of people now. I am no longer afraid at all. The animals must be protected and I am proud to be chosen to be a voice for them. Their purity humbles and inspires me.

From my timeline:

"I am from planet Vegan. On planet vegan we dance and sing with the animals. We especially love the cows and the pigs and the chickens. Everywhere we are surrounded by animals and by vegetation. We are happy on planet vegan. But some of us had to leave planet vegan because we saw that planet earth was destroying itself and we felt deep sorrow for the human beings that were suffering and causing suffering. So we left our spiritual realm and we came to this physical plane. Life here is very hard for those of us from planet Vegan. Some of us even ate other spiritual beings and wore other spiritual beings while we were here only to find out that we had been harming life. Our hearts broke for the suffering that we caused and we yearned to return to planet vegan where the spiritual and the physical are one and where kindness prevails. On planet vegan we were taught that the animals were our brothers and our sisters. We were in awe of their intelligence. We were humbled by the way they loved us and communicated with us. When we came to earth we lost our way. Now we have so much work to do to restore and to heal life. We are tired but we know where we come from and our mission is clear. We are here to teach love. We are here to protect life. We are here now and one day soon we will return to where we came from. One day soon we will live in joy and in harmony with our brothers and sisters, the animals and with all of nature again. I am from planet vegan. I am here for only a very short time."

              -Atara Schimmel


Morning has officially arrived and I am still not tired. Breaking through all of my fears of is exhilarating and seeing the waves that breaking through my own fears has created in the 'external' world is a incredible. But the fact remains that 75 million animals are killed every day in America alone. Still, I have proven to myself that I don't have to die from despair. I can speak my truth and celebrate my victories and watch how each internal barrier that I break through reverberates in the 'external' world. In reality there is no separation between any of us. We are all each other and we are the animals as much as they are us. Their suffering is ours. Our denial is their despair. Our liberation is their liberation. Their liberation is our liberation. The challenge is to remain loving and compassionate and hopeful and to keep on working. The challenge is to take care of my teeth!

And to fall asleep. Please.

Maybe my mistake was in actually thinking that ACOG was part of the solution. Believing that if they only knew the truth they would change things.

Maybe what I should have seen is that ACOG is the problem and maybe what I am beginning to accept is that knocking on their door is like knocking on the devil's door asking for some compassion. Why on earth would the devil give you compassion and healing when he makes money from your suffering. He wouldn't.

Naivete goodbye.

Our medical system is so corrupt and I am only beginning to awaken.

Good morning Vegan Sisters.

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”

-Marcia Angell


On another note though it is the very same note indeed. I continue to get resistance. Even here in so called opened minded provincetown. Matt from the library told me that people came to complain to him about my performing  my mesh poem. Was the word 'Vagina' just too much for our open-minded and progressive Provincetown audience? Mind you an audience that consisted of local writers and poets?

It seems that whatever I do is not right and that wherever I turn people are trying to silence me.

I have never called myself or considered myself to be radical in any shape or form. The concept that it is radical to be compassionate and to speak up for those that are suffering be it humans or animals.....is an insult to my basic intelligence.

-Atara Schimmel