Sanctuary's "Release" Day

It’s here! Sanctuary: A Home For Rescued Farm Animals is released from Clarion Books. Thank you for being here with me. Inexpressible thanks go to my editor Kate O’Sullivan, who encouraged this book from me, my agent Lori Kilkelly, my designer Celeste Knudsen. Thanks to the animals and people of the sanctuaries I’ve visited over the years: Maple Farm Sanctuary, Woodstock Sanctuary, and Unity Farm Sanctuary. 

This book has been years in the making, since I went vegan in 2017, and when I look through it now, I see faces of friends I’ve made along the way, who changed me forever: the goat rescued from slaughter, who fell asleep in the rain with his chin in my hand…trusting, somehow, again…the purring of turkeys in the safety of sanctuary space, even with the darkness of the Thanksgiving holiday just beyond the fence… the visible joy of the cow rescued from her life on a dairy farm, finally allowed to become an adoptive mother for the first time in her life, despite carrying each of her own calves to term year after year, but never being allowed to nurture them…I remember the silence of the sweet air in the hay-filled barns, their quiet eyes, their noticing, their social bonds, their exquisite languages.

I remember not only the feeling of peace with the animals, but where it was coming from: rumbling up from the ground, through hooves and feet alike…expanding far beyond our own separate understandings, reminding us of our commonality, our intertwining sentience, leading us back to our true selves… and to one another. It is a deeper peace than we have human words for, because peace is actually beyond-human, and must include us all. 

Adele, JULIA, star at unity farm sanctuary in sherborn, MA

Maybe, together, we can be released, even for one moment today, into a greater imagining of one another?

Using the word “released” for this book today, dedicated to these animals, feels especially poignant, because that is exactly what a sanctuary provides: a safe and sacred space for their release, not just from their physical exploitation, but from the rigidity (dire for them and for us) of our cultural perceptions of them, societal rules that were once just as strange to us as children. 

We can be released, back into that original knowing. I believe it. Or I would not have written this book. I wouldn’t have painted these pictures. Maybe, together, we can be released, even for one moment today, into a greater imagining of one another? 

Maybe we can imagine, even for a brief second, a world we have not yet seen, in our lifetimes. That doesn’t mean it’s not possible. I think those who say change is not possible, have never tried looking into the eyes of a cow. Because when you look in, you recognize that it is.

At the sanctuary fence, eye to eye, we recognized, in our own bovine and human ways: a world of peace. And for a daring second, recognized ourselves as members of it. And that it could be built from here. Though that task felt impossibly big, it could somehow begin so small. Just like this. With nothing but our own wondering about one another, to start with. Cow-nose-searching-human-hand-small. Low-to-the-ground-small. Saying-hi-to-a-bug-small. Roots-and-chicken-feet-first, so that the foundations of peace: compassion, empathy, justice for animals, people, the land, the water, could begin from that first rumbling-place…that more-than-human depth. 

Look what just a little wonder can do…Children do it best, so this book is for them: to affirm their recognition of that world. They may be small, but they have looked into its eyes, and they already know it well. They will be the builders, they are the rumblers, they are the change-making-wonderers. And the big things always start small.