When I contemplate the idea of wellness, a host of seemingly unrelated things come to mind. What has chicken farming to do with wellness, or buying a turkey breast, or drinking milk?  Yet, those things flood my mind as I think about wellness.

Wellness is a state of mind towards how we conduct our lives within our daily existence; our attitudes toward each other, our willingness to serve instead of expecting service.  Wellness is for me a general approach to life and what each person brings to the table in the grand effort to make the world a better place starting at the grass root levels where we reside.

If we can show compassion towards chickens on a farm by giving them larger compartments to live in while they produce eggs for our consumption, if we can refrain from blunting the ends of their very sensitive beaks that can register pain, they need their beaks to scratch and identify food, if we can allow turkeys to mate naturally by not engineering the breast of the male to such a size that they cannot mount the female to mate and as a result the hens have to be artificially inseminated in a most cruel way, if we can allow a cow to wean her calf in the natural time nature allots by not taking away the calf so we can harvest the milk and get the cow pregnant again to repeat the cycle, if we can exercise some compassion in these regards, then the trickle down wellness of our bodies and general well-being would be incredibly improved, if we could do some of these simple things. 

Wellness is not just relegated to what we eat and how frequently we exercise or how many times we wash our hands and how pesticide- free our ground provisions are, wellness is the total consciousness of a people committed to continuing the human species.

Lana M. Ho-Shing. 10/26/16