Every evening at dusk, someone in our family tucks our chickens in.
Last night, Georgina was missing.
We alternate tuck-in responsibility from week to week. This keeps the chore fair and avoids a nightly round of rock-paper-scissors. On cold or stormy nights, the stakes increase: “Dang! Best two out of three! Noooo! Best three out of five!” Thus the pre-planned schedule.
Our beloved chickens have a yard that is fenced with—you guessed it—chicken wire. It keeps the chickens in (mostly) but is not, shall we say, a secure perimeter.
The chicken tuck-in consists of scooting our three girls into the coop, or checking that they are already in there, and closing the gate of the coop / enclosed run.
It’s as secure a perimeter as we could build. We used half-inch welded wire around all sides and buried it a foot deep to keep out tunneling rodents. We padlock all gates and coop doors—we don’t lock the padlocks; they are simply an extra measure against raccoons. Raccoons can learn how to open gates. Hopefully not padlocks.
There was a big storm last night. I was finishing yoga on the back porch as the wind picked up and thunder began to rumble.
The rain started as I made my way to the coop — the chickens were already roosting inside their coop.
Two of them bawked good night to me.
Missing was Georgina. Georgina Jackson, who, if I’m being honest, is my favorite of our current three.
If you don’t keep chickens, you might not know what incredible creatures they are.
I sure didn’t until we got our first trio in spring 2020. Yes, they were a pandemic project.
I never thought about keeping chickens. As in: the thought had never occurred to me. Growing up, the only chickens I knew of were on farms—big farms.
But our then-ninth-grader son had been asking for chickens YEARS.
He had taken care of them at his wonderful preschool and fallen in love. And hey, we all needed cheering up in March and April of 2020. So we got three baby chicks and boy howdy, were they cute. And as they grew, they continued to grow on me.
Turns out I love chickens, maybe even more than my son or husband do.
I love chickens.
I’ve talked about this before, and you can read that post here:
Suffice it to say, I’ve learned something I should have known before: that chickens, like all beings, are whole, beloved, holy creatures.
They have different noises they make at different times of the day.
They have vastly different personalities.
And one thing that always gets me is that at dusk, they somehow just know to climb up into their coop. You’ll find them clucking, happily yet sleepily, on their roost inside their little red coop. They might spread out from each other when it’s warm. They huddle sooo close when it’s cold. Sometimes they all face the same direction, sometimes not. Butt, beak, butt.
To repeat: last night, I could not find Georgina.
I looked everywhere. It began to pour; lightning flashed, lighting up the woods, the yard, under the porch. I switched my iPhone flashlight for a headlamp and searched again, everywhere and, like a creep, even our neighbors’ yards.
Sensing my distress, my husband set the pot on the stove aside and searched, too. Nothing.
I decided to leave the gates open for a little longer, in case Georgina could find her way to the coop.
Went back out an hour later to close up, whether Georgina was back or not. Feeling very much like making a decision on planet Hoth, that we must close the shield doors even with Luke missing.
Oh, God. The scene outside. I wanted to roar like Chewbacca. A mighty yawp of grief.
There were feathers everywhere. White feathers. Brahma feathers.
I looked in the coop. Only one chicken now. Angela, looking scared and … very, very alone.
Feathers in the enclosure. Water bucket tipped over.
Something had gone into the coop and dragged the other Brahma, Ericka, out.
Tears now mixed with the pounding rain. I scanned with my headlamp. Ericka lay dead out in the yard, the saddest of endings of a trail of feathers.
I was beside myself. I felt responsible. I’d left the gate open.
I came back in, sat with my husband, talked it over. Should we wait until morning? It felt too sad, not respectful enough, to leave her out in the rain. He went out to bury her.
So yes, it’s pouring and storming, and he’s digging in the back yard, occasionally brightly lit by lightning. He’s got a big shovel and a headlamp, raincoat and hood, and he’s obviously burying something. Hopefully no one from the side street was walking by.
And while he was doing that, he saw Georgina.
She was dead, in the middle of the chicken yard. She had NOT been there before, during the initial search.
We have no idea what happened. But we have some guesses.
There are feathers even halfway up the trunk of our giant oak tree. Probably it was a raccoon. Or maybe a very big opossum. Certainly some kind of tree-climbing predator. Killed them both during one dark and stormy night.
Very, very sad.
We’ve been SO lucky that this is the first predation loss we’ve had of our girls. Our other girls died of heart attacks or other natural causes. Although I guess a predator is a natural cause, really. But it feels different. It feels so sudden, so violent.
What’s my point in telling you this sad story?
One: I’m a writer. Writing is how I make process, try to make sense of, things.
Two: I’m so sad today, about something most people wouldn’t care too much about.
The degree of sadness has me asking myself some questions:
How do we remain in touch with the FACT that every chicken is a whole, beloved, holy creature, and yet know how chickens are treated as —inanimate products— in factory“farms,” and not explode into sobs and rage when watching cars lined up ten deep at the drive-thru for Chick-fil-A? Zaxby’s? And Church’s Chicken, KFC … you name it?
Factory farming and layer hens: many chickens are stuffed into wire cages that are just a few feet wide and 15 inches tall. These birds can't even spread their wings without hitting the cage or another chicken. Photo from the Humane League How, why, do I continue to go through life this sensitive — “with no skin on,” as Dr. Prakash from Believarexic used to say? Is this a good way to live? It’s a hard way to live. But what is the cost of NOT living this way? What parts of myself would I have to shut down? Does shutting down parts of yourself really work, in the end?
In what ways does a capitalist structure require us to compartmentalize our feelings, our grief? Like … how do you make space for feeling this sad about your chickens and get up and go to work because you have to? In what ways do the demands of our current way of life require us to deaden, compartmentalize, cut off, and deny parts of ourselves?
If, as I believe, every single thing — breathing or not, nature or not — is constructed from the very particles of the Monad, or the Creator, or the Great Cosmic Echidna, whatever you want to call it — yes, I do mean every atom, every part of everything — and somehow maybe especially the the things that respirate and are alive and have consciousness and I include rocks in this grouping somehow — how can we possibly-ossibly think about harming or killing anything, ever, at all? From cow to cockroach, from dolphin to salmon, from Palestinian to American? I mean … how?
Maybe hunter-gathering and small-scale sustainable farming are ways to live ethically? At least if you hunt, you have to reckon with what you are killing, with what you are eating? You have to breathe its breath and feel its once-warm body and fur or feathers and deeply KNOW that it was once alive with a personality and feelings and knew to roost in its coop at night?
Is there any ethical way to eat fast food or “farmed” meat? At all?
And again, if, as I believe, every single thing is formed of the Great Cosmic Echidna, that is the basis for radical equality, right? OK. How does radical equality want to show up in the world? What would that world look like? How can we make that happen?
Nationalism, militarism, war, imperialism, genocide, capitalism (valuing money over people’s well-being), white supremacy, denial of health care … even factory farming and climate-change denial … even treating children as less-than-adults … even “all rise” and standing in a courtroom for a judge because of their status as judge … these are all antithetical to radical equality, are they not?
How do we live in such a way that we can literally remember at all times this notion that we are made of the very same stuff? That we are all equal, and radically so (radical meaning “from the root”)?
Angela Davis button from Syracuse Cultural Workers I used to pray for the kind of sight that would show the aura or light or halo around living things, as a visual reminder that we are ALL holy. (I believe that enlightened folks like Jesus or Buddha probably had this kind of sight.)This would make it easier to remember we are all holy, right? And act in that remembrance. But it’s many years later, and no haloes — I can only see people’s energy if I reallllly squint at them funny — so I kinda gave up. I’m not enlightened, so why should I be given this sight? I’ve come to think that maybe the entire point is that I CAN’T see the halos on every being, and the spiritual practice is to try to remember ALL THE TIME and then ACT based on that all-the-time remembering?
I don’t know. I can’t figure all of this out today.
I do know I’m very grateful for y’all. I’m grateful for this space where I can write about life and my beliefs and my wonderings about how we actually show up and act, and I know I’m grateful when I hear from you.
XOXO
"... every atom, every part of everything — and somehow maybe especially the the things that respirate and are alive and have consciousness and I include rocks in this grouping somehow ..."
I believe (?) this too, coming from a different direction.