Chicken Love

A new book group was born on Monday. Yes, this makes the third for me and the fourth for Michael--tells you something, doesn't it?

This one is a theology book group. We're starting out by slowly reading our way through Elizabeth Johnson's Ask the Beasts, a fascinating book structured as a dialogue between Darwin's On the Origin of Species and the Nicene creed. After only the preface and the first two chapters, I love it and am very excited to keep going.

Here's the passage where Johnson reveals the inspiration for both the title and the thesis of her book:

"Job...in debate with his misguided friends...challenges them to abandon their rigid certitude about how the world works and look to another source of wisdom:

Ask the beasts and they will teach you;
    the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
ask the plants of the earth and they will teach you;
    and the fish of the seas will declare to you.
Who among these does not know
    that the hand of the Lord has done this?
In his hand is the life of every living thing,
    and the breath of every human being.    (Job 12:7-10)

If you interrogate the flora and fauna of land, air, and sea, the text suggests their response will lead your mind and heart to the living God, generous source and sustaining power of their life....Theology, which seeks to understand faith more deeply in order to live more vibrantly, has work to do here. For in truth it has seldom asked the beasts anything."

I hope this tiny sample is enough to lure at least some of you into reading this wonderful book, because that's really all I'm going to say about it now.  Instead I want to talk about an "Ask the Beasts" sort of experience I had yesterday, the day after the book group's inaugural meeting.

Some background: Since February I have been serving as a mentor for a refugee high school student through the Dayton Public Schools. For the sake of his privacy, and for the safety of his extended family members, I will refer to him simply as C, and I will not mention what country he and his family came from. Suffice to say, they arrived in Dayton in December, just in time for the worst winter we have had in living memory.  And the country they left is a hot one.

I love to travel, and I've been to a lot of places. But I've always come back home at the end of my trips. In fact, as I've gotten older I find I appreciate the coming home just as keenly as I do the going someplace--different but equal delights.

As I have been meeting with C since Valentine's Day, I have found myself pondering what it must be like to travel to a completely foreign culture, a totally different climate and geography even, with no hope of ever going back home. Never. And I find that I can't really imagine it. So I just try to be as open and present to C as possible, to watch and listen for any points of connection, always bearing in mind how profoundly his experience differs from mine.

And that, of course, brings us to the subject of chickens. (The "of course" isn't really justified. I just threw it in there for effect.)

C is gentle and soft-spoken, always gracious towards me. I can't help wondering what on earth he and his family think I am there for--whether the concept of mentor conveys anything at all to them. But because he has been raised in a culture of respect for elders, he always receives me with smiling warmth and an effort to respond positively to whatever (possibly completely baffling) expectations I seem to have.

There are, however, moments when he truly comes alive with spontaneous animation. And often, those moments occur when he is telling me about his chickens.

Back home, C had pet chickens, who would run out to greet him when he came home from school.  One in particular would sit on his lap to be petted, and fend off any others trying to take her place. C is very knowledgeable about different chicken breeds and the ins and outs of raising and caring for chickens.

It is very clear that C misses his chickens acutely, and misses contact with animals in general--the fish he kept in an aquarium, the animals he would visit on an uncle's farm.  Here in Dayton, the family is living in rented quarters in an inner-city neighborhood, so there are no animals to greet C when he comes home.

The more I saw that spark of animation and energy--that love--that would light up C's face when he talked about his chickens, the more I felt that I needed to do something about it. Here was a young man whose life had been so rudely disrupted, who was trying hard to make the best of it--what better way to support him than to find him some chickens to love?

Don't know why it took me so long but finally a light went off in my brain--I know someone who has chickens! For the sake of this post, I will call her The Chicken Lady.

So yesterday, I took C to visit The Chicken Lady. The Chicken Lady lives out in the country in a kind of mini Garden of Eden that she and her husband have brought into being on land that, before them, was used to raise hogs and tobacco. Now it flourishes with fruit trees, berry brambles, flower gardens, a little woods, large vegetable gardens, three goats, four cats, and, yes, a mixed flock of chickens.  Plus, this week, a big batch of six-day-old baby chicks.

 This is not one of The Chicken Lady's chickens, but some of hers look like this.

Even the drive out to The Chicken Lady's place was a treat for C. He is quiet, not boisterous, but his eyes glowed as we got out into the farm fields, and he commented on how good it would be to live where it was open and the air was so fresh. He was hoping to see cows and horses as well as chickens, but The Chicken Lady doesn't have them.

It was a pure delight to watch C shyly playing with the cats, commenting sagely on the perfidy of coyotes, and especially, energetically chasing down escaped chickens to return them to the henhouse.

I didn't take any pictures during our visit, so I had to filch some from around the web.

Please pretend that this is a picture of C chasing a chicken. It isn't.

This isn't a picture of C chasing a chicken either, but who could resist

re-posting such a fabulous image?

 

 Even though he had told me a month or so previously that he doesn't really like goats, C seemed to welcome the chance to visit with and pet The Chicken Lady's goats. And on the way home, we did see a horse and two donkeys, though still no cows.

These are not The Chicken Lady's goats. 

These goats live in Morocco.

In trees.

 

"Ask the beasts, and they will teach you...who among them does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this?" I don't know if C was conscious of God through the beasts, but I do know that a youngster who had experienced  far more violence and disruption in his life than any caring adult would wish for any child found solace and joy and a sense of being at home through The Chicken Lady's garden and its beasts.

Proto-chicken. C went home with seven of these,

freshly collected from the henhouse.

The Chicken Lady is generous as well as hospitable.

 

"Taproot" of Happy Memory

If you're as old as I am, you may remember that phrase "of happy memory" as a churchy-speak way of referring to someone who has died.

Well, my "Taproot" blog hasn't died exactly--or if it did, it seems to have recently resurrected--but the fact is that the website couldn't be accessed for at least 36 hours, with no explanation.  And that doesn't make me feel good about trying to maintain my blog there. 

But I did kinda like what I had posted in my two posts.  So I thought I would re-post them here before shutting "Taproot" down for good.  So here goes:

TAPROOT POST #1:

Welcome to Taproot, my new blog. I’ll be writing about a variety of things, and I’ll be writing in a variety of formats. 

Sometimes you’ll find commentary on events or issues, sometimes meditations or reflections, sometimes poetry, sometimes personal-life updates. 

What my posts will have in common is that they will emerge from or touch on things that go deep in me–hence the name Taproot. 

Think of all the different parts of a tree that are supported by its taproot: thick, solid trunk that only grows thicker and more solid; scraggly bark that cracks and sometimes sheds as the tree grows; leaves that last through three of the four seasons, changing from delicate lime to robust deep green to fragile but brilliant; petals that may only last a week, but a glorious week. 

My posts will be as various, and as rooted, as that. Thank you in advance for your attention.

**********

NOTE:   I will not in fact be using the "Taproot" name any more, but the comments about the nature of the blog still stand.

**********

TAPROOT POST #2: titled "Two Poems Inspired by Clay"

owl slides
on silent wings
through velvet dark

all secrets lie exposed
to wide night-piercing eyes

small life
fearing the talon’s grasp
shelters in stillness

as owl slides
swiftly
silently
through velvet dark

******************
That one was written to go on the back of a clay owl I made in a kind of semi-Cycladic style. And the process of making the owl, then writing the poem, then inscribing it on the back of the owl, in turn, inspired me to write this poem:

*****************

BEGINNING HANDBUILDING

The course fee includes twenty-five pounds of clay.
Choose white, brown, brown with speckles, or red.
This time, I choose white.

The white clay is actually gray when I get it,
and much softer than the brown I worked with last time.
Twenty-five pounds of soft, deeply still gray clay.

What does clay remember?
Does it remember being mountains,
before water and dissolved chemicals wore it down?
Does it remember pronghorns leaping on its crags,
eagles nesting and soaring,
climbers scrabbling for finger and toe holds?

Or were those memories dissolved too
by the slowly seeping water,
the slightly acid water,
that broke the mountains down
into particles far tinier than sand grains?

Does clay remember slowly drifting in the water,
slowly slowly drifting,
slowly settling down out of the water,
slowly nestling, tiny particle with tiny particle,
into a deep still bed?
Does clay remember the dreamy drifting,
the slow settling?

I sit and stare at the clay,
so still, so deeply inert.
Who am I to disturb so deep a rest?

But maybe it isn’t inertia.

Maybe it’s something else altogether
deep availability
what the venerable Basque sage would call “disponibility.”
“You called? Here I am.”

With my hands, I make a suggestion.
Clay responds,
accepting part of my suggestion,
and making some suggestions of its own.

And so the conversation begins.

************************
Wrote that one today [ed.: ie, April 25, date of the original post]. The “venerable Basque sage” reference is to Ignatius of Loyola, who had much to say about letting go of attachments so as to reach a state of “disponibility” or complete availability to God.

Here's a process picture of the owl:

Hi, I'm over here!

Well, my Taproot blog probably set some kind of record for briefness of existence.

Within hours of my creating it, I found yesterday evening that I could no longer connect to the blog.com site.  Don't know if it's a temporary problem or not, but it's still not letting me connect this morning. What good is a blog if I can't post to it or read your comments?  Not much, I'm thinking.

So here I am at blogger.com, trying again with a new name:  Weird and Wonder-ful.

About that name.  It probably describes what the posts on this blog will be like, though there's no way of knowing yet.  But it certainly describes me!

Thanks to the good folks at the National Geographic Genome 2.0 project, I now have scientific evidence of what I have long suspected:  I am definitely on the weird end of the homo sapiens bell-shaped curve.  I have about twice as much Neanderthal material AND about twice as much Denisovan material in my DNA as most folks. At least in the DNA I inherited from my mother, which is all they tested. So I am certifiably weird.  In the best possible sense of the word.

Now for wonder-ful. Note the hyphen. This trait too I inherited from my mother. She it was who taught me to wonder at the world around me.  When we would go for walks together when I was a little kid, she would be the one to stop and point out some small thing--a lichen, a tiny bug, some interesting tree bark--and invite me to really look at it, notice it, take it in, in appreciation and wonder.

She also subscribed to Arizona Highways, the New Yorker, National Geographic, and the Saturday Evening Post. Through the photos, art, fiction, and prose of those magazines, I came to know a wide, wide world of inexhaustible wonder. She instilled in me curiosity and delight. Can't ask for a better heritage than that.

So once again, thank you for your attention.  Now I have to try to figure out all the nitty-gritties of the blogger.com blogging ecosystem.