Return
Babes
The hen that started with thirteen chicks is down to seven which is pretty good considering it has been almost a month since I first saw her babies. They follow her less now, except when I come around and they seek spots to hide. They should know I’m the one throwing them what they cannot find. But they’re young, and time takes time.
They mix what I have left in a box that I built from found woods. Mama and babes ply their trade with webbed feet that perfectly stir leaves and kitchen scraps together with shredded leaves. The lives sustained by this are far more than their own, and the pile that was once level with the top of the box has broken down to fill only half.
I thank these workers of CRISP. And in my thanks I want to give them a gift, and in this I see three or four half eaten brown turkey figs that the birds tasted before flying away. Mama hen is the first to try what I throw, pecking away, and I remember years ago, planting pomegranate trees by throwing half eaten sections into the yard that the chickens might eat the arils and decide where the seeds would be dropped.
These chicks follow mom’s lead. Pops, well, all the many Pops, for the eggs that hatch do not come from one rooster, do not even come from one hen, he’s far away, calling out somewhere around the busy streets that he is in need, of what nobody’s sure.
The circle of this fig starts with the death of a wasp and the birth of others. It’s a beautiful story, in the book of Genesis, I believe. After the wasps, we have sparrows and starlings, cardinals and blue jays, fan tailed skip birds and even the one that looks like Brad Pitt in the eighties. Evolution then says, “You, yeah you. Pick those for the chicks.” And I do.
And though voracious to begin with, Mama and babes leave partial figs sitting on the earth. And those figs will bring fruit flies and those fruit flies will bring lizards and what is left after all of this will return to the earth and become food for the very tree that bore them, will become food for what cannot be seen without a microscope.
A microscope cannot know what passed through all of these stages, for this is something of a circle in which only the participants receive vision.
To see, I pause and consider. To pause and consider, I see what I sometimes miss when rushing from that to this, when on a campaign for certainty, when running with a number on my chest away from worry.
The above are guideposts necessary for growth. To find my place within this circle of what is, to see all as what is, to know that my resistance, too, is a part of this. The lesson comes in what is happening. The lesson for the baby chicks is that soon they will learn that when they hear the words, “chook chook,” that means I am bringing food.
And they, too, might relive a day from times ago when laughing gulls would come down from the sky and join their ancestors, and I'm not talking from millennia ago, I’m talking 2021, on Lesseps Street, right outside my front door.
