After Sitting for a While Sunday Morning

At times, when the words wouldn’t come, he would search images of the great authors, as if, in those dark mannerisms and confident smiles he might find some common thread, a shared squint or folding of the hands, that, with practice, he could master and thus join their ranks.

           

Compassion and Karen Armstrong

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I have always loathed DIY self-improvement books. Not saying that some of their nauseatingly flowery or over-zealous rhetoric hasn’t done some people, some good. But, I think the flood of neighborly advice in the past three decades has pulled so many people in so many different directions, that the greater bulk of society has lost sight of who and what they are as humans, and what we are and can, and should be as humane beings.

Needless to say, it would take one hell of a speaker to convince me that it wouldn’t be a waste of twenty dollars and a weekend, buying and reading their life-bettering tome. 

   

    Karen Armstrong had what it took, and were she to ask, I wouldn't hesitate to lay down my nets and follow her. She is that rare.

   If you haven’t already, let me recommend that you read her latest book, ‘Twelve Steps To A Compassionate Life’. It will add tenfold to your creed, whatever it may be... and hopefully, in due time, erase the word loathe from my vocabulary.

Once in a Lifetime... Maybe

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Of all the things we humans will never get to do in our lifetimes, I think that going into outer space and seeing a chicken lay an egg… in person… are the two least likely to happen.

I can  now cross the latter off of that list.

So, this morning I go out to feed the chickens and gather the eggs that I didn’t gather last night. (Bad Farmer. Bad, bad Farmer).

There’s a hen sitting in the number one nesting box. I figure she’s thinking that since I didn’t collect the eggs last night, they’re hers to sit on. Think again Chicky.

I reach to get the eggs. She pecks me. Whatever. We spar a bit and finally I get her to stand up. She’s straddling three eggs. They’re gross. All muddy or poopy, I don’t know which, but I don’t want her sitting on them. And while I’m trying to find a clean spot to pick them up by, Fonk! A friggin’ egg flies out of no where and hits my hand.

At first I thought the egg was one of last night’s that had rolled up behind the hen when she stood, then rolled back down while she was harassing me for taking the poopy eggs. I guess my brain did not want to accept that I had just witnessed an egg shoot out of a chickens butt, let alone that I almost caught it. And I do mean shoot out. That hen was throwing some crazy heat.

And really, whose brain would want to accept this. The odds of this happening have got to be stupendous—at least as stupendous as getting to ride on the Space Shuttle. But there it was: a shiny wet, new brown egg. Fresh out of the oven.

I love possibilities.