Safe Within the Wings

“It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.”
Irish Proverb

”How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings...”Luke 13:34

Since the baby chick hatched surreptitiously one month ago, it has been constantly chaperoned by older hens.  Initially barricaded by three who moved the hatchling as a unit around the chicken yard, the phalanx has eventually diminished to two — a Speckled Sussex and a Light Sussex — who guide, supervise and correct.  Those, and protect.  So far, the most visible threat they perceive seems to be me.  Each time I pass through the gate to accomplish one chore or another, the caretakers maneuver the chick into the recesses of the chicken run or the outer reaches of the chicken yard.  Remove is, so far, the preferred form of protection; failing that, subsume.  The baby chick simply disappears beneath the feathers and girth of the older hen.  Eventually, for the patient observer, a small beak emerges from behind the protective wing, assessing the prospects for resumed play.

I frequently think back to that first morning we realized that this little puffball had hatched among us.   I naively, foolishly thought I should rush right out, somehow scoop it up into my cradling embrace, and spirit it out to the barn for safe keeping.  As if the guardian hens would have allowed it!  I would probably still be smearing antibiotic cream on the puncture wounds in my face and hands from frenzied beaks mercilessly unleashed.  The chick’s well-being would have only been diminished in my “care.”  These mothering hens simply and intuitively know how it is to be done.

Saved, then, from my own well-meaning, I have instead simply observed and admired.  Somehow they have kept the chick fed and hydrated.  Somehow they see to it that the little one moves inside at night, and out again each morning to keep active.  Now four weeks into this constant supervision, they perceive the time to be right for greater independence.  The motherers don’t stray far, but the spacing in recent days has spread to feet as opposed to inches.  There are moments when the chick appears to be by itself.  This aloneness, of course, is more illusion than reality.  Should I take too much of a step in its direction, the two motherers appear almost as if by magic, seemingly out of nowhere, to surround and deter.

“It’s almost biblical,” I think to myself; my background instinctively assigning all goodness to holy script. But caretaking, I realize upon more patient reflection, is not first of all biblical; it is natural — simply the way we were created to be with each other.

In each other’s care.
In each other’s keeping.
The weaker, sheltered beneath the wings of the stronger.

I’m not sure how we have so grievously lost touch with this primal obligation and privilege.  Any more we insert an avalanche of questions and conditions in front of such caring.  We are concerned with worthiness, about the potential for dependency, about how much it will cost us in money and time and effort and distraction; about precedent.  We don’t want to be inconvenienced — or the needy too convenienced.

Maybe it’s because we spend too little time among the chickens.

To be honest, it’s not perfect out there.  There is a pecking order, sometimes ruthlessly constructed and scrupulously maintained.  There are skirmishes over food, and should one or another manage to snag a passing mouse a mighty chase ensues.  But they do know how to care for a baby chick.  They instinctively seem to understand what we are struggling to remember:  that it is in the shelter of each other that we live.  Gathered beneath the wings.

The Seeds of Life in the Midst of Death

There is a coolness residual in this early morning - a faint signal that summer is waning, autumn stealthily approaching. If the sky is to be believed, there might be rain today. My hose-shaped hand would welcome the sabbatical.

It's Saturday morning, a day that ever since childhood has unfolded at a slower, more relaxed and reflective pace - even these days, at this stage of my life, when any day could afford the same. Sprinkling water into the flower pots, I allow the heaviness of the week to slip away. Death has been too much in the air these successive days; death, both metaphorical and material; both feathered and foreshadowed.

For some cosmic reason, half of the appliances in our home took this opportunity to die - the kitchen disposal, a countertop oven, a refrigerator, the washer and dryer. All of them too soon - too young, though of course the warranties had expired. All week I've been the crotchety old man decrying the cheapening of our manufacturing, cursing the planned obsolescence, and lamenting our senseless additions to some landfill. And then a young hen, newly introduced to the flock from its security in the barn enclosure was viciously snuffed out in a gruesome manner I'm having trouble erasing from my mind. And then news of a friend's cancer, dormant for a deceiving time and presumed gone, returned. All this, with the dull ache of last week's multiple mass shootings still throbbing in our soul.

I'm weary of the pall.

Good, then, to see new blossoms opening in the pots. The chirping of the surprise baby chick bounding down the ramp of the coop as I open the hatch evokes a spontaneous smile.  I inhale with the myriad sounds of morning - the roosters' antiphonal crowing, the cheeps and rasps of crickets, cicadas and birds.  There are blossoms on the squash vines, the okra bushes and the miscellaneous pepper plants foretelling good things to come. And there are tomatoes to pick; tomatoes, red and juicy and full of seeds...

...the promise of good things further still down the road.  And did I mention there is a chance of rain?


There is more to these days than death after all.

A Classroom for the Heart

We hadn’t planned on hatching baby chicks.  We assembled a flock of laying hens and proceeded to gather each day the eggs they offered.  And then a rooster accidentally found his way into the assemblage.  And then another one.  

It happens.

Even then our practice continued without alteration; attentively gathering each day’s ovaline deposits without concern for possible fertilization.  It takes 21 days of carefully temperature controlled incubation to hatch an egg, and that simply wasn’t going to happen.  Until a trio of brooding hens had different plans.  

The design of our coops includes an interior roosting area, elevated a foot off the ground and accessed by a ramp.  Each evening the chickens ascend the ramp, after which I lower the hatch and raise the ramp, thereby securing the flock until they are released with morning light.  Beneath that elevated roosting area is a foot-high crawl space the chickens use for shade or relaxation.  Or, as it turns out, brooding.  Unnoticed by me for some number of days, one and then two and eventually three hens secreted themselves at the very back corner of this crawl space; well out of reach and sight.  When I did finally spy the girls in their hiding place, my first thought was sickness - that they had removed themselves to die.  Several mornings I released the flock, expecting to find the worst underneath.  Every morning, their brightly alert eyes confounded and relieved my fears.  And then it hit me:  “I bet they are sitting on eggs, far enough way that I can’t collect them.”

And so it was that a week ago we noticed a tiny puffball of a newly hatched chick, moving in the wake of the older hens.  One single hatchling.  Our first thought was to capture the new arrival and relocate it in the brooder where we had raised a group of purchased chicks last winter.  The mothering trio, however, thought otherwise.  They were in charge of this little one.  Anytime either of us drew near they shuttled the chick back under the coop — with reinforcements.  On our first venture out to take stock of this new arrival, fully 12 of the older hens crammed into the “run”, shoulder to shoulder, like a football line, barricading the three “mothers” and the chick behind them just to insure that we couldn’t interfere.  In the ensuing days, the threesome and their ward explore the chicken yard in an expanding circumference, pausing from time to time to allow the chick its rest.  We watch as it climbs the neck of its primary “mother” to nestle between her shoulders; slipping down beneath her wing at the least sign of concern.  

And I audaciously believed for an instant that I knew better than they how to raise a chick.  

A week has passed, and the chick is noticeably healthy and growing.  The “mothers” and their extended community are incarnating the wisdom that the rest of us have largely forgotten:  that it takes a village to raise a child.  It is too big a job for any one of them to accomplish alone.  Collectively, they pay attention.  Together they see to its access of food and water.  In concert they watch the skies and monitor the fence line for the least hint of predation.  That new little puffball bobbing around among them is “their” shared responsibility, and they are impressively, conscientiously, taking their job very seriously.  Once upon a time our own neighborhoods behaved like this - our schools, as well, and faith communities.  The very fabric of our society was woven from precisely such conscious threads of interdependence and mutual responsibility. Today such notions sound merely quaint; dangerous even, or perhaps simply too expensive or too much bother. 

I do my best to stay out of the way of these resident experts - far enough away to not raise alarms, but close enough to observe.  It’s humbling to be taken to school by these feathery creatures with a brain the size of a walnut.  But, then, maybe it isn’t the size of one’s brain that matters as much as the capacity and suppleness of one’s heart.

Either way, I’m deeply grateful for the education and the example.  I have much to learn about caring.