Monday, June 18, 2007

PECKING ORDER


Here at the dawgranch we have chickens. Though I don’t eat their eggs I do watch them go about their ceaseless search for and gobble of food. After several years of keeping them behind fence, the chicken keeper, Donna, has relaxed into allowing them free reign of the property, which has yet to come near being too little for their widest scavenges and they return to their roost at the same shade of twilight every evening, so the door to the coop hasn’t been shut for months. Now that they are free to roam as far from the rest as they feel safe, the entire characteristic of societal pecking order has disappeared owing to its obvious uselessness on the free range of the yard.

When I was in the first grade the only thing I remember lacking was the prestige of the third graders; in junior high, high-schoolers; as a private, corporals; as a freshman, seniors; as a junior engineer, senior engineers; as a seven handicapper, a scratch golfer. Once the space between stepping stones begins requiring reconsideration of ones commitment to youthful promises and affording the time for such meditation … one has pecked ones way far enough from the ratty status race to observe life without frantic expedience and to honestly look back at the clucking flock pecking the fucking clock and question the need for the security found within such company. That same point in accumulated experience has been popularly referred to as mid-life crisis, where the life choice can be to either take a revelationary journey inward and outward simultaneously in the stillness one may find there or to rededicate oneself to carrying that carrot stick until, if one lives so long, it is too heavy to do more than afford the rest of life in a doctor’s pocket.

I ate the carrot at the age of thirty-four in 1972 and haven’t had to do anything since — I have certainly gotten to do much more than I could have experienced back in the coop. Set your chickens free.

5 comments:

karoline in the morning said...

i don't think one can ever rest comfortably thinking, that there is something else out there to discover..its the same passion that children up at night for fear that they'll miss something...i have the same fears..that i'll die without having all the answers...

:)
k

Yodood said...

Although your body will still be curious at your last breath your wish to explore lives on in those who love you and, I like to think, in your reincarnation born into a world made better for your wisdom to be here now. I have reincarnated at least three times in the life of this body it seems.

karoline in the morning said...

i just know who i am and where i am, and thankfully that's all, i have a hard enough time getting through today, let alone yesterday..

:))
k

Garth said...

Freedom lies in the head, especially for those of us who cannot find a viable way out of the system. We may still live in the coop, but our minds are in the field.
Another great post Greg.

Yodood said...

This whole blog is in my head, my body is a neurosurgeon in downtown Mabhatten … two more brain tumors and I can by a phantom jet. !•}