Chickens

At present, we have five lovely little hens that were gifted to us last month. We're enjoying them very much, but three of them are too young to lay eggs, and one is suspected of being hermaphrodite. So one lone chicken is shouldering the heavy burden of laying eggs for the Familia family. She does her best, no doubt, but we get around one egg every three days. Split between four people . . . well, you get the picture. We're still buying eggs.

But last night we were given another wonderful family of chickens. We haven't brought them home yet, but we've named them. Two are the cute, chubby kind with black and white barred feathers. Tony christened those ones Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Axa named the two strikingly dark red hens The Foxy Ladies. And I claimed the privilege of naming the two golden pheasant-type chickens Demeter and Persephone (continuing in the same vein as Venus and Daphne, two of our current chickens). But most wonderful of all is the large black iridescent rooster. Several weeks ago, Axa had said when we got a rooster he would be named High King Peter. But when she saw him, she decided it didn't fit. Not at all. He is as tall as her waist, and utterly fearless. After some deliberation, she decided he would be called The Great Achilles. Ironic, I thought. Being a rooster, I would say his heel is his very least vulnerable part.

Hopefully, all the chickens get along. And hopefully, I'll soon stop buying eggs.

Autumn Leaves

I have a photograph on my desk of Axa, half buried in autumn leaves when she was maybe nine months old. I don't recall the children playing in leaves since then. I don't remember raking them either, since I was a little girl. We used to always rake our yard and then our neighbors'. It was an easy act of service where you didn't have to see anyone, which appealed to my shy side. And as a bonus, we got to keep all the leaves we raked and make a huge pile or a leaf fort (snow forts are out in California).

This morning Axa and Raj and I went out and raked leaves under the sycamore tree. We made a respectable little pile, although it did have the disadvantage of being full of prickly seed pods. Raj and I both worked to remove them while Axa raked, but there were just too many. And really, in a leaf pile you're making to jump into, even one is too many. Still, they left their shoes on and danced around in the leaves. It was fun, and it reminded me of my childhood.

This afternoon during quiet time, the gardener showed up and mowed it all away. Oh, well. I guess more leaves will fall.

I am curiously disinclined to write lately. I write nowhere but this blog. I guess I'm just not ready to see what comes off my virtual pen when I let my mind loose. And even in this blog, I try to focus on the immediate, the concrete, the everyday. I am not able to venture right now into the realm of the infinite, the absolute, or the ideal. Plato and I have parted ways, and I see the eternal in the now. I don't take care with my sentences or craft them carefully. I just write what's on the surface of my thoughts. The surface always carries hints of the depths, without giving them away entirely.

Autumn

The leaves are falling, falling as from way off,
as though far gardens withered in the skies;
they are falling with denying gestures.

And in the nights the heavy earth is falling
from all the stars down into loneliness.

We are all falling. This hand falls.
And look at others: it is in them all.

And yet there is one who holds this falling
endlessly gently in his hands.

Rilke

Hope is the thing with feathers

Can we disbelieve the birds?

Our goldfinches have come back. The male was almost bright orange in the springtime, but then I hadn't seen either one for months. We saw them the other day (he and his mate are indistinguishable to my eyes now), soaring across the empty blue spaces between trees.

Today was windy, and the sun came in and out from behind the clouds. The calling of the crows takes on a bleaker tone in the wind.

I have three little carved elephants from Indonesia standing on top of my roll-top desk with trunks upraised at me. The littlest one seems to be smiling. I put away the clean dishes on the counter today. There's nothing unusual about that, except that I've seen them there for the past week and not been able to bring myself to put them away. Little by little, maybe things will get better.

Tomorrow will come, and bring something sweet, even if it is a fleeting moment.

My mother in law gave me this meditation:

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

- Galileo