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| "Buckbeat", March - November 2012 |
This morning, while I tended to moving furniture around and cleaning the front room in order to create space for this weekend's healing ceremonies & spiritual rituals, M wandered out into the backyard to release the chickens from the coop. She came in quickly with the news, "Buckbeat is dead." A pang of sorrow, regret, sadness and loss rang through me as I followed M back out to collect our beloved chicken's body from the bottom of her wooden cage.
Born with a twisted bottom beak, Buckbeat, along with her sisters Arwyn and Jedi, were the runts of a brood born down in the Tijuana River Valley at Suzie's Farm this now past spring. K, a then apprentice at San Diego's most popular organic food producer, sweetly brought the three chicks home to live intentionally at a cooperative in Sherman Heights. Just after the death of the Prosperity Hive as well as during my healing process from my rattlesnake bite, I recall stopping in to experience K cradling Buckbeat within the warmth of her zippered bosom.
When I moved in to Las Raices on June 1st, I was in such a state of acute suffering that I projected my feelings onto Buckbeat. "She can't eat!" "She isn't getting enough nutrition." "We should just put her out of her misery," I lamented to K. Her reply? "Buckbeat has a wonderful life. Her and her sisters are happy here." How could I argue? Instead, I sat with this dose of deep compassion.
Being a morning bird myself, it was only natural that I would arise around 6:30 every morning and wander down to tend to the chickens. This is my contribution to our growing village, and it is my responsibility as a healer who also dispenses animal medicine. Over the course of these past few months, I have truly developed a relationship with our three hens - who, during the warmer summer season were producing tasty little eggs. They have taught me much about living in harmony - partly because, whenever I tend to needs greater than my own, I have to present myself to this here and now. And also because they are very special, unique, loving and compassionate birds - "human" character traits which, I believe, had lots to do with Buckbeat's "disability."
Buckbeat was an individual all her own. She would innocently hop up the back balcony stairs and strut her stuff in front of our living room's glass doors. She was quick to flutter onto the shoulder, or the arm of a lawn chair, of a visiting friend, as we sat perched underneath the tangerine tree. And, she was a star of the screen - over the summer, she played a minor role in a video that Priestess Aurora and I shot in the garden about the expressive & embodiment arts. She's forever memorialized in my #36 birthday photo shoot - a gift compliments of Stone's Throw Images and Kevin McIlwaine, my main photographer and friend for over three years now. And, just the past week, Buckbeat also danced to "Everything is Beautiful" for the footage that Sher and I recorded on our balcony.
Now, Buckbeat's gone.
Taking with her our scared, chicken-like ways of being undernourished and disabled.
Another sacrificial bird to add to the soil found underneath the lemon tree - the same one where we planted the dead Barn Owl three weeks ago.
Yet, what remains is always the same -
IT'S LOVE.
