death in my backyard

It's country to be close to the real stuff in life and that pull towards living where there were more fields than parking lots is what brought us back to the green mountains of Vermont. We have been trying for the last year to create a homestead here. I believe in homestead education - not so much homeschool, although that's how it breaks down. It's amazing seeing experiences through my young farmer's eyes. She adamantly tells me that she wants to be an ANIMAL farmer and is clearly the reason we were pulled to raising chickens. Always interested in animal chores and helping feed, care for, love the farm animals (or all animals) of the world. What amazes me is her beautiful understanding of death and how raising chickens last year would bring me to a greater understanding of mortality and the wonder of life, the dance of death, the sustanance of life. All life comes from death. We eat to survive, we eat vegetables, meat, grain - all the foods we eat are linked to death. You don't have to kill a plant to eat it, but many times especially in large scale farming, there are many little tiny furred or feathered deaths from machinery. So whether you eat meat or not - birth, death, life - they are all linked.

We weren't completely ready when we got our first set of chickens. We loved them though and when one started cock-a-doodledooing.

It's all life except for the birth and death and those two experiences usually make you grateful for the life part. The NOW - right now. Nothing brings you more right now than how we come in and how we go out. Vermont tends to be on the real side of things anyway, but when most of your friends raise and sometimes slaughter what they eat, you know you're not in the city - not in any American city. Somehow we here have wrangled death out of our picture. We put people in hospitals to give birth, send them to a nursing home to die, and we have people way out in the middle of the country where most of the people don't live raising and killing and packaging what would otherwise be our daily or weekly or at least monthly run-in with death.*

We hadn't intended to raise meat birds. When we realized that we had a rooster, we both were excited, maybe we would have chicks in the spring, he could protect the hens, he was so beautiful with his bright orange feathers and purple-green tail. I don't eat meat, really, and it has always been my mantra that we just don't eat our pets.

However... we were unprepared for the 5:30 wake up call and his need to break out of the pen and then there was poop on the car and he ate one of my gardens. He was a force in the world - man he was one cool rooster. He jumped on everything and his crow was adorable, but he was streaming like a shooting star and we knew it. It quick became just too much for us, and nobody wants a rooster, and then we were really coming unglued with the daily 5:30-6:30 crowing sessions.... We even tried leaving him out at night but he still crowed until someone went out and talked him into stopping.

Greg was going to do it himself, but I thought we should have help, so we arranged a dinner/slaughter. I was going to flee the blessed event, but as the day wore on I knew I wouldn't be able to. I stayed. I made a dinner for ourselves and our friends who came to help fitting for the ritual of lentil soup, beer bread, and salad topped off with peach tart and whipped cream. I did what I could to hold the energy for it all and I stayed outside to give thanks, say good-bye and wonder a minute at death.
"It's time?"
"Yes."
Oliver caught him without any problem and held him gently as we all stroked his feathers and said good-bye. He was so calm and beautiful. Still full of life and ready for his journey. We all backed off a bit and I watched Oliver slide the rooster over to my husband who caught his head in his hand as if they were dancing. The other hand brought the knife to the rooster's neck, paused once more in gratitude and sliced the head clean off. The body did it's last dance with mary-jane and it was all over. All but the gratitude which has permeated the structure of this casa and our selves since. It's the cycle of life. It's a circle or a spiral or whatever you believe, but we all are born and we grow and perhaps reproduce and then die. Our physical bodies remain and can be used for sustenance to feed the remaining life on earth.

Animals aren't caught up with the quantity of their years here in this physical world. They are happy to be here, super present with the eating and the drinking and the reproduction and survival, and when their time comes, they aren't fearful. The moment of death is beautiful and they know it. All life comes with death. It's the molecules from plants and animals that sustain us. I felt so grateful to my family for being the ones to bring this death right into our backyard. It's here all the time, but to experience it with intention and gratitude and without sadness or attachment to fear is something to be marveled at. Where there is reverence there will be light and we're illuminating the dark sphere.

blessings of gratitude,
Emily

*or out at sea fishing and gutting, you get the picture ;)