Chicken Love (continued)

So, I dropped off 15 of the chickens to the butcher and kept the other 5 whole. While carrying the whole chickens in, I noticed that they felt good. Energetically, they had a very strong, loving presence. And I felt grateful, really grateful. The kind of grateful I realized is the true feeling behind our custom of saying a grace before a meal, giving thanks and asking that the food nourish our bodies. This is the feeling that being close to your food will give you, and that our ancestors in some corners of the world felt as a part of their daily life and ritual. I wanted for a quiet place to truly embody this feeling, to be with it. At the same time I realized that I had committed some small sin in abandoning my chicken to the butcher and the electric blade, introducing them to violence for the first time when even their slaughter had been done in love. It went against the true flow of life, and in some ways felt like a denial of our shared life, the life that runs through chicken, beets, dandelion, and woman alike. A denial of life, a denial of true gratitude, a denial of our interconnectedness.

Too late.

The next day I went to pick up my chicken and the scene was awful. The place smelled weird/bad, not like meat turning bad per se, but just bad. I looked in the back where there was a line of 6 or 7 workers all in a row holding various cuts of meat with knives in their hands and thoughtless looks on their faces. Yikes. They brought my coolers out and the chicken hadn't even been packed back in its bags. It was piece by piece just thrown back into the coolers loose. The work was still for me to do to package it all in freezer paper and ziplocs. Oh, my, I was not prepared for that, I thought I would take them home and pop them in the freezer. As I raced to the store for ice and supplies, I was met with the warm smell of bacon-ny nastiness and unfresh meat that had built up on the outside of the coolers from being in a commercial butcher's walk-in. I began to cry. As I was packing the pieces, I was struck with the disrespect of it all; the pieces didn't have the smooth logic a handcut piece would, they were squarish and weird. Some of the legs would have the end of the leg be broken, and I was sad for the chicken that had its leg broken after death.

The story turns out ok. The chicken seems to be fine, all considered. But it doesn't have that feel anymore. It met it's true death at the butcher's saw.

And so I ask myself, what else in our life has lost its energetic presence, its life, it's connection to the One, as a result of our denial and our violence? What else and who else?