Moving to chicksandweeds.com

So - I really like this blogspot template...but my website is hosted elsewhere and myself - I am all over the place and am trying to focus and to work my main website for a while - chicks and weeds for a while. I'll put up links here to the new posts and pages there

Life with chicks, chickens, roosters - and weeds

I love chickens, I especially the chickens in the garden - and now the babies, what a treat to see. Our natural world is beautiful and while life on earth has its challenges, pains and will always come to an end, I believe and hold true that given enough consciousness, no one and nothing needs to be abused and exploited and that we can live in harmony. I don't appreciate the government spying on facebook and google - including blogger - and am moving, for now and a little sad hearted, all my chicken blogs to my currently available website chicks and weeds. It is a wordpress format, which I don't prefer, but we'll see. Please join me there and have a blessed day.

Hello Mama - this is Mama Pencil, a buff minorca

Beauty Break with - Miyoko Shida Rigolo

Free range and cage free, that is good enough for you?

Your idea of "free range" was different?

Cage free and free range it says on   your organic egg carton - oh, yes, and you do in fact care. Here is the price of your eggs in images: we all pay for the commercial poultry industry and their waste products with our taxes, polluted environment and its clean-up, antibiotic resistance - and the loss of our soul allowing and supporting the suffering of these sentient creatures.
This image spares you the pecked ones, the dead ones, the sick ones, the transport and the cruel deaths.  ....

When are we going to be done supporting it?

All you need to officially be allowed to say 'free range' is a door that opens to the outside with a specific sized grass area. It's a loophole. Few chickens ever go out that gate, they are too scared - and too many. But since they have the 'option' -> it's called free range ...that sells much better to the unsuspecting customer who has not delved into the mass animal keeping realities too much, who still trusts what "they" tell you.

Healthy foods - money, comfort & convenience & addiction to junk

Yesterday I asked someone - who is eating eggs in their household - if they would be interested in soy free organic free range fresh garden eggs ...offered for the same community price we pay but cheaper than in the store for those kinds of eggs. The answer was ...I don't want to pay that for eggs .....

Sad ....

Not a bad person, quite the opposite, one on a long time spiritual path,  not a poor household, but it has to be the cheap eggs from abused hens ...when another $ 2/week/dozen eggs  would pay for the  best eggs you can get from chickens as happy as they can be.

Just a chicken ....

Maybe I AM missing a point - about the general condition of the planet and the humans on it - maybe it really IS going down and 600 plus years of dark ages await us, all new age awakenings not withstanding - and it really is too late to do anything about it. The humans who run the show do so because they are genetically missing some empathy genes .....

Maybe real awakening permits this to be because it just IS ....

So you know about the tortured suffering animals, you know about the health hazard of eating conventional & precessed  foods - and yet, despite your intentions and conviction, you still eat them? Ya, I know ...lets see:

no time to shop, the kids gotta go to practice, there is nothing else in the house, it is more expensive - and oh, it tastes so good ...the junk .... no time to get the good stuff, no time to cook ....

Taste ...pleasure - comfort foods, feel good foods & bad eating habit.... and habits are hard to break.

In my mind's eye I can see the stalls of the calves taken from their mothers at birth - so we can have the milk - dairy cows are some of the most abused mothers on this planet, and yet, at times, I too dring milk, I still eat butter - I have not managed yet to go to see the farm where I may be getting milk in the future....but mostly I HAVE switched to tea - and that goes without milk.

As far as your food is concerned, living in integrity with your highest knowing IS inconvenient and costs more money, even though it should not.....
Our comfort, laziness and habits keep us on track of doing something not compatible with our highest knowing. ....
And according to a new recommendation from Harvard - milk is NOT on the recommended good and healthy food list ...that was all from the industry for money. It was all a lie.

We don't want to pay that much for eggs .... sad, unaware, unhealthy - especially if you can afford it.

The general population really is unaware of the animal suffering in industrial farming. ...and in fact, it does not matter to them. And even if they "know", there are the realities of daily life and human weakness - there is comfort and convenience and habit and perceived lack of money - and we give in - only the image with the calf or his mother is haunting .... but that means, you have to LOOK at it.

I am writing about milk because - I am guilty too - I know better - and still have some dairy products .....maybe not for long - but I do not know. There is the reality of daily life and what is available. But I will keep at it - and one of these days soon I will get out to the farm ..... and maybe I'll just switch to tea .....

One of these days there is standing strong, yet soft, clear flowing right action and words  and embodied compassion.


What are soy free, organic, free range kept chicken eggs worth?
To answer the question: priceless once you know all that it takes - Like with many things, you can't actually pay for those eggs, the price just covers the hard costs ....

The other answer: whatever the customer is willing to pay for them ...

I would like to find people on this path to whom animal welfare does matter enough to no longer support large commercial animal keeping - but who, for some reason or another - are not vegan ...... I would like to keep chickens for them too.

Loosing another chicken - what is the lesson?

He was a sweet big guy - the most trusting of the buffs

This blog is not about predators threatening the free range flock or some disease or other that takes them from us - it is about  - loosing a chicken - as in: it is no longer part of your flock, you will never see it again - whether it is dead or went to live somewhere else - it is OUT OF YOUR life.

In the last couple of years I have lost 2 dogs and in the last few months - it was chickens.The first losses were young roos lost to predators, then there was culling, and shipping to new homes, someone coming to pick one of them up and sending more of them off for culling, then there was sweet Runti last week.
This morning,  a predator got one of the 2 remaining buff boys. I could see from the feathers in several spots that he tried to get away. Of the buff boys, he was the sweetest and most trusting. ...and again - I wonder, as I did with the others: did he suffer? - hoping he didn't, recalling the state I was in when I had a car accident - and if it is anything like that - then there is no suffering. Certainly - it would be less scary than having to travel in a crate and be put into a cone? --- but, and here is the thing - when I found what was left of him - he was already dead - he was gone. WHATEVER suffering may or may not have gone on was no more. It was done. Where did he go? Whether he went back to God or dissolved into the premordial Being - he'd be fine in either case. In fact - he would have vanished without a trace of individuality. And if he has an eternal soul - he would carry the love and his earth time with him. Either way, he'd be okay. And if he was just some mechanical scripted sentient machine - he was now kaput to the degree that he was no more in the sense that the life, the spirit that moves through all things, no longer moved through him and the body was in the process for disintegrating.

So I observed my reaction, what I did with his body, and was put back into the space-time when ancient homo sapiens walked the earth and their magical thinking about death, ancestors and even why cannibals eat humans, why eating the heart of an animal was magical etc.

There is a mystery.

...but back to this one: he is gone, they will all go sooner or later and all I ever can think of is: may they have a good life. This is their only life. ....and that is true for humans too: as this particular human - no matter how much we are all the same - and how similar it all is: it is none the less it's only life ever....ever .... and while they are alive - they are sentient.

And after the chickens are gone, they are so totally gone ...there is this realization that all they had was the moment of their life ..and all I could ever do to them was right then in their life - and only then did it make a difference to the totality of BEING itself - only in that 1 moment of the NOW can you ever do any good or harm. Now he is no more. Grief is literally pointless, even though sentient beings seem to go through it in stages.

Okay, it seems I didn't do a real good job explaining. There is always only the now.

If this sweet roo ceased to exist as an individual roo, having melted back into the light, it may not matter now that I love him simply because he is no more ... it only mattered in the moment - that I gave him an extra treat that day ...in that moment it mattered, not before or afterwards. He no longer suffers now, like Runti.

So I catch myself thinking about him, going back over things and realizing: there is no point. Holding on is pointless because he is gone, forever - and all I  ever had, all anyone ever has -  is NOW - this very moment.

Having connected with him eye to eye - what is it that connected?

More and more this here is realized as truth (for the moment): I had nothing but myself with which to make the world.

It is somehow comforting to imagine that they - animals as well as humans - have a soul and that the love stays with them, or,  that karma will catch up with them one way or the other, but really, if they do not then - get this ....it is only in the moment that anything matters, that the love added to the totality of Being .........

okay fine - I can't explain it....but these repeated losses  have been driving something home ...about impermanence, uniqueness as well as non-separation of everything and the only difference we can ever make is NOW - and this feeling realization is slowly changing me.

Oh well, enough - there are many more aspects to this. Some say it does get easier with the chickens - but I wonder ..... because each one is unique ....and it'll likely be the same. ..... and all I can hope to do is love them, give them the opportunity to let them be who they are and do my best so they don't suffer.

Then there is that whole issue about consciousness and life forms .... including plants - but that is a whole other story as well as: it is all energy and vibration ....hm ....

So the lesson - can't be described.

The words sound maybe something like this: Your responsibility is NOW. Your life and their life is only NOW.

Re-sharing this one, made in 2002 - it is only part 1 - I chose it because of what the teacher says: they only have this one life .... but it really is quite a remarkable teacher and class and I recommend you watch all 5 parts.

How Chickens changed my Life

It was suggested to me a short time after getting my first chickens to write about: How Chickens changed my life. At the time, I was thinking: hm ...they have not really changed it, but I started writing some posts on another site anyway. I do know however that those words were not "just" said for no reason ....so I kept an open mind and heart - and - I am in the midst of that change .... or rather  A change ..... the learning about earth realities that involve suffering of sentient beings of all kinds has hit home in ways I "sort of knew" in my head before .... but now it is a different way of feeling and seeing .... and it is causing great tourmoil  - and change. Not sure of what or how ....one can't always tell in the facing another act boss monster event what is gonna happen and where you will find yourself afterwards. I am keeping track of some of all this in writing about the chicken adventure, but it really is affecting my in other ways .....

There is this (part of a quote I read somewhere): learn to carry the weight of the Universe or be crushed by it

and

....you feel it (the pain) more and it bothers you less - It is time to access the: "bother me less" part. Urthgame ...

Funny how what I am realizing myself, in the vein of personal experience personally experienced - I recognize saints and sages having said it all along, some of them thousands of years ago.

In this here video, the teacher says one thing: ...this is the only life they will have ....