morganchicken part 3
DESCRIPTION
urban chicken keepingTRANSCRIPT
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How keeping chickens will save your life
sarah gilbertblog producer, writer, photographer, mama
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one cold day in march, I woke up unsatisfied with my efforts to tread gently upon the world
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all I heard from the media was new ways to feel guilty; I should stop flying / washing hands / heating my home
photo Lee Jordan, licensed under creative commons
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my friends and blog readers spoke with a single voice: you. need. chickens.
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yes. yes, I did. in a world where we are told what NOT to do, here was an affirmative. keep chickens.
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six days later, I took the #4 half-way across the city and bought chicks. who immediately began to save my life.
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in our arts & crafts houses, our pearl district condos, we’re disconnected from the cycle of life.
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chickens reconnect us, from their fragile first days to their desperate relationships with the wilder sort
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suddenly, our wild spaces, our worms and weeds and creepy crawly things, have meaning
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in small steps, we begin to count our urban spaces in terms of what life they support, instead of the quality of our lawn
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one day we do not ask our children to come in from the yard. instead, we go out with them. we become angry about the non-
indigenous plants.
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we remember the simple pleasures of butter, flour, eggs. we wonder whether it would be possible to get a cow.
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in our single-minded quest to keep our creatures safe, we do things by hand, two parts gravel, three parts sand.
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we stop unannounced at neighbors’ houses to admire their coops. neighbors no longer walk quickly by, enraptured by our hens. we
notice less litter in our front yard.
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gifts take on new meaning.
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one day, gardening does not seem so impossible. we learn about heirloom tomatoes and cover crops and composting.
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having experienced the joy and beauty of a free hen, we demand cage-free eggs, free-range beef, organic pork.
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when we see trash, we do not think, ‘how awful!’instead, we take it home and compost it.
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we discover strange loves; we remember to do things with our hands; we reduce our waste; we tread more
lightly. and instead of guilt we only feel wonder.
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we discover that we did not save money, but that we did save ourselves – from ignorance, from isolation, from disconnection, from loneliness and the loss of nature. we saved a few hundred
yards of land, we saved our community, we saved our landfills, we saved our children.
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