A THEME PARK WITH CHICKENS!
They are T-Rex's closing living relatives so it is a perfect evolution.*
But naturally, the chickens also give into their wild instinct and the climax of the movie will be a chicken flying a helicopter and me doing some Die Hard kind of action moves to save the world from chickens gone wild.
You see, I love my chickens, but I also know they would probably be happy to eat me. My chickens are carnivores. I saw a dozen eggs at the store that highlighted the fact that the chickens were vegetarians and I felt sad for those chickens. It's not as bad as being stuck in a tiny cage, but I'm pretty sure after watching my chickens rip a shrew apart that they are one step away from Velociraptors.
If I only deliver leftover veggies to them from dinner they give me the look like the old lady in the "Where's the beef?" commercials. Meat makes them happy.
It sounds like a good idea to have vegetarian chickens who don't fly helicopters, but that's not who they are (well, maybe the helicopter part).
I'm slowly figuring out how to love things and people for who they are without making them conform to how I think they should be. I'm slowly releasing my agenda
for this world and figuring out how to delight in the mystery of the moment.
How do I enter relationships without insisting people or chickens be who I want them to be?
My answer to myself: Meet people where they are and let the relationship transform us both.
That's my new motto next to "Don't let chickens have access to helicopters."
The problem is that some folks, or maybe I should say all folks some of the time, act like assholes or worse are incredibly dull.
How do you meet behavior like that without letting it sap all your energy or destroy any chance at relationship?
There are times we need to confront behavior that is destructive to relationship, but it is for the sake of the relationship, not for my agenda or romanticized notion of who that person should be.
There are times I have to give my beloved creatures a good talking to for digging up the garden or wandering into the neighbor's yard. Some of the confronting is for safety, but some is because destroying my plants does test my love for them and make me think about dissolving our relationship, especially when they follow it up with pooping all over the porch or screaming at me through the dog door. I have to set good boundaries so I can keep loving them.
I'm pretty enamored with a recent quote I found by Leonardo Boff about Dostoevsky. He writes, "For Dostoevski, the opposite of the beautiful was not the ugly, but the utilitarian; the spirit of using others, and thereby stealing their dignity."
Meet people where they are and let the relationship transform all. Let go of who you think they should be and allow yourself to discover who they are. Confront what is destructive and forgive what is annoying. That's how the chickens and I coexist.
* The analysis shows that T-rex collagen makeup is almost identical to that of a modern chicken - this corroborates a huge body of evidence from the fossil record that demonstrates birds are descended from meat-eating dinosaurs," said Angela Milner, the associate keeper of palaeontology at the Natural History Museum in London. "So, it is very satisfying that the molecules have provided a positive test for the morphology." (Who Are You Calling Chicken by Alok Jha, The Guardian)
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