The One-Eyed Chicken

The one-eyed chicken turns her good eye towards me, poised to pounce on the moldy cheese I intend to scatter for our flock of five. In terms of pecking order, I doubt she’s at the top, but she’s held her own, foraging and evading predators for months now. I drop chunks of mozzarella well within her visual field and cheer her on.

Each morning, I render thoughts, words, and prayers the way lard is rendered from the carcasses of the beautiful pigs. I endure the heat of certain realities, stirring the hot mess around in the cauldron of my mind, watching impurities rise to the surface. To those in charge of assigning value, the one-eyed chicken might be classified as an impurity and skimmed off the top. But I’ve hung around with The Idea long enough to realize that the one-eyed chicken is not an impurity. She might actually be the purest expression of meaning available.

I don’t know how she lost that eye. I don’t know how it is that humans lose their way and kill each other. We are frightened and ashamed of our perceived inadequacies. Life seems wildly unfair. We’re lonely. Despite warning signs and alarm bells, we continue to accumulate possessions as if they will save us. We don’t realize we’re gathering floatation devices that push us to the surface where our fatal impurities will be most obvious.

And there it is.

We cannot save ourselves, and this makes us go a little crazy. Will humanity survive the adversarial urges that elevate winners and denigrate losers? Can we decenter ourselves enough to relax into being an ever-evolving, transitory, fraction of The Idea?

Botox doesn’t make us younger. Wealth does not make us worth more. Denial doesn’t change the truth. Fame does not make us immortal. We are loved, as is, by The Idea—a fertile complexity that in the end, renders us as wordless and dependent as the day we were born. The Idea that birthed us is in perpetual danger. It must be hell to watch us gorging on toxic delicacies to prove her wrong. Or prove her right. But The Idea needs no proof. We’re the ones who need proof, so we make things up. False justifications and worthless guarantees.

For now, the one-eyed chicken still lays eggs, which of course, proves nothing.

And everything.