My sweetie and I were driving down the highway yesterday, returning from celebrating a friend's 50th birthday surprise in Houston, when we drifted into what appeared to be snow floating in the air. "
What's that? It looks like snow. How pretty!" I said. And my mind slipped into all kinds of fun fantasies about snow in South-Central Texas in March. We decided that it was too early for cotton from fields or cottonwood trees, so it remained a mystery. About 30 minutes later, we got our answer...
We came upon an 18-wheeler with an open-air cage-like trailer. The "flakes" were drifting madly from it in the wind. And then it hit me: it was chickens. My heart sank. Their beautiful white feathers were being blown free as they moved down the road. Hundreds of chickens in shoebox-sized cages filled that trailer, stacked from its floor to the very top, one on top of another, on top of another... The ones on the outside edges were the lucky ones: a few had managed to cram their heads out of their cage and get some air, long necks stretched out as far as they could stretch them into the breeze. That's how I identified the load as actual chickens and not just feathers; otherwise, there was really no way to tell. The rest looked like cages of white feathers, no body or life to them at all.
The others - the ones crammed in the inside stacks - I presumed were dead. "
Death from fear and suffocation" I lamented, knowing that this was an assumption, though a likely one. It was difficult to imagine anything else for them; and it occurred to me that they might actually be the luckier ones, if
any of them could be considered "lucky" at all.
I fell into silence for the rest of the trip, or maybe it was shock. I've had similar reactions to the sight of logging trucks hauling long, beautiful tree trunks stripped clean of their lives, on their way to lumber yards to make boards so that we can build things. But this - these chickens - hit me on an entirely different level. It's about the sanctity and sacredness of
life, and how gravely it feels that humans dishonor it sometimes. "
It's criminal!" I whispered, and I cried inside.
I wanted to vomit; it was too much for mere tears. I started to recapitulate immediately, to clear the pained energy from my body, to give back the trauma and cruelty, but I didn't know who it "belonged" to. So I prayed and sent it to the Earth, asking for healing, balance, and forgiveness. I breathed in fire energy from the Sun to purify its residue in my body, and to reclaim the life force I'd leaked on behalf of those poor chickens. And I sent them all the love, compassion, and light that I could muster. And I prayed to Spirit to release and forgive us humans for the cruelty we wield, so mindlessly at times. And I vowed to write a blog about it.
"
You've never seen that before?" my sweetie asked. "
No" I answered flatly. "
That's how it's done." And I thought, "
Well, it needs to change!" I began to fantasize about supermarket "chicken protests" to educate folks and support them in buying
cage-free chicken. I had flash visions of people waving signs and shouting witty slogans outside of restaurants, fast food joints, and in grocery store meat departments to frightened shoppers. I thought of animal cruelty groups and how they might help, recognizing that any humanity given to farmed chickens, cows, pigs, etc. is already largely due to them. And then I recalled this story my dear friend shared with me the night before:
She said she was talking with a coworker who is a vegetarian now. When she asked him why, he said he'd been an avid hunter for years. And then one day when he looked down his scope at a deer he was about to shoot, the deer looked straight back at him, and all he saw in its eyes was fear. And he said to her, "
I don't want to eat fear."
That's the best reason to become a vegetarian that I've
ever heard. And that's what we're doing every time we eat a piece of meat that comes from a nice, clean package at the store, or every time we order chicken at a restaurant, or buy chicken from a fast food place. It's not what it appears to be. There are exceptions, of course, for the few farms that choose to do it more humanely. But they
are the exception.
Many folks still seem to care more about price than ethics these days. Yet what we don't realize is that it's not just "price;" it's
cost. And there are "hidden costs" like
eating fear that have an impact and take a toll on the energy of all life -
our life - here. There is an impact from this, with or without our awareness. So, I vowed to write this blog, and to stop ordering chicken at restaurants and fast food places, and to keep buying the packages labeled as "cage free" from the grocery store. I don't want to
eat fear.
I don't want to
contribute to fear either. I don't want any living thing to have to die a fear-filled, painful, cruel death any more than
I want to do that. And if they must, I pray for there to be as much love, honor, and respect around them as possible. Yet this is not how it is; "
that's how it's done." And I watch the part of me that wants to change it raise up in protest, and then fall back into surrender to what is, recognizing my attachment to what I
want it to be.
But there are things that I
can do, that I'm
already doing, to soften around this reality; so I focus my energy on
them. And then I think of my own death and how I might support myself in surrendering to "what is" for it, too, just like I am for those poor chickens.
Suddenly, a year doesn't feel like enough time for this task....
©2010 Cecilia L. Zúñiga. A Year To Live. All Rights Reserved. Reprints, copies or reproductions of any kind must be accompanied by copyright credit line.
I got to thinking about who I am, really. "Am I me or is that shadow the real me? Who is the me that people will remember? Who do I want them to remember and why? What am I leaving behind in my wake?" In one generation or less, any memory of me can be completely erased, my life here dissolved. Every adventure, every experience, every breath completely erased - my existence here forgotten, irrelevant history...
