The hawk and the cockerel

Requiem for a rooster

I once helped a farmer bury a goat who had died during a cold December night. Or, come to think of it, the ground would have been frozen solid. Maybe we just moved the goat to a resting place and covered him with as much earth as we could muster, biding time till the thaw.

I used to wake up at first light even though the blackout blinds kept the sun out of the room. Bombadil, the bantam rooster that we accidentally got with a batch of hatchlings that were all meant to be hens, ensured my wakefulness with his cock-a-doodle-do’s.

A few weeks ago I tended the chickens—who still live with Lauren—while Lauren was out of town for Christmas. Then, on the first day of this year, Lauren messaged to let us all know that Bombadil had died defending his flock from a hawk.

That’s quite a way to go. That’s quite a way to start a year.

I called Lauren to lament. In the text thread my niece named how apt and valiant and poetic Bombadil’s ending was. I thought of the other three backyard chickens that I buried over the years under the flowers in the front yard. I thought of the John O’Donohue prayer that I read from a book of blessings for the first hen that died, standing at her little grave, shovel laid to the side.

I sobbed on the first of January, over Bombadil’s death. Rest in peace, darling little frenemy, whose morning cries warned of the new day and forbade further rest.

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My tears for Bombadil were laden with the weight and the spin of the earth. Endings and beginnings. The uncertainty of creation. Is this as true for you as it is for me, that: Every day, when I set out to make something new, I fear that the spark of creativity won’t be there if I reach for it, that it won’t meet me if I show up?

But I usually do anyway, show up. And it usually does, meet me.

In a dream, my first car, a ’91 Mazda Protogé, won’t start. Mazda is the Zoroastrian god of wisdom, the creator deity. 

Nevertheless, I show up.

Because the man with the meditation practice met me in the basement and recited a poem about princes and kings and fools being makers of eternity. 

Because

Keisha E. McKenzie

wrote about how irrelevant it is to credit one moment of turn as any more significant than another moment of turn.

Because Tillich said that god is the ground of being. 

Because Maria says that being is the thing worth tending. 

Because Tom gave me feedback, encouraging me to be authentic.

I’m planning to launch a business as a life coach and a retreat guide. The specter and possibility of failure wakes me up in the morning before first light. “Cock-a-doodle-don’t!” it croaks.

In the field of human potential everybody’s promising something, and those promises are washed up in so much noise that it’s a wonder when any value manages to crawl through and evolve into transformation.

In the efforts of beginning a business there is so much earth to move. 

In any effort to create anything there is so much former life to compost.

Nevertheless. 

Because it feels good to muscle my way through this world of feather and flesh.

I am the hawk and the cockerel. 

And the man with the shovel, smearing earth on the corner of the page with a prayer.

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You were fierce. You were faithful. Your watch has ended. RIP Bombadil.