Life Lessons from my Chickens

We're hatching chicks in an incubator upstairs. The first few emerged on Saturday, several came on Easter sunday, and a few more are considering today as their birthday. My little kids are quite smitten by the chicks and fascinated by the process.

I am learning a great deal about transformation and life by watching the process. One thing I notice is that I really had a sense of pride for and affinity with the first brave chick. She didn't have the most effective exit strategy... she pecked for a very long time and finally broke through. I'm not sure what part of my programming has conditioned me to think that being first is best. I'm considering how much this notion serves me and perhaps I'll let it go.

The second chick had a much more efficient liberation. She pecked in a sort of straight line until she'd completed a circle and then gracefully pushed the whole top of the egg right off. She didn't have to fight nearly as much as the first. Why do I appreciate the struggle of the first more than the efficiency and grace of the second?

We have two kinds of hens, brown ones and black ones. For some reason the first 5 chicks born were brown and the next 4 chicks born were black. The black ones all died their first night. We think that they got too hot under the lamp and too dehydrated. Maybe the 5 brown chicks - being several hours older and therefore stronger - bullied the black chicks and kept them from the water? We don't know.

All the eggs began their 21 day incubation at the same time. Today there are two eggs with beaks sticking out of them, and I can see the chicks are breathing, but they appear to have no motivation to break out. This is the most interesting lesson of all to me... I put the eggs in and did what I was obligated to do. I can't do anything else. I can't break the shells open and let the chicks out because they would be weak. They MUST struggle by themselves in order to build up the muscle strength and determination needed to survive.

It doesn't matter if I'm fearful, helpful, prayerful, or facilitative... each of those chicks has to make its own choice to fight out of it's shell or to simply die.

Like the school we're working to start. I've done what I can to guide the visioning and the strategic planning process. At our last meeting we agreed to re-open a number of the variables which had been pinned down in the first iteration of the strategic plan draft. Some of the possibilities included realizing something less than what we had dreamt. We even came face to face with the possibility of giving up altogether. I encouraged everyone to sit in the place of uncertainty which we created by re-opening the variables. I asked them to see what the various options feel like.

I hope that what emerges from this time of incubation is a fight to live, a fight to emerge from our shell and grow feathers so that one day Leslie Creative Learning Cooperative might fly. Creation is a tender and fragile process, yet it is infinite and constant. Even if all my chicks don't hatch there will always be more chickens. The seeds I plan and tend to may never bloom, but there will always be flowers. For this, I am grateful.