A vital richness

When trying to attach words to what I feel in day-to-day moments, I keep coming back to “vital richness.”

My husband and I celebrated 8 years of marriage this week, and we’re closing in on a full decade in our current home. When we moved in I had absolutely no interest in gardening, I was afraid of bees, and I had a big box grocery store curbside pick-up order I automatically copied-and-pasted each week in a (fairly thoughtless) routine to just get it done. Now, gardening is an obsession, I’m a certified journeyman beekeeper, and I can count on my hand how many times each year that I visit a big box grocery store. There’s now a community behind our food, friendships with farmers, shared resources, and I visit most of the farms where our meals come from. How do you set a price on that? It’s a vital richness. I give credit to the bees for all of it. After I got my first hive, I started to research plants for bees. As I learned more, I wanted to maximize my planting efforts by selecting plants that fed the bees and us at the same time. It opened my eyes to the nutrient loss in our country’s soil health, and ethical deficits in CAFOS (concentrated animal feeding operations) that anchor our mass food system.

As I write this, I hear the proud crows of our gender-confused hen, Princess Cardamom. Sometimes in a flock of rooster-less chickens, which ours is, one of the hens will decide to take the rooster role. They’ll even grow a large comb and stop laying. According to Dr. Jacquie Jacob’s “Sex Reversal in Chickens” piece for the Poultry Extension, injury or damage to the hen’s ovary can prompt the transition. Dr. Jacob speaks about this condition on the Urban Chicken podcast. Princess Cardamom was bullied by a guinea hen we once had (and subsequently had to re-home since the guinea hen wouldn’t stop the bullying). She was hurt so badly at just a few months old that I found her body bloody and limp. Perhaps that trauma spurred her gender revolution? For a few years now, Princess Cardamom’s feathers get darker with each molt—another trait of roosters—yet she’s selectively opted to continue laying while sounding her daily sunrise crow. Her call kicks off that rich feeling. It’s a thread of something so rare, one could never imagine it could exist. Each morning we start our day with this reminder. Here she is, sounding her avian yawp.

While I waited for my husband to bring supplies for her wounds, I Consoled our baby hen Princess Cardamom after she was attacked by a guinea hen. Her flock stayed close by.

Before Princess Cardamom’s time, back when we had our first flock, I remember our first egg. Our sweet hen Josephine laid it and immediately sang the egg song. I visited the coop, picked up the warm brown egg from the straw, and marveled at how perfect it was in the curve of my palm. While having a small flock of chickens isn’t just collecting eggs and hearing endearing hen crows (case in point: my post about flystrike), caring for them comes with new perspectives. Yes, they need fresh feed and water, their coop cleaned, and occasionally a spa treatment if they’re egg-bound. My perspective is that instead of being a chore, I get to do these things. I get to collect eggs and enjoy nutrient-dense breakfasts (check out my article about boosting the nutrient-density of your backyard chickens’ eggs), and at the same time I get to help the flock with what they need. I get to clean the coop, help heal their wounds, carry buckets of water—what’s vital to them. Another vital richness.

I feel the same way caring for our pigs now. I get to hear their happy grunts as they crunch into fall apples. I get to set up and rotate the fencing for their paddocks. I get to re-fill their waters after they dump it for a wallow, or just out of clumsiness. There’s no, “Ugh, again?!” feeling of resentment. It’s a rewarding contentment. Even after I got poison ivy from clearing space for their fence lines, instead of feeling like it’s a thorn in my side, I think: I get to put Calamine lotion on, look out my bedroom window and see the golden hour light up the grazing pigs. It’s a spotlight on the vital richness.

The phrase came to me when I picked a blackberry in my garden over the summer. My fruit-bearing plantings have been slow to produce the past few years, so when I find a ripe treat before the birds do, it’s rich. I can’t recall which podcast, but one I listened to a few months ago interviewed someone who talked about real wealth. He explained that you can’t put a price on what it means to walk outside, pick fruit off a plant that you planted, and savor it in the moment. It’s true—there’s no price. All of this is an investment, compounding, ready for withdrawal when the market (environment) is right. It’s a different kind of wealth that’s discovered through a pseudo-mining process. It’s a mining you don’t realize you’re doing. Chipping away is the seed planting, the incubator humming, tending to the garden’s seasonal needs, and the listening. Princess Cardamom wants to be heard. Although her crow sounds like a hoarse cock-a-doodle-doo, to me it’s the song of wealth.