I thought my worries were my angels.

Yelena (2 weeks old)

1am: “Mommy! Something is hurting the chickens! Something is hurting the chickens!”

My worries. My angels. My chicken drama.

Last summer we lost our newly hatched chicks to skunks.

The skunks climbed into our chicken coop through a hole the outdoor bunny dug under the coop. They ate eggs that were so close to hatching you could feel them squirm in their shells, and gobbled up our day old chicks in one bite.

I’ve found my deep love for chickens to be surprising. They poop everywhere and aren’t affectionate like a cat or dog. So why all this love? It seems to stem from a ban on all furry, sweet animals when I was a child. So these incidents of chicken drama are deeply stressful for me.

Each night before bed that summer, I lay awake waiting to hear those tragic sounds again. My ears had grown huge and their hearing capacity extended out into the backyard.

This summer our hens went broody again. We could have removed all their eggs to protect ourselves from more chicken drama, shield our tender hearts.

But love won.
Love for the special high-pitched “food is here” cluck of the mama hens. Love for the little blonde-brown chicks following their mamas, scratching and pecking under our English walnut tree.

Despite this joy, my worry began again.
I noticed myself walking around in a state of distress, thinking about them and then losing sleep. I began wondering how I would visit my family on the east coast and not panic about predator attacks without my hyper-vigilant presence to protect them.

On an episode of We Can Do Hard Things, a podcast with Glennon Doyle, her sister says that worry is how she shows love….her worry is her love.

I realized I was trying to “love-worry” them into safety, to care for them through wrapping them up in my anxiety.

But was there another option? Anxiety vs. Love?

I didn’t want my anxiety enlarged ears picking up the sound of a twig snapping and thinking it was certain chicken doom.

I’m not sure what brought on the shift in me, but I realized I was surrounding the chicken coop in a cloud of anxiety thought-forms. This was the opposite gesture of the outcome I wanted. Safe, happy chickens.

This dichotomy of anxiety or joyful love couldn’t be true.

So I transformed my worry into a conversation with angels.

If you don’t “believe” in angels, or feel a presence of something larger or more positive, just the word LOVE will do the trick. You could send it out—the word itself—instead of the other words you are repeating in your head.

So I began a new practice that day. Every worried thought turned into a new phrase, with the force of the positive words I said, the positive picture I was creating. A chicken coop surrounded in light.

I surrounded that chicken coop in light each night. Weird? Maybe. Better than a cloud of anxiety? Definitely.

Do I check for tunnels under the coop? Yes.

Do I check on our three littlest chicks( Alina, Mal and Zoya) throughout the day? For sure.

Through this process, I’ve crumbled a binary system.

Anxiety vs. Angels. Fear vs. Love.

Both are important. Useful.

So I put them together in the same pot, stirred them with a wooden spoon, and watched them swirl into something new.

Let’s do this with the other binary systems around us. Climate Change. Vaccinations. Political Parties. Materialism and Spirituality.

Now my heart and head, they work together. They inform each other.
They are cooperating to keep my soul in balance. They are Freedom + Love.

In this little blog post, I’m inviting you to create something nourishing and real. Not the falsehood of duality.

We are all in this together. Like it or not.

The virus, climate change, chicken (sub any other word) drama.

Rather than a flow of energy/love between us, something sneaky has crept in.

If we just perch one level up, we can see that the division among us is actually the destructive force. More than any material plane event, like a fire or a virus.

And the material plane events can only be healed by refusing to accept the division and seeing each other, ourselves, our planet in a unified way.

For what is love if not seeing the whole and embracing it.

xoxox Laura

PS- Tune-in to That Good May Become, my bi-weekly podcast on all things everyday and esoteric.
PSS- Stay tuned for a link to share your spiritual stories in the next month or so.