Brooding

 

It always amazes me to see the chickens or ducks sit their nests. With singular mind and purpose they sit, day after day. For chickens, a hatch requires twenty-one days of sitting, a duck, twenty-eight. It must feel like an eternity. I get restless after watching them for just a few minutes and must be moving on. A hen that is not nesting is a very active creature. Always on the go - foraging, exploring. They are already busily about their days before I roll out of bed at six o'clock, a respectable time to start the day, I think. So how do they make it all stop? How do they tune out the temptations to leave the nest? What a lesson in self-sacrifice...

I remember my own pregnancies. I could still travel, garden, and amuse myself to distraction. Not so for the hens. It truly is a "confinement." Could you sit - voluntarily - for twenty-eight straight days? Just sit? No books to read, no sweater to be knitting, no telephone to talk on (or computer!), nothing to watch or listen to except the world going on outside the window? All you would have to occupy yourself is your thoughts. What would you think of?

It is no surprise that mulling over the same thought over and over is called "brooding." But what do our broody thoughts amount to? Are they productive? Brooding is productive. For my hens it produces an incomparable reward - offspring. Darling little ducklings, and cute little chicks...promise that the world goes on.

A hen will not continue to sit on a spoiled egg. It will push it out of the nest. Am I as careful with my nest of thoughts?Or is precious time and space cluttered brooding over pointless pursuits?