Chicken Processing, Wendell Berry, Jesus, the Tao Te Ching, Jimmy Carter, and Winter Storms
The sun hasn’t come up today yet, but the sunrise yesterday was extraordinary!
With that sunrise as a kick-starter, we immediately began loading up 265 pasture-raised meat chickens to take to our processor so that we will have chicken for our pop-up market on Saturday in Dallas.
Our chicken processor is such a gift. I’m not even sure we would raise chickens if it weren’t for Wind Meadows Family Farm. They are one of only a few USDA certified processors for small farms in the entire state and they are only thirty-five minutes away from us.
They specialize in pasture-raised birds like ours and are so easy to work with which is certainly not always the case with processing facilities. It’s a pretty unnerving thing to work so hard to treat these animals with such care and then trust that your processor will do the same. Will we even be getting back the animals that we raised?
I have come to really trust Windy Meadows. Not only are we getting OUR birds back, they have always worked with any special orders we have had and called with any questions.
A great off-shoot to working with Windy Meadows has been getting to know Daniel who is in charge of the processing operation.
Daniel is part of the family who owns the farm. He and his spouse are expecting their (gulp) sixth child within a month. Daniel, doesn’t look like a roughneck meat processor but instead approaches with a clean shaven face and a disarming smile. He looks like he could be your young therapist instead of the processor ready to slaughter your chickens.
He talks like it too.
Within five to seven minutes of our visit yesterday he summized that fear or control seem to be at the root of so many problems. From my point of view, he just explained most of my problems and oh, by the way, the history of human civilization.
And then he threw out this nugget. He said that he used to wonder a lot about what he should do with his life, and now “I am just trying to be faithful in the spot where I am planted.”
Imagine that—being in your thirties and not chasing the better salary or bigger house. “If I was with her, or my waist was slimmer, or I had that job, life would finally be good. After all, it’s nine days into January, isn’t this the time to set goals of where I want to be?”
No, says the chicken processor—I am trying to be faithful where I am planted.
It sounds like the entire summation of the wisdom of Wendell Berry’s writings. Berry (I so wish we were related) could have worked at a prestigious university but instead lives on the family farm where he has written over thirty books and countless essays and poems with a No. 2 pencil.
Berry was a regenerative farmer before regenerative farm was a thing. He reminds us that new is not always better, that sexy is not always satisfying, and that more efficency does not always equal better results. He counsels us to not always “pray for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.”
“I am trying to be faithful where I am planted.”
That phrase sounds like Jesus when he told the parable of the man who planned to build more barns to hold more stuff and yet ended up all alone talking to himself, or his admonition to not wait for things to come but to “wake up” and do the work right in front of us, or his kind words to not worry about the troubles of tomorrow. Today’s troubles are enough.
It sounds like the message I get from reading the Tao Te Ching where I am told that “a good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving” or my friends in Alcoholics Anonymous who teach me to not to worry about the future. “Just do the next right thing. By the way, If you don’t know what the next right thing is, just do the next loving thing because that’s usually the next right thing.”
And so here we are, on the day that our nation honors a peanut farmer who did do big things, but then instead of making more money on more speeches to enhance corporate profits, just went back to the house where he had always lived in little Plains, Georgia.
He went back to the same community he was planted in doing the same things he always did with integrity. Of course, he also built a lot of houses for people that didn’t have them and taught a lot of Sunday school classes too. He was faithful in the spot where he was planted.
I wish I lived in a place that didn’t have crazy weather with tornadoes in the spring, crushing heat in the summer and a maybe rain/maybe snow/maybe ice storm staring us in the face. A place without wild hogs and hungry coyotes and pesky fire ants!
And then I take our chickens to be slaughtered at a little place outside of the small town of Cumby, Texas and I hear these words—
“I am just trying to be faithful where I am planted.”
