Chicken Zen

In Coop, I wrote:

Every time I stack firewood, there is this moment at the finish when I step back and survey the neat row, and a yoga-like calm fills me.

I find myself doing the same thing every time I move the chickens.  Earlier this week I moved them from a scratched-up, denuded patch to a patch filled with wheat and clover.  It was a bigger move than usual and it took me over an hour to get everything repositioned and reset.  But when everything was in place and I opened the coop door and all those birds came spilling out and immediately scattered and set to pecking and scratching and making those quiet contented cluck-clucks, why, I just had to stand there for a while and let it soak in.  Ommm-cluck.