To photograph chickens, you have to have patience and fast lens, as their heads are always tilting and bobbing up and down. They are getting used to me, and I always show them my camera near food, so they are getting used to that as well.
I have to say I am enjoying photographing the chickens, and seeing their herky-jerky, synchonistic movements. They are simple efficient pecking and eating machines, moving like puppets on strings together, one up, the other down, sometimes all down together. Like many animals, they are dumb about life but smart about food.
It’s sweatshirt weather. Maria and I get up each morning, have breakfast and go out and see the animals, and brush the donkeys. Simon loves to be brushed, and I love the sight of the two of them together in the big barn.
I’m looking for a doctor who practices alternative medicine. As part of the process, I’m approaching traditional, or mainstream doctors as well for comparison. I stopped in one today, and was asked about my insurance first, then given a 10-page questionnaire. The receptionist asked for a record of my medications and tests, and I told her I didn’t have any for the past few years and she looked both incredulous and uncomfortable, as if I would keel over on the spot.
Would I like to make an appointment for some tests? Because doctor needed that to see me. All I had to do was fast, show up early in the morning, and spend a few hours giving blood and other things.
That didn’t pan out.
I went to the alternative practitioner I am considering and he gave me a five-page form. My eye caught one of the highlighted questions on the second page. “What did I love about my life?” I answered that I loved everything about my life – my wife, my work, my farm, my animals, my dogs. The nurse called me at home later to make an appointment and ask some questions and said the doctor wanted me to know that he was pleased to see someone – we have an appointment next week – who was so healthy.
How, I asked, did he know I was healthy, since he hadn’t examined me or even talked to me?
“He said if you love your life, then you are healthy,” she said. “It isn’t just about what the tests show.” This might pan out.
I told her to relay to the doctor one of my favorite quotes from Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “No medicines can cure what happiness cannot.”
Sometimes I think the notions of health that are widely practiced are almost frighteningly narrow and unhealthy. A doctor told me once that a healthy person is someone who hasn’t had his or her tests yet. There is perhaps more to that than he realized. I like Marquez’ definition. I am coming to define health differently than many people, and I feel better about it every day. And healthy. That are many things that might get me to a mainstream physician, and I will know what those things are if and when they occur.
But I agree that no medicine can cure what happiness cannot. I am glad to find a doctor who believes in my health, as well as in my potential illnesses.
I like to think you can take a nice photo of anything if you think about it. Hail the Daily Egg. It has returned.
