Good things can come from bad things.  When bad things happen, are you completely focused and mired in the suffering of the bad? Or, do you allow yourself some space to simply BE with it, whist knowing that something good can come from this?

I, in my wise old age 😉, am finally starting to “get” that something good can come from almost anything if we only allow some space for it to develop.  That space is created by not dwelling every moment on the worry over the bad thing.  When we obsessively dwell on every bad outcome and every possible what-if, we are using quantum physics and all the laws of creation and manifestation against us.

Meet Tia, our puppy.

Yes, she is a bantam chicken, not actually a puppy. But she seems like one!

Yet, a sordid tale precedes the realization of our little garden buddy…

We have a flock of chickens that we raised from babies this spring.  Tia was the smallest of the bunch, and always the underdog.  Despite being raised from a chick, she never bonded with us whatsoever.  She never was anywhere to be seen when we hung out with the chickens – always avoiding us to any extent possible.  She was the pariah – she didn’t hang out with the other chickens all that much either. 

We also had ducks. Including some male ducks.  Turns out, male ducks are mean and horny. We did not know this.  One night, we thought Tia was missing from the perch lineup, and immediately feared a hawk had gotten her.  Then, my husband found her in the corner of the coop, looking bloody and lifeless.  We whisked her out of the coop and into the garage. Upon closer inspection, she was intact, but her entire head was bloody because it had been plucked down to bare skin.  The male ducks had attacked her and ripped out every feather on her tiny little head.  I slathered her head up in calendula ointment, and we gave her special living arrangements in our garage, but there wasn’t much more we could do.

Days past, and we kept her in confinement so that she would be safe and bugs wouldn’t descend on her open wounds.  But she didn’t do much more than sit there.  And she wanted nothing to do with us even though we bugged her every day.

And I worried. Worried about infection. Worrried about what would happen in the future, how long we could keep her in the garage.  But, I also realized that worrying on a repeating loop helped no one. Not her. And not me.  So I consciously and repeatedly put those thoughts aside whenever I managed.  If there was something else I could actually *do* then I continued the thought, but if it was the same thought I’d already had twenty times before, and if it was *still* as outside of my hands as it was for the last twenty times … then I’d cut that thought off! It wasn’t helping, and it was only creating more negative anxiety.

Turns out, Tia healed up 100%.  She never did go back and join the flock, though she visits them sometimes out in the yard.  However, the shocking part of the story is that she became, through this horrible ordeal, our best little outdoor buddy.  She lives permanently now in the garage, and is the only chicken allowed in our front yard.  She follows us around, comes over to us when we call.  She comes over for treats when we grill and eat outside, and flies up to our shoulder if she is worried and wants safety.  In the summer evenings she would sit on my knee and dutifully clean her feathers.  When we come home from being gone she comes running over to greet us when we get home. And yes, I do take her out to poop every morning, just like a puppy.

This special relationship that both my husband and I enjoy never would have happened without this horrible event.  I think this is an excellent example of something good coming from something bad. We will never know why bad things happen, and in truth, we cannot prevent them all.  No matter how hard we try or might want to.  I could have chosen to spend a lot of time dwelling on the worry of her injury;  the old me sure would have.  However, it turned out better than okay, so all the worry would have been simply wasted present moments.  The next time something bad happens, I’m going to remember that I never can know what good might come from it – maybe, even, the love and affection of a little chicken who had been a stranger.

P.S. And the male ducks became dinner.