Last week we had a heck of a wind storm, and when I got up in the morning I noticed that the makeshift gate for the chicken coop had blown down. The girls, obviously pleased by this, were scratching around the yard, looking for some tender 6am bugs. (early bird, you know....)

Already dressed for work, I stepped into the backyard and rounded up the ladies, careful to keep the hem of my slacks out of the garden dirt. With the girls secured back in their run, I returned to the kitchen to finish getting my coffee.

While I puttered around the kitchen, I thought about how silly a pre-work chore chicken catching is, and just how much I like our "farm" chores around the yard. There is something very right about caring for the animals and plants as the sun rises, slow and intentional sustaining of the things that sustain us. I wandered through my thoughts for a bit, and found myself slowing down and enjoying my morning routine. Which is quite an impressive thing at quarter of 6 on a Wednesday.

It kind of made me sad- first, for the speed that the rest of my day would take once I left my kitchen and started toward work; second, for the years I was in such a hurry to get somewhere or be someone that I would have been irritated, not amused, by such a humble morning space. It's odd, really, how fast we expect life to move, and how much we feel we don't have time to do simple things. How much time would it take before we had time to spare?

We have microwaves, dishwashers, clothes dryers, and robot vaccum cleaners, tools to do things faster and unsupervised, to remove ourselves from the mundane- to free us to other things. But what other things, though? What are we doing with that time?

My morning chasing chickens, my afternoons hanging laundry, and our evenings tending the garden remind me that the mundane is not something to categorically avoid. The mundane, when embraced, is often the only part of my day that replenishes my perspective, connecting me to the people and world around me. Sometimes, in this mean and hurried world, shooing chickens back into their house is just what I need to move everything else into its place.