Frogs and Chickens

If I am a frog, I do what I do and that helps the pond. I don’t get up every morning and say,“Well, gotta go help the pond!”  A frog lives like a frog and whether it is useful or happy or not is immaterial to it. In human fairy tales the frog wants to be a wolf, or is tricked by a fox, or in some other way has desire and misfortune. A frog in a fairy tale can be sad. The frog who wants to be a frog king is not successful because frogs don’t have kings, really. There can be bigger, more successful ones, but that is just the luck of the draw.

Chickens are very smart, and the ones at the bottom of the hierarchy are resigned. As chicks grow up or new birds are introduced into a flock, the work of ranking begins. There is much fighting, pecking, and squawking, and much pushing off the top rung of the roost. But once the hierarchy is established, everyone is settled. The lower-ranked hang back until the higher-ranked have eaten. They don’t plot revenge or rebellion or even complain and moan about being at the bottom. They just are.

Fairy tales in their deep wisdom do the same thing to chickens they do to frogs: the chickens who act like chickens are happier than those who want more. Or there may be kings and queens of chickens, but if they want to be that, they can. They can still only eat so much, fly so high, or be raccoon meat. The poor rooster is genetically predisposed to guard the flock, and he will die to do it. But I have never seen one cower, or squawk “why me?” as he tries to fight a fox with his feet.

What this means to me is that we really are not as smart as other animals because we think what we are really matters to anyone else, and even believe it matters to ourselves. Whether I am a good frog means to be a frog—one who sits out on a warm log and waits for flies and slips back into the water for a swim. If as a frog I try to be a fish, nope. A bird, nope. A toad? Who would want to be a toad? And when the frog is just a frog and doesn’t worry about contentment, and all the other organisms in the pond do the same, the pond keeps going—a system of causes and effects that feed back on one another and keep a balance. Life is life, luminous, raining, time to brumate, a fly goes by.

This is enlightenment, nothing special they say: seeing things as they are, doing what is in front of you to do. Change—like a colder winter—may kill a chicken or two. But the other chickens will just go on, having eaten the dead girls as nutrition against the cold (Which isn’t “cold” to them but a bodily need for warmth; notice the difference between when you say “warmth,” and when you say “warm.”). No mourning for long over a useful loss. Yes, the hierarchy will need to be rearranged. But so it goes.

So to be a good me is…what? To just be a lump and sit on the sofa? Well, if a frog just sat on the lake and watched the flies go by, he would starve, and if other frogs followed suit, the lake would be overcome with flies. If one frog tried to kill all the others, the pond also would eventually be overcome with flies.

That is what we learn from fairy tales, and it is true. We are systems within systems, we have work to do like a stomach. If we don’t do it, everything suffers. If we do it too self-consciously, and want to do it better, we unbalance it. I am trying to just be a frog and get the fly passing by. It’s tired anyway and is on its last wings. Not that it's complaining.