baby daddies of any gender

on thursday i heard farmer yon, who runs Hattie Carthan garden, say i’m looking for baby daddies of any gender. someone who can care about beings other than their fucking self. someone who can teach the chicks how to drink water.

i asked someone else at the garden if she was talking about chicken baby daddies** or people baby daddies, and they confirmed that she was talking about people. my next question was how can a person teach a chick to drink water, they said i’ve never done it so i didn’t know.

i am struck that things so basic to staying alive actually need to be taught, to be learned, to be modeled, to be practiced. like drinking water. like telling the truth.

i am pretty good at drinking water, and i am still learning how to tell the truth — which does not come naturally as a white american person. we suffer from incoherence, and some of us are trying to recover.

the people who i have felt most loved by insisted on truth. they told me the truth, were willing to withstand the brambles of ego/conditioning to challenge my lies. sometimes the lies were ones i had told myself for so long i mistook them for truth. sometimes the lies were inherited from this destructive culture.

“Jimmy was watching him, too, with those astounded, vulnerable eyes, and Arthur realized that Jimmy was never going to be misled by anything Arthur might say.”1

maybe love hurts because it asks us, gently or ferociously, to quit lying. and maybe love calls us to know what we know, that is, to act on what we know.

love as a refusal to be misled, love as an intensity of regard that deceit withers before. love as insistence that you know how to hydrate, how to refresh, little chick.

**chicken baby daddies of any gender incarnate: