What Was I Saying By How Much I Fed The Chickens?

Also at http://ulteriorharmony.org/?p=702

A couple days ago, I got called out for overfeeding the chickens. Slightly, the turkeys too.

The young chicks are so numerous and so voracious, there's no chance of overfeeding them--I'm hauling out a 50lb sack of their feed every other day, and every morning their bowls are picked clean.

But the feed is too expensive to have it ending up on the ground because the chickens not cleaning it up well due to abundance.
Ooh, way to chastise and chasten me! You all know how much I dislike waste. Chickens, with their ability to clean up, are patron saints of the blessed realization that there is no such thing as waste, so I could have blamed on myself pretty hard for making very-chickens wasteful! But I haven't been beating up on myself quite so much of late, since all that time on the road. Just like the "injuring the attack-rooster" incident (which I shared on Facebook and may tell in more detail here as things shape up), I'm recognizing that this is part of the learning curve. In fact, it's part of "knowing what you're looking at" once again--knowing how to gauge food consumption.

As I fed this morning, I was meditating on what feeding these chickens meant to me--why it was that I'd ended up overfeeding them. Turned out, my heuristic hadn't been "Chickens need x amount of food per day." Instead, it had been "I'm feeding someone else's chickens and I really want to show that I'm responsible and reliable." If there's visibly food in their feeders, the message is "I won't neglect your precious birds." In retrospect, I might have communicated my worth more appropriately by underfeeding: "I treat your expensive feed with respect."

I'm glad to have taken the metaphoring and nonverbal communicating out of the "how much feed will they eat?" equation. Who knew so much could be said with farm chores?

***Diving in in medias res*** I know it's been over two weeks since my last post, and that this is my first post from my new abode! The easiest way to break a hiatus is simply to dive into the middle of it, so, voilà. As I continue to ponder my "dual blog and what is the blog about anyway" existential challenge, though, it does occur to me that a continual thread of mine is investigation of metaphors, so I'm contemplating how that might be promoted and centralized.
Otherwise, here I am--what do you want to hear about?

Sending desert love!
Ela.