squinky

We live somewhere with a ton of hawks and coyotes. Our coop was our quarantine project so we kind of overdid it. It’s 8-by-16-feet, surrounded on the sides and bottom with heavy gauge hardware cloth and a metal roof. Nothing can get into it.

The run, on the other hand, is about 30 feet along one side, chicken wire and covered with bird netting. We lost two of our girls when someone made a mistake and locked them outside in the run. A fox dug under and took them. I added a skirt along the ground to stop anything digging in but it’s not as good as the coop itself

Eggs. I bought the expensive ones once just for laughs and they taste great without the weird funk. Now I have my own chickens, and the eggs are better than anything in the store. It’s probably more expensive though!

Carrots and celery I always buy organic because they seem to take on the flavor of whatever they were watered with. It makes a difference there for me.

And tortillas, I get the local boutique ones instead of the national mass market ones. Big difference there.

I do basic mindfulness meditation, sort of a secular version of Buddhist meditation. I'll give a quick rundown:

• Find someplace quiet, and sit comfortably but in an upright and attentive posture if you can.
• Set a timer for something short and attainable. Three minutes to start? You can do one minute if you're intimidated, no problem.
• Close your eyes and listen to your breath. Feel the sensation of breathing. Focus on it as much as possible and as little else as you can. It shouldn't feel like a struggle, just a calm focus.
• You can't do it? That's normal. Allow your attention to go to what distracted you. Is it a sensation in your body? A worry? An idea? Allow it to happen, acknowledge it, and try to see if you can focus back on your breath.
• Now repeat. The timer is there so you don't distract yourself wondering about when to stop. Keep it up until you hear it beep.

That's the basics, and it's all you need to start with. Next you learn things like how to deal with persistent mental distractions, and some additional types of meditations that have different or additional goals and techniques.

One of the goals here is to build up a technique for helping your mind stay present and focused, "mindful", in whatever shape that takes for you. When my mind is completely restless and I can remember to do it, it helps a lot. It's certainly not a cure for ADHD, but it helps with daily functioning, and with the associated anxiety and self-worth issues that come along with mine.

Most of this is cribbed from Dan Harris, who used to be with ABC News, and wrote a book called "10% Happier", which talks a bit about his story and also has a decent surface-level overview of beginner meditation techniques. I caught him when he was on The Daily Show and he took 5 minutes to talk through the basics, and I tried it and was hooked.

I will say that up until recently I've gone around telling people that I've been a big meditator since I was a kid, but in my own mental health journey I've realized that the thing I've done since I was a kid is dissociating. And it's fine, retreating into my own little mental isolation like that is something that got me out of a lot of traumas, but even if it has bits in common it's not quite the same as meditation. And now I'm like a bodybuilder who realizes years into it that his form is all wrong, and has to back all the weight off and start over.