Once I saw a curious sight. There is some embarrassment in my saying. I have not told of this fully to anyone, so do not laugh or scold my folly. I am a simple man, but I am no fool.

It was a single chicken that I saw. It ran as chickens do, a random path across its pen. Upon seed and stone, it stepped and pecked, as was its way and right. Idly I watched, perhaps reflecting on the nature of the bird and comparing it to my own course and habits, dear to my loving  heart. Am I so different from that bird, scratching out food for myself and family, day after day as the sun's light allows?

The hen did then disappear behind a reach of shrub, a stubble of bramble bush near a fence. I watched. I watched again and waited. The bird did not emerge. I went and I inspected. My thought was that the fence was breached. A gap of escape might need a mend. There was nothing, not hole or opening, no bird, not even feather plucked and left upon the dusty ground. It had not flown — barely could it have, if it had wanted, it being as flightless as a dog or any animal of the farm. It was not there hiding nor had it fallen lame or collapsed there faint upon the ground. But clearly, it was gone.

I knew this bird, not by name or personality, but by colour and markings distinct. And never again did it I see, not walking in the enclosure, not in its roost, not dead from injuries in some shadowed corner of the field or farm.

I thought to myself, "There is more at work here than chickens and fences and bramble bushes. The bird has gone, but I cannot explain the how or why. It has not taken to disguise or to a deceitful way, for the count does clearly show: one bird less, one bird that is no more."

Some might dismiss this mystery as a nonsense path. What is of concern in having one bird more or one bird less? Others may vex and worry in the theft a single chicken, a meal lost or a bit of money gone. But with certainty, I tell you: it is not about the bird alone. The bird is nothing in the scheme of things. It is in the moment of disappearance that comes the revelation. In it, there is something of the beyond, the otherness that comes parcelled and entwined to our own life. 

To that bird I owe a debt. But, greater still, in her disappearance my reach does now extend halfway to the heavens. What was here is now gone, but with it my very thoughts and soul have been released and freed.

I speak to you now of this because you are a person to understand. You are one in a thousand or perhaps a thousand thousand. You are one to know the difference between a bird and the beauty of our being. Let it be true, for it is this that I declare: this vanishing bird reveals the logic of the very heavens that shine above. It shows to me that there is more. I know it to be so.

I suppose there were but few days in the months that followed that I did not give thought to the strangeness of that chicken. Could its disappearance only have been to perplex and so to distract? There were moments when I found myself leaning heavy upon my shovel, gazing upon the empty field and the hills beyond, no thought of work, but filled with ponderings of that bird and where it was now to be found. I caught myself and did scold. "It is for work that you are here, to dig and sow this field and not to play with thoughts of riddle birds and mysteries of your own invention and idle entertainment." 

But is there, tell me, any greater work among us to be done than to ponder what is possible and beyond the everyday? I thought of it some and then some more until in circles my thoughts did scurry. And then to finish and be done, I told myself that perhaps there was no bird at all, that like a clever joke the seeing and then unseeing was a deception and the whole thing an entrapment and I, in certainty and truth, was the fool to have fallen.

Yet still, to this very moment, I do not mention this event to any other in the way I tell it now to you. They will laugh and, in the telling, something of my wonder and childlike awe will be lost. 

But to you, my friend, I tell both of bird and of her perplexing exit. 

You are one, I know, who can accept. I can see it in your eyes. They do not roll with jape or jeer at my wonder. They do not dismiss the fantastic, favouring the dull. There is no mockery from you. You do me honour in your accepting silence.

Draw close, I say. Listen on.