Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure.  It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.  We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous?  Actually, who are you not to be?  You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.  There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.  We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us. It is not just in some; it is in everyone.

And, as we let our own light shine, we consciously give other people permission to do the same.  As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.  -Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love

A couple of years ago as the result of some vigorous coaxing from my neighbor, we made the decision to adopt.  He’d been after me for some time about it and I’d put him off successfully.  I’m too old to start again, I said and I meant it.  It was one thing to do it when I was 35 and I was able to bolt from a dead sleep at the slightest sound of a whimper, but at 45 my reactions had slowed just a bit and getting out of bed in the middle of the night involves a 2 or 3 minute conversation with my various ambulatory parts, just to make sure we’re all on the same page.

"Not that kind of adoption," he said to me when I revealed my fears of inadequacy to him during a chat over the fence one day.  "Come on, this will be easy."

Famous last words.    I have a soft spot for the puppy dog faces of my children.  It's one of my greatest flaws.  And so, against my better judgement, I acquiesced.  After the seventy third “please mom, pleeeeease” I said OK and within a few weeks we became the proud parents of 6 of the cutest, fluffiest baby chicks ever to be hatched.  Not that I'm bragging or anything.  We promptly named them Hawk, Fluffy, Clucky, KK (kamikaze), Pepper and Maurice.  They lived in a galvanized metal palace in my youngest son’s kingdom, a sort of utopia where they had everything they could want and the sun shone brightly all day long.

We all had our favorites.  Mine was Maurice, who secured her name after a long, drawn out naming battle with my kids who wanted to call her “King”.  “What a ridiculous name for a chicken,” I said to them during one of the discussions feigning indignance.  “I think we should name her Maurice.”  They wrinkled their noses at the suggestion.  In the end, I won.  (I am the mom, after all.)

Maurice was what they call a “polish” hen.  She had a beautiful little tuft of feathers on the top of her head.  She looked a bit like a Las Vegas show girl, the ones that high step their way down the stairs in the casino shows.  The others were beautiful as well, but none of them quite as spectacular as Maurice.

It turns out, the other girls were jealous.  No sooner had Maurice and the others moved into their beautiful, custom made “chicken digs”,  did the girls decide that they had better take Maurice down a notch and began to peck at her beautiful crest of feathers.  The pecking became so intense that after a while, that Las Vegas showgirl look was replaced by the look of a balding monk, her feathers encircling a bald, raw and very unattractive, center.

It’s funny how similar animal behavior is to our own. The media is full of stories about athletes, actors, politicians and other notables, admired for their talents only to be vilified and cut down when they get too high.  We are desperate for someone or something to look up to and then threatened when it is presented to us.  We are afraid of our own brilliance.  We look to others to find it.  Rather than celebrate our own light we rush to squelch it, minimizing what we are so that others will not resent us or feel threatened.

Today in writing group we wrote about a mirror, a magical mirror that could take destructive reflections and smash them into nothingness, replacing them with a reflection of brilliance, the brilliance that is in each one of us.  Write what you see in the mirror, I encouraged them.  Write about your own light.  Let the image in the mirror shine bright for all to see.

This morning, as I went up to collect the eggs, I thought about Maurice.  Over time the pecking got worse.  Chickens can be pretty harsh.  Not unlike their human counterparts, they look for weakness and go for the jugular.  Pretty soon, Maurice’s feathery crown lost its luster and over the winter, we lost Maurice.  As odd as it may sound, it made me sad.  Maurice, like the other two-legged adoptees, had become one of the family.  But more than that, she was a symbol of brilliance and light, of the reflection of uniqueness that is in all of us and a reminder that we cannot and should not... hide.