I like to watch the chickens when I buy their eggs from the farmer.  Even though I am placing my money in his tin, and counting back my change, I know this exchange is between me and those small birds.

Yesterday in Vermont, I bought a carton of eggs from some chickens.  The carton wouldn’t close; a tall, stately egg angled up the corner.  Inside, the orbs, with their varied hues and sizes, sat in each preformed cup, too unique to sit perfectly.  In the array of twelve, there was not one genuine, certifiable medium.  The eggs were a cosmos without uniformity, without conformity.  In the end, the lopsided, the wide, the pointy, the small, the round, and the jumbo-sized all came together to make my family’s breakfast.

A world without averages, a world without mediums, is a world without mediocrity. It is a world without boundaries, without hedges and barbed wire, a world where potential is determined by what is inside an individual, and beauty is determined by the delicate shades and contours of one’s soul.  It is a world where the greatest work of all is what is done and surrendered up for the good of others.

We have the ability to sustain and nourish each other.  The world could be a beautiful place, if we just understood that its fullness is meant for everyone. I want to be in that kind of carton.