The Tyranny of Now

Author’s Note: This essay is an installment of the Sunday series Reports from the High Wood where I detail what we are growing, building, and doing here on our little homestead in Vermont. They include deeply personal anecdotes, details about projects, and plans. Every Wednesday I publish a free essay for Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree about what knowledge we can glean from the changing seasons, but these Sunday essays are raw, vulnerable, and therefore exclusive to paid supporters. Please consider supporting this project if you do not already to unlock this full essay, a voiceover, and the entire archive of my writing. Thank you.

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A fox killed my rooster.

I think it did anyway. I haven’t found signs to confirm it, but while eating lunch a few days ago with my family, my mother-in-law looked out the window and exclaimed “A fox is chasing the chickens!” She went on to explain “It just chased one into the forest!” Honey Boy, our new rooster who had only been with us for two weeks, had tangled with the fox and was now luring it away from his hens. Smart boy. Brave boy. We never had problems last year with predators and decided to continue to free range the chickens, but sometime in the last month, a fox sniffed out our coop and has been watching, waiting for our guard to drop. I had hoped Honey Boy escaped the fox and was just hiding in a tree somewhere. Then a day passed. Two. Three. Honey Boy is not coming back. We take a great deal from the forest and sometimes it takes something back. A blood-toll we pay to balance the scales. I told my little girl the bad news that I didn’t think Honey Boy survived. She responded with a pout. “I…g-guess that means no chicks…” and I felt the reflexive urge to find a replacement for dear Honey Boy immediately, to stop that little lip from quivering.

Stay golden, Honey Boy.

I went inside and began browsing craigslist and Facebook Marketplace for a new roo. Few options right now, but there’s one an hour’s drive north of here. There are a few closer but those people want money and roosters are normally free. I began writing emails to the posters anyway. That urge to rush out for a new rooster wasn’t just about the flock or my little girl’s quivering lip. It was the same itch that drives us to order a gadget the moment it launches, to refresh our feeds for instant news, to demand answers before a question is fully formed. We live under a tyranny of now, where speed is king and waiting is equated with dying. Amazon delivers tomorrow, AI familiars solve problems in seconds, and every pause feels like failure. We so easily get caught in the break-neck electric current of modernity. What do we fail to notice when we let speed steal our time? We run so fast looking for a cure, a replacement, a fix. How do we slow down and just let it hurt?

This is what I did to break free from the tyranny of now while still cheering up my little girl: