A hive cannot exist without its bees, nor can a single bee exist for long without the hive. The hive's task: transformation of sweetness and light into nourishment and deeper sweetness. Every bee has a job, which changes as she grows older. She helps raise the young, feed the queen, guard the hive, and gather nectar and pollen. When she has flown her wings to nothing, she dies peacefully and her sisters remove her from the hive, where she becomes one with the land that nourished her. Male bees have the very important job of carrying on the genetic code so that hives can be strong and plants can be fertilized and grow fruitful. The queen's job is to lay eggs, ensuring the future of the hive.
I got this idea lifetimes ago that I needed to be bigger than I am, more powerful, caring for others that nothing bad could ever happen. But my insight today was this: I am not a hive, I am a bee. I have my job, and it is crucial to the great Hive, but I am not a Hive and I need not do the job of a hive. It is not my job to save anyone when it wasn't their time to be pulled from the water. Or in the metaphor of bees, it is not my job to make all the honey by myself. Only to provide the piece of the puzzle I am called to right now, and to sing my song of connection and creation.
We know our tasks by following the light, the nectar of life, and the hum of our Hive. That hum come from individual bees and from the whole collective. At this point I am called to be still, to listen, and to let my task be revealed.
May your place in the light be made clear, my friend. Blessed Bee!
I'm going through some shit. Don't know if it's a Dark Night of the Soul, or what, but I'm coming apart at the seams. I also don't know what started it all, or how long it will last, or any useful information that would still my freaking-out head a little bit. But there are layers: something I'm trying to write, which is forcing me to deal with some old, shoved-under-the-rug emotions; a psychic reading my hubby received; general stress about doing everything right; cutting out sugar; and heightened food sensitivities. All of these layers have woven together into a tapestry called Panic Attacks. Racing heart, sweaty palms and feet, dizziness, fear, and jelly legs. Got tested for hypoglycemia, anemia, and thyroid problems. All fine. Trying to gently allow the stuffed anger, sadness, and fear to come up. Trying to not get completely overwhelmed. Putting my life on hold, which is hard when I'm a homeschooling mom to two smart and emotionally sensitive kids.
While I feel frightened and overwhelmed, I am also receiving little signs of support from the universe. All one can do in the middle of a panic attack is breathe, or try to, and pray. And today, in little nudges, I got some small assurance that everything happens within God's arms, and I will be okay. Like a song the kids haven't played in ages that they played on repeat, a song from my childhood that brings up layers of sadness and also a sense of being cared for. Like in the midst of my creating a rebirth/spring altar, my nursery plants arrived (pear, forsythia, and grape!), and I had just enough time to put them in the ground before it rained. Like the rain, which calms my selkie self and reminds me that it's okay to cry.
As I planted one of the dwarf pears, I shook apart the rock-hard clay soil that hadn't seen sunlight in possibly 60 years, and I let it represent the old stuck parts of me, the fear of being myself. Thunder rolled in the distance, and at first I felt afraid, for people do get struck by lightning here, but then I let it be the fire of transformation, the flash of anger I need to safely let out, and the passion I am trying to allow myself to own. Then I planted the little dormant tree and asked the devas to ground pear in my yard. I dedicated these pears to the sweetness of growth, and to crafting life where there was stuckness.
I came across this article written in 2010 and somehow never published (it was in my Draft folder!). Though today is cold and snowy, the essay is still timely. --Clea
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I love all the seasons for their unique gifts and beauty, but I get sort of manic in the spring. The snow has melted, the nights grow warmer, and the seeds I ordered in January have all arrived. It is time to put my plans and ideas into action. I get to put the first spring seeds and seedlings in the ground: radishes, kale, Brussels Sprouts, lettuces…
I don’t just put plants or seeds in the dirt, though. I see gardening as a co-creative process between Nature and me. The seeds with all their fiery potential meet the fire of the Sun, and between lies the sweet wind, sacred water, and my loving attendance. I have the plan, and She Who Makes Things Grow puts my plan into action. When I plant seeds, I first hold them in my palm and feel into them. I thank them for their contribution to the planet and my life, and I put them in the ground. I cover them with soil, water them lightly, and take a moment to pause. I call into my garden the energy of whatever plant these little babies will become. Obviously the plants will grow, and even thrive, without my doing this. I feel, though, that working with the energy of the plant as well as the physical process of gardening aligns me with the greater powers at work.
We are deeply tied to the “natural world;” we are in fact a part of it. In a world of cell phones, a thousand television channels, satellite radio and the World Wide Web, it can be all to easy to forget this. I remember this truth when I tend my garden. I am surrounded with the hummus scent of soil microbes and wakening grass. My fingernails and every crease in my hands are black with dirt. The surface of my skin cools against the spring winds, yet I peel off layers as the Colorado sun sinks through fleece and cotton. It is not uncommon at a mile high to garden in a tank top even in February or March. Of course a spring snow shower can come at any time….
On the sunny days, the fat radish seeds go into the earth, a promise of the crunch and bite to come. I sprinkle another bed with mesclun mix, and dream of early salads. On calm days I sometimes lug all my seedlings out into the bright sun, and do my best to remember to bring them in before dark. While the seeds and baby plants promise a bounty of freshness, I promise them life, a chance to contribute to the turning Wheel. My muscles, blood, and breath dance with these neophytes, bringing them into the turning of time – and bringing myself more fully into the Great Dance as well.
Gardening brings me into real space and time. The practice connects me with the earth, my neighbors, and the food economy. A friend recently asked me what I would grow if I could only grow one thing. What a preposterous question! Even if I lived in a high rise with a teeny balcony, I would grow herbs and salad out the back door, and more plants in a community plot. Growing my food is a response deep within me to my roots as a descendant of farmers, to my spirit that honors the sacred earth, and to my mind that eschews corporate agribusiness control over my dinner table. I feel in fact that I do not do enough.
When I talk to my seeds and to the plants as they grow, blooming, sprouting, reaching, dreaming, I thank them for their hard work converting sunlight to usable energy. I thank them for gracing my yard. I thank them for inspiring me to exercise daily with my shovel and garden gloves. Then I take a quiet moment to reflect on my place in the here-and-now. In this quiet, the garden speaks back to me. Through its vibrant greenness it tells me to breath, trust, know we are All One, not only on a virtual sphere, but right here in this moment of sunlight and breath and stone.
Want to grow a garden this spring? Plant early spring vegetables a few weeks before the last average frost. Include some of the following:
Arugula
Beets
Broccoli
Radishes
Salad greens
Kale
Dandelion greens
Chives
Green onions
Need space? Many cities have community garden organizations. Check out the American Community Garden Association’s website at www.communitygarden.org.
I'll update this blog post as I come across more books that express nature mysticism or a sacred connection with nature in children's books. Bonus points for beautiful illustrations!
If you have any suggestions, please let me know in the comments!
Singing Down the Rain by Joy Coley
Step into a small town where all the children are friends, but a brought
has made the adults so grumpy they can't stop arguing! Only a miracle
can heal this divided town. People are so hopeless, they almost don't
recognise that that miracle when it appears as a women who specialises
in rainsongs, Yet slowly the townspeople realise that with this faith
they can sustain each other during the dry times, and then sing down the
rain together.
Under the Lemon Moon by Edith Hope Fine
One night Rosalinda is awakened by a noise in the family’s garden. She
is astonished to see a man creeping away with a sack of fruit from her
beloved lemon tree. Rosalinda seeks out La Anciana for advice. The wise
old woman offers an inventive way to help the tree and the man driven to
steal her lemons. Set in the Mexican countryside, this charming story
explores how it feels to get gifts — and to give them.
The Secret Place by Eve Bunting
A small boy finds a secret place in the city that he shares with a white egret, mallards, and even ducklings. A book about finding nature in the heart of the grunginess of the city, and a child's connection with that sacred discovery.
What Does the Sky Say? by Nancy White Calstrom
"What does the sky say?" a child asks. What does it say on a winter day,
or on a Saturday night, or when the rain beats on its chest, or its
mouth is full of moon? A child watches the sky in changing seasons and
in all kinds of weather and learns to listen to its voice. In "What Does
the Sky Say?", author Nancy White Carlstrom's imaginative and poetic
text encourages all readers, both very young and older, to wake up to
and participate in the opportunities for joy and learning each day
offers. And Tim Ladwig's extraordinary illustrations perfectly capture
the moods of weather and season, the magic of childhood, and our deep
connection to all creation and its Creator.
Owl Moon by Jane Yolen
"As expansive as the broad sweep of the great owl's wings and as close
and comforting as a small hand held on a wintry night . . . The visual
images have a sense of depth and seem to invite readers into this
special nighttime world."--School Library Journal, starred review. Full
color. 1988 Caldecott Medal Book.
"There is no single bee – as there is no single human being. It’s a
product of a limited world view. The single bee is only one individual
part of the bigger entity of the entire bee hive....This can serve
as a beautiful metaphor or mirror for our own existence: That we are
just one individual part of a bigger entity: The earth’s ecosystem and
the entire universe." - From themelissagarden.com
I took my first beekeeping class this morning. I've been stung by bee fever! I hope to get a hive next spring, spending the year learning more about bee guardianship, figuring out where to put my top bar hive, and reading reading reading all I can get my hands on.
At the same time, a group of friends and I are ready to take real steps towards a homeschooling community center. In the next month we will start writing our non-profit document and making it real.
It occurred to me the other day that all these projects express the energy of building strong
community. Bees are all about community. We all know a hive to be the quintessential community, with the queen, workers and drones each fulfilling their purpose being - ahem - busy bees. But honey bees and other pollinators also teach us about the health of our own human communities. We've seen this recently with hive collapse and other bee diseases that have been created by humanity's obsession with monetary wealth. Monsanto and Bayer focus so exclusively on making more money that they are not considering the health of bees, the soil, water, or people, and bee colonies are suffering. Climate change is causing or contributing to droughts around the world that is making bee keeping near impossible. Without water, you can't have bees. This is a global phenomenon affecting the price of honey, small business, and large commercial beekeepers. Then there is the way we grow food in most industrialized nations, namely in monocrops like acres and acres of only almond trees. In a normal ecosystem, there would be other flowers providing bees with nectar throughout the year, and bees wouldn't have to be trucked around (the process of which kills millions of bees each year) to follow the flowers. Our money-obsessed and "efficiency" obsessed society has created a culture of insanity, and the bees cannot or will not put up with it.
So I'm sitting with this energy of community, and contemplating how humanity (at least in industrialized nations) is having to rethink what community means to us. For many people it no longer means the local church of your chosen denomination, the office, and the neighborhood school. Or if your community does include one or more of these, I would guess that there is some aspect of those communities that are stretching or which you question. You don't have to be a homesteading hippie to be part of this shift, either. Our fears about safety in schools, the debate about same-sex marriage, a Jesuit pope, Facebook, and working from home are all examples of how the idea of community is evolving.
I wonder how bees might teach us about community. Not just in an old-school way, where each has her own place in the hive and it's all about the safety of the hive, but in an evolving way, involving sacred geometry, transformation, and the dialectic of hive versus individual. As we humans evolve, let us call on these higher levels of hive expression as guides. And let us not forget to hum as we create a new world!
While you peruse seed catalogs and plan this spring’s garden,
keep the end of the season in mind. Your garden’s plants offer more than
beauty, medicine, and food, they also offer a promise for the future in
their seeds. If you are a slightly more advanced gardener, or want to
be, plan to save some of your seeds this summer by
letting the plants go to seed.
You will need heirloom varieties — hybrid
seeds do not reproduce true to type. Many seeds sold today are hybrids.
Check to see that yours are heirloom or F2; F1 hybrids will not produce
the same plant you gather them from.
Some seeds are more complicated to save than others. These need to be
pollinated carefully (like corn) or are difficult to gather (like
tomato). If you have never saved seeds from your garden’s plants, start
with the easy ones like lettuces, orach, spinach, peas, beans, parsley and squash (that were planted
far away from any other squash variety).
To learn more about seed saving, check out Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth and my own Sacred Land.
65 million Americans garden, which adds up to a lot of money spent at
garden centers each year. You can join the growing
movement of home gardening without spending a lot of your own money by
using the following tips:
- Grow from seed. A lot of vegetables and flowers
are easy to grow from seed without any special equipment. Buy organic
seed from a good source like Seeds of Change or Botanical Interests, participate in seed
trades, or bum a few off a gardener friend. Germinate the seed by
putting it between damp paper towels placed in a plastic bag in a warm
spot like the top of the hot water heater. When the little root has
popped out, carefully plant the seed in potting soil (compost mixed with peat moss
works well) in a clean, used yogurt tub that has holes poked in the bottom. Keep them moist but not soggy.
Place them in a sunny window, or put them outside during the day and
bring them in at night till night temperatures get warm enough (about 40
degrees for warm season plants; 50 degrees average for tomatoes and
peppers) to plant outside in larger pots or a bed. I put my yogurt
containers on a tray for easy transport in and out of the house, and I
cover the trays with bird netting to discourage squirrels from digging
in the dirt.
- Compost. This reduces waste, improves your garden
soil, and saves money. Purchased compost is expensive and may not be
weed free. A great way to get materials for your compost is to collect
grass clippings, dropped fruit, and raked leaves from your neighbors. Last year we got bushels of wormy apples from a neighbor, and we have fabulous compost this spring.
- Propagate from other plants. Buy some rooting
hormone, which is about $5 for a nice sized bottle. To make more
perennials, ground cover, or shrubs from ones you already have and like,
or from ones your friends and neighbors have grown, cut a bit of a
branch off and dip it into the rooting hormone. Push this branch into
potting soil, water, and cover with a plastic bag till you see new
growth. Then plant in the ground in a hole amended with compost. Many
perennials (flowers that come back year after year) can also be divided,
which involved digging them up, breaking them into smaller clumps, and
replanting. Water well and feed with compost for best results.
- Take advantage of your city’s offerings. My city offers free mulch to residents. You bring a truck to their mulch dump site and they fill the back of the truck with wood chips.
The mulch is not the pretty bark chips you buy at a garden center, but
it works great as a covering for garden beds and around trees. It
conserves water, and as it breaks down it improves soil fertility. Your
city may offer compost, mulch, and even trees for free or cheap. See if
your city has a website with more information.
- Look for deals on Craigslist or Freecycle. I’ve seen free river rock, free horse manure, and cheap tools of all kinds listed on this great site. Even plants!
- Water by hand. Overhead sprinkler watering is a
huge waste of water, and therefore money, not to mention a sacred
resource. Use a watering head on your hose the turns off, or water with a
bucket and a smaller container like a soup ladle. Or better yet, install a timed drip system. Over time it will pay for itself in saved water.
- Collect gray water. Put a bucket in your shower
and another under your eaves to collect water, then use this water on
your grass or flowers. A rain barrel can also be used to collect rain
water, and this water used to water your veggies. If you have a plastic
rain barrel, store it out of the sun to reduce plastic particles in the
water. Cover it with screen to keep out bugs (especially mosquitoes) and empty often.
- Lean on community. You don't have to grow it all in your yard. Last year a friend posted on Facebook that he knew of a cherry tree loaded with fruit that the owners were offering to anyone who wanted to come harvest. Then in the fall we went as a homeschool group to a local farm and paid just a few dollars per person to pick bags and bags of produce. We had over 170 pounds of produce for only $10! What would your neighbors or friends like to grow? What do they have extra that they can trade?
- Look first at the markdown shelf. The scraggly, overgrown plants that don't look pretty anymore are moved to a mark down shelf at most gardening centers. With a little love you can nurse them back to help easily for a fraction of the cost.
Gardening doesn't have to break the bank. In what ways have you shared money in the garden?
Owl Moon by Jane Yolen
