The Sister-Twins Enriching Your Life

When the bees rained down on me, I had two choices.  To panic, or to merge. It was 2010 and I had never been around a bee hive before.  I was visiting a honey bee sanctuary, but having a clump of bees fall on top of me wasn’t exactly how I thought the day would go.

I wouldn’t say I was particularly adept at merging at the time, or even knew what that meant, but I do know it happen.  Something shifted in me so immediately, that I was no longer just Ariella.  I was Ariella and these bees crawling over my skin and under my skirt.  I was ecstatic.

To be ecstatic means to stand outside oneself, or to enter into a state of rapture.  It is one of the moment of magic we sometimes get to encounter through experiences with music, dance, art, eros, nature, and ceremony.   I talk about magic a lot, but what I’m really talking about is the moments where everything seems to come together in some kind of divine synchronicity.  It’s the moments when you touch something ineffable.

Magic affirms life in this world and in the Otherworld.

The bees came into my life in a cascade of magic.  One holy, synchronistic event after the next.  They pounded down the doors of my heartbreaks again and again, lathering my raw sorrows with balms of beeswax and honey.

I was looking at my daughter today, thinking about the magic that brought her here.  The tired years on longing and praying.  The synchronicities that brought the donor father into my life.  The bee swarm on the day she was conceived.

This was followed by the thought, “I’m not really experiencing much magic anymore.”

Hold it! Don’t scoff.  Of course there is magic in every day life with a baby.  What I was referring to, is the kind that happens when you’re on your way home from work and decide to take the long way round, by the sea, just because you can, and no one is waiting for you.  And the whales that appear just as you step out onto the bluff.  I’m talking magical events.  These can be somewhat easier to come by when you aren’t a full time working solo parent.

The truth is, life with a toddler is all magic and all mundane and the same time.  It’s the same with bees and beekeeping. There’s an awful lot of regular, old to-do lists in beekeeping.

My relationship with the bees isn’t quite as mystical as it once was.  This is because they are literally less mysterious to me.  I understand them better.  I understand their behavior, to the best of my ability.  It feels more like a long marriage, when the initial romance fades, but new layers of discovery and depth present themselves as long as we stay curious and open.

Suddenly, there is great beauty, and dare I say, magic in the mundane.

The mundane and the magical are sister-twins.  They are symbiotic forces of good.  You can actively choose to oscillate between the two, brining that much more richness and meaning to your life.

However you have to be willing to do two things:

1. Believe that magic is possible for you

2. Embrace the mundane when it’s time to return

You may be someone drawn to the bees for mystical reasons.  Wonderful. Be prepared for the reality of the day to day life of a beekeeper.

You may be fixated on the abc’s of beekeeping, dotting all your i’s and t’s along the way.  Wonderful.  Be prepared for their magic to seep into your life and sweep you off your feet unexpectedly.

What we love most is always connected to a sense of magic, but what sustains that love is the day to day reality of being in relationship with it.

I may not be having euphoric meditations on the daily, but my daughter is also no longer a whisper on the wind.  She is real, solid, present, and not particularly interested in all the mystical experiences I had in my long journey to bring her into this world.

We move between states of being, and stages of life.  The bees show us this over and over again as they expand, contract, go inward, reappear, expand, swarm, and start again.  They show us what it is to encounter the numinous and batten down the hatches when appropriate.

Moving between the magical and mundane of bees and beekeeping is how I run my 10 month apprenticeship.

Tending the Sacred Hive: Women’s Beekeeping Apprenticeship is open for enrollment for our January 2023 program.

May your experience of every day reality be always threaded with a bit of magic.

Loving the Land As It Is

California has always been hot and dry, but not this dry. There have always been fires, but not this many, not this big.

When I look at the land I feel parched. I feel an aversion to this field where my bees reside. I don’t want to be in it. There are too many stickers and burrs. I love this field in the winter and spring when it turns soft and green. In my mind, there’s a voice that thinks the soft green field is “right”, and the dry parched field is “wrong”.

Intellectually, I am aware that nothing in nature can be be broken down to such binary statements, but there is also an animal body in me, sniffing the air, and feeling the cracked earth beneath my shoes.
“Move away from it”, says the animal. Find shelter, water, shade. “You don’t know how to feel safe here.”

Psychology tells us to love the wounded parts of ourselves. Can we do the same with this earth? What does it feel like to extend love toward the brittle, dry field? How do we do this authentically, without falling into the trappings of “love and light” spiritual bypass. Can you love the rattlesnake while listening to its warning?

I am in love with this green earth, but often when imagining my love for nature I picture rich valleys, vernal springs, shaded woodlands. I don’t live near any of those environments. I live in dry dry dry California. How do we let ourselves love exactly where we are? It’s almost as hard as learning to love exactly WHO you are, scars and all.

What if, even knowing the imbalance this dry field represents, I gave it an offering of my love. Not a prayer to be different or verdant or “fixed”. To love it for everything it is in this time of profound environmental turbulence.

This is where to work is. Not just forest bathing trips, and meditations by a crystal spring, but a raw, uncomfortable commitment to place. Like a long marriage, with its pitfalls and its grace, can we choose again and again to love the land, even in our animal grief for what it’s become?