Why I don't like the phrase "find your purpose."

“Find your purpose” is a phrase I’ve never been too fond of.

It’s used to market to people’s pain points.  I would know.  I spent most of my early adulthood feeling like a an unmoored misfit, trying to make it in a music career, but feeling like (gasp) music wasn’t quite enough.  Don’t get me wrong, I breathe music.  I adored it as still do.  But, I didn’t know how to reconcile my love of music and performing, with the feelings of “what am I supposed to do with my life?”

Bees changed that of course, but that’s another story.  Now, almost a decade into this bee-centric career, I get asked a lot, why bees.

Let me tell you: bees are not my purpose.  Bees are the vehicle that powers my soul’s drive.

I’ve worked with marketing teams before, and they always ask me to “find your ideal client’s pain point.”  They want to know the “results” working with me will drive.  They get really excited if they can throw in the mouth-watering hook “find your purpose.”

But what if looking for purpose isn’t the point?  There are many direction I could have gone with my life.  It could have been music.  Or folklore.  Or therapy.  Or travel agent.  It needed up being bees, for now.  But it’s not just bees is it?  It’s bees, folklore, travel, dreams, women’s wisdom, shamanism, animism, eco-literacy, mythology, and spiritual ecology.

What if, it’s not so much a question of finding your purpose, but rather, asking what drive you.  What propels you forward in this one wild life?

It a way it’s the same question, but rather than finding a catch phrase or a job, you’re asking yourself what moves you to act, create, live.

For me, it’s a love of the animate earth.  Beyond that, it’s a drive to help people fall in love with the Earth.  You could fall in love through gardening, hiking, clouds, rocks, bats, phosphorescent seas.  You name it.  It was bees for me, but the bees are the vehicle, not the purpose.

What drives me is a belief.  The belief that if we fall in love with the earth (any aspect of it), we are more likely to develop a relationship with it.  And in developing a relationship with it, we learn to listen to it.  In learning to hear the non-human world, to love it, to relate to it, we naturally want to support it.  Whether that support looks like climate action or helping kids identify weird cool bugs, it doesn’t matter.  What matters, is that you have more love in your life, and that love is reciprocal.   

I believe that the only way we turn the tide on this massive ship of the Anthropocene is through falling in love to the point of relating, and from that point, finding different ways of being with the earth.

What about you?  What drives you?  What calls your soul onward?  Forget a catchy, well-defined purpose.  What does your soul ache for?

Bone Memory

Aurora on Dartmoor. Devon, England.

There is old memory in all of us. Or perhaps what I mean, is there is human animal memory in all of us. Call it ancestral, call it instinctual, call it past life. It comes from the same place. Bone memory.

I witnessed this in my daughter when friend and author, Sylvia Linsteadt took her up to the ancient bone lands of Dartmoor, where the crone mother presides over bog and changeable mists. Where young foals and lambs test their new legs.
We could not hike far. It was more of a wee ramble over stone and grass, avoiding prickly gorse, and foot-snaring holes.
Sylvia recognized the cuckoo’s call fist. Unmistakable. Just like the famous clocks. Cuckoos are good luck. To hear the first cuckoo of spring is incredibly fortunate. Indeed, other hikers stopped to listen and look for this rare blessing.
Of course we left the songbird offerings. My 2 year old daughter, understanding the magic of the moment then requested that we all take hands and dance a little fairy jig in a ring. She doesn’t know about fairies, or dancing jigs, or May Day dances, or any of the customs of her heritage, but there she was, directing us in a little dance. When she was finished, she requested we lay down on three separate stones, and close our eyes.

If you know anything about fairy lore, hearing a magic bird, dancing on the moor, and falling asleep on a rock is most certainly the beginning of an otherworldly tale.

She knew. Bone memory knew that here, in this land, as the newly born foals wobbled near their mothers, here is where you dance. Here is where you lay your mortal body against the ancient stone. Here is where some part of you remembers: yes, this. I know this. I am this. This place is in me. I recognize this land, because I am eternal, and all my grandmothers are alive within me.

A Galactic Spray

What is your relationship to the stars? The actual stars in the sky, not the metaphor, although that's lovely too.
Can you see them at night where you live? A few? Many? I grew up in a place where I could count shooting stars before bed and make up my own constellations. As a teenager, I sleep outside most of the summer, and well into the autumn. I would fall asleep staring at the expanse, memorizing the forms as they passed. I could tell time by the position on the stars. I knew what point of night it was if I woke in the dark. 

Daughter and I went camping for the first time. We laid in this hammock and slept as dusk crept across the mountain. We watched the trees become silhouettes. 
We cuddled at night by the fire before making our short, slow trek back up the road to our tent. It was the second night that she found the stars. Secure in my arms, head back, mouth open wonder. Not a word. No exclamation. Silent wonder. 

A galactic spray. From the root words, gala and g(a)lakt, meaning milk. The milk of the stars with it's forever-river pouring sweet nourishment into our imaginations.

When was the last time you were in silent wonder? Arrested by beauty. Alive with the impossibility of such magnificence.

#stars #earth #nature #breastfeeding #lactation#milkofthestars #galaxy #milkyway #camping #motherhood

For the Love of a Tree

I remember when I first read the Holy Thorn tree had been cut down in an act of vandalism. I cried out and burst into tears. I was at my parents home and was crying too inconsolably to tell them what was wrong. I was acting like someone had died. In many ways, someone had.

We can wax poetic about how we’re all interconnected, but the true sense of kinship and belonging to this Earth happens in relationships. A relationship to one beach, one particular herb, one particular tree. Relationships that go beyond imagining the tree has a spirit, to the simple feeling of “this tree is my friend.”
I get so overwhelmed with existential grief around what’s happening to our planet, but there’s no healing when it’s that far out of our scope of relating. When the grief is for one place, one being, one spirit or group of spirits lost, then there is movement, catharsis, and possibly resonant change. When we feel feel the grief of lost relationships, we begin to understand just how tied we are to the more-than-human world. Sometimes we learn of our belonging through our loss.

I have made pilgrimages to Wearyall hill and the Glastonbury Thorn since I was 17. I knew this tree well. I have given it many offering, tied many wishes to its protective ring. The Holy Thorn was a wishing tree, a blessing tree. Across Celtic nations, there is an old tradition of tying cloth to sacred trees, both standing alone, or near sacred wells. The cloths are often wishes or prayers for healing, health, or good fortune. This tree, in particular, was connected to a local legend that claims Joseph of Arimathea visited this sacred hill, while carrying the Holy Grail into hiding. For some, this is the Grail of King Arthur’s legends, and they say the Once and Future king himself is buried in the local Abbey grounds. They also say this is where the mists parted and the priestess isle of Avalon was revealed in Arthur’s final journey beyond the veil.

The Grail Joseph of Arimathea was said to carry, is also though to have been Mary Magdelene herself, as well as the children she bore with Jesus, as the grail is considered symbolic of the Magdelene line and essence. There is even a telling that Joseph of Arimathea brought a 12 year old Jesus to Glastonbury during one of his trade missions. The tree represents Joseph’s staff, which he planted upon arrival to Wearyall hill.

This land is full of myth and legend. What I share only scratches the surface of the confluence of myths living in the landscape.

This tree too on a deeply symbolic meaning to me, but it was also a tree I came to know as friend over the years.

It was both a symbol of the greater mysteries of the sacred, as well as a point of reference. A place where I could tangibly feel the meeting of the worlds: nature and human, magical and mundane, this world and the otherworld. It was a place both solid and liminal at the same time. Many prayers of mine were given to that tree. Many have been answered.

I think in our quest to reunite with ourselves as relational members of the more-than-human world, we have to remember that it starts with individual relationships. It starts with love affairs. These can be near and far. A moment with a sea turtle in an underwater queendom. A conversation with a rock in a desert. A friendly swell of the heart when seeing a favorite creek spot. A deep sigh when gazing on a familiar mountain. Who have you befriended in this wide, wonderful earth? Which cave, tree, cactus, or meadow calls you kin? Calls you home to your own belonging?

The 3 first photos are of the intact tree in 2013. The last is 2015, after it was killed.

Embracing the Eco-Erotic

“And now you ask in your heart, 

‘How shall we distinguish that which is good in pleasure from that which is not good?’ 

Go to your fields and your gardens,

And you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower, 

But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee. 

For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life, 

And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love, 

And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.”

• Kahlil Gibran The Prophet

I had a dream last night where I was partner dancing with a beautiful stranger and someone broke us apart.  I protested, “but I’ve been single for six years!” This late into my pregnancy it’s actually quite surprising to dream about love.  While my dreams in the early stages of pregnancy were all about processing loneliness and the longing for the beloved made manifest, in the last few months I did something I haven’t tried in about a decade.  I stopped my dreaming practices.  As a dream teacher, this was rather uncomfortable, since living by example and maintaining my practices is so important to me.  Yet with the loosening of the threads that have made up the whole of my identity (a byproduct of pregnancy), I needed to let go of the “work” part of dreamwork, and just see what my daughter and I wanted to dream together.  

There’s been your fair share of chaotic nonsense dreams, but throughout the last few months, my dreams have been peppered with the sensuous and the erotic.  Not in the way of lovely mysterious encounters with dreamy ( <—- yes pun) men, but with the inherent eros that ripples through nature.  I have dreamt of bathing in thermal pools with mermaids, of swimming in a river canyon lined with blooming jasmine, of surfing with dolphins through rainbow phosphorescent seas, and of sailing on rope swings through a verdant forest.  All of these types of dreams carry a note of the sensuous mixed with exhilaration, a feeling we often attribute to intimate encounters, or falling in love.  However, these are all propelled by encounters with the natural world.  

Sitting at the edge of spring, and the edge of motherhood, I am becoming aware that these years of “singleness” (whatever THAT means), have also afforded me the opportunity to cultivate something precious.  A deep, wildly sensuous affair with the living earth.  Do you ever pick a single rose petal from a flower just to caress your lips with it until the petal becomes translucent?   Or go to the river early, when the water is still cool, just so you can feel the sun warm your skin as you dry out on smooth rocks?  Or inhale the scent of a beehive in May, eyes closed, feet bare?

Do you know what this kind of behavior can do to your imagination?  You can learn to inhale more than air.  To breath up the deep green of a temperate rainforest, or the indigo blue of a desert night.  You can see more in a ripple of hills and clouds than a horizon.  You can float into the hanging gardens of Babylon.  Hell, your own skin can bloom in peonies and anemones.  

I think, this is perhaps what bees do every day.  Riding waves of scent and light we only glimpse in our dreams.  Enfolded in flowers.  Submerged in the hum.

It’s also the inherent terrain of the child who is allowed to freely be with and of the Earth.  In the era of climate change and biodiversity loss, we need more than ever to cultivate this relationship with nature.  With the sensate experience of pleasure as it relates to sun, sky, wind, rain, sea, sand, fur, flower, snow, and stone.  Our ancestors most surely did.  Maybe not in the near past, but somewhere in your blood there are the whale-song memories of cultures who courted the moon and laid flowers at the feet of the sea.  

This kind of relationship to the beloved that is more-than-human is not simply a pleasure, it is a necessity.  When we feel more than our basic survival is at stake, when we feel our soul is entwined with this fluttering, heaving Earth, we change not just how we fight for it, but how we love.  

Food for Bees

Do you feed your bees?

Bees get their nutrients from flowers. Pollen provides protein, fatty acids and minerals, while nectar provides energy through carbohydrates (sugars) and minerals/vitamins.

The honey bees’ diet is nuanced and complex, gathered from the diverse floral offering of the bioregion and stored for consumption in the hive.

As bee stewards, we often need to be mindful of nectar sources and potentially feed our bees. Reasons to feed might include: a prolonged drought leading to a nectar dearth, a long winter, a baby colony, and inadequate forage in their habitat.

In conventional beekeeping, another reason to feed you bees is because you took too much of their food and have to feed them so they survive. 🙁

Here’s the catch: in most beekeeping practices people are taught to feed bees sugar. Even if you don’t take too much of their food, you are still expected to feed them sugar syrup for all the above mentioned reasons and also as stimulative feeding. When beekeepers feed bees too early in the spring, it stimulates the colony to start producing more bees. This is because the sugar coming in signals to the queen that there is a nectar flow and she needs to lay eggs for new foragers to be born. Beekeepers do this to get a jump start on spring and build up a bigger workforce toward human aims of production and capital.

The thing is, sugar is not honey. Sugar is not bee food. They can survive of it, but not forever. It’s hollow food. Ultimately, sugar syrup damages their digestion and weakens their immune system. Beekeepers say you can’t feed bees honey because it could contain the spores of a disease called foulbrood. This is true, however, it can be avoided if you know your honey source (talk to the beekeeper your sourcing from) and also know if foulbrood is reported in the area you live in.

If you are going to feed your bees to help keep them alive and support immune health, consider feeding them their own food: honey. If you have to feed them sugar, mix it with some honey or alternate between honey and sugar. Remember, honey is bee food, before it is human food.

Dismantling the Inner Patriarch

I couldn’t bring myself to write a Friday post ON Friday because I was in the middle of my own maelstrom of self-doubt. On Friday I flew to LA for the most incredible opportunity to speak at the Natural Beekeeping Conference put on by @Honeylove.

I had been invited to speak on the topics I often write about: why we keep bees and my experiences with bee shamanism. While I love these subjects, I am not used to talking about them at a conference in front of people with complex presentations on innovation, science, methodology and technique. ⠀

As the weekend went on I gathered so much applicable, fascinating information. I took copious notes. I listened to captivating conversations. But I also, quietly railed against my own nature, questioned my professional value, and felt exquisitely sensitive to the fact that my presentation was NOT about how to keep/save/study bees. It was about restoring our relationship with bees. I spoke a lot about love, mystery, and the liminal. ⠀

I wasn’t due to speak until the end, so I had all this time to question everything I stand for. To feel small as a woman. To feel like my work didn’t have value without quantifiable, tangible, physical proof. I fell for the top down model of valuing intellect over intuition. Patriarchy got me good. I was submerged in the quagmire of what happens when we let a world view tell us that one aspect of our humanity is more relevant than the other. It was fascinating.⠀

I basically gave a talk in support of all that was being suppressed by my own interior judge. It felt great. Well, the judging felt like shit, but the talk felt great. So did the camaraderie, reception from those who attended, and the commingling over the weekend, of so many devoted folks. I am so fortunate to be in a field that is starting to value the feminine/intuitive/somatic experience alongside our more “traditional” values.⠀

What could be possible for this Earth if we married the exquisite intellect with the intelligence of the body and intuition? Maybe we should ask the bees.

Respecting the Sovereignty of a Body

Happy Friday the 13th, a day long associated with women’s bodies and women’s cycles. Did you know that a woman has her moon cycle about 13 times a year? Funny how a number associated with women’s potency, power, magnetism and fertility was conveniently turned into an “evil” number.⠀
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As we do the incredibly tenacious work of teaching the world to honour women’s bodies, we are doing so much more than supporting female bodied humans. There is a direct line from subjection and abuse of women’s bodies to the abuses done to the Earth and it’s creatures. With the advent of Patriarchy, the act of imposing power over a woman’s body led to the skewed world view of man’s dominion over the Earth rather than partnership and stewardship with the Earth. The inherent fecundity of the Earth has long been associated with woman and the power of the womb. Despite ages of misogyny, the Earth is still called Mother Earth. Even after the arrival of Patriarchy, there continued long-held beliefs associated with the Goddess of the land. In Celtic nations, to earn governance of the land, the King had to wed the land, known as Sovereignty. It was only she who bestowed sovereignty upon him. ⠀
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The suppression of a woman’s voice, the denial of climate change, and modern day beekeeping practices are all related. They all source from a belief system that is both threatened by and in direct opposition of the sovereignty of the body. When we started placing more power in the As Above, ignoring the So Below, we forgot our own birthright as beings woven into the fabric of life. One of the most radical things you can do to disrupt the broken system of our times is to listen to the body. Yours, the bees, your children’s, your beloved’s, the Earth’s.⠀
You want to be a beekeeper? Start with hearing and respecting the inmate language of your body.

Shamanism Meets Tea Time

I’m about to board another flight to London. I seriously can not wait for scones and tea at No. 9 on the Green in Wimborne. I am visualizing pouring cream into a saucer as I write. Heaven.

I have a suitcase filled with long skirts, a wooden distaff, special rocks, wellies, and an air purifier.  Not the most obvious choices for a trip to England.  Ok, the wellies get a pass, but they’re so damn heavy and awkward. (Please don’t tell me to wear my weight on the plane.  You ever try wearing knee high rubber boots 7 miles over the ocean?)  I’m on my way to the Sacred Trust, a school for shamanism, deeply rooted in the Path of Pollen, a European shamanic tradition with the honey bee at its heart.  The air purifier is just because I’m allergic to mold.  Go figure.

People have started to ask me if I live part time in Europe.  I’d LOVE to say Yes, but the answer is, not yet.  Since 2010 I have been traveling to the Sacred Trust to study a form of shamanism that survived the Romans, the Dark Ages, and the Inquisition.  I equate it to a graduate program. A big investment with my time and money, which is helping improve my mind, body, heart, career and life path. That’s how I justify it to my left brain. My right brain couldn’t give two effs, because this work is 600% soul food.

The school teaches a line of gynocentric, bee-centric shamanism that honors the feminine principal. It is mostly made up of female students, although there are many men starting to take newly offered classes for all genders. It mostly works with bees, but there are serpents, stags and spiders woven in. It is multidimensional and embraces the betwixt and between.

The tradition is a small golden thread.  A quiet hum that lasted through the burning of our grandmother’s grandmothers.  It’s an answer to my American hunger for spiritual belonging.  A hunger that longs for a sense of spiritual roots, but wars with how to be a native Californian without appropriating the spiritual traditions of the Indigenous people of this land.  I can not begin to describe the relief I felt when my heart encountered the bee tradition and I cried those soul-aching tears of recognition, knowing that somehow, not all had been lost.  

Let’s unpack that for a moment.  First and foremost, I need to address privilege. I’m a white, western woman.  My ancestors are oppressors and I carry that in my lineage.  I refuse to be blind to my own privilege, and as a result of that refusal, I keep discovering ways that I have been.  Let me just state that I am learning and I have a long way to go.  Also, I fly over an ocean 1-3 times a year in the pursuit of earth-based wisdom connected to the part of my ancestry that was oppressed by Patriarchy and Christianity.  So while I resist the dominant social institutions of the former two powerhouses, I am also partaking in the hypocrisy of the entire capitalist, planet-degrading #deathspiral, by using fossil fuels to catapult me in a metal box to a place where I can feel connected to the earth.  That’s some real bullshit right there.  

Yet, I also subscribe to the idea that there are certain soul places on this earth.  Certain spots that speaks to us.  Speak through us.  Calls us.  Awakens us.  Claim us. Can a person be OF their native soil and also OF a patch of earth 6,000 miles from where they first touched their feet to the dirt?  I most certainly have been claimed by more than one place in my life. Just are sure as I have been claimed by more than one heart.  The English countryside is one of those places.  And it requires a good set of wellies.

On with further unpacking.  When I say I cried because “not all had been lost”, I mean, I am woman and a member of the gender(s) who were and continue to be shamed, maligned, violated and abused for our sex/identity.  The wisdom ways of women and the honoring of the feminine in earth-based traditions were nearly snuffed out in Europe’s long history of violence against the life-bearers.  Coming to a tradition rooted in my ancestor’s homeland that honors the voice of the womb and the power of the feminine principal is cathartic, to say the least.  We ascribe voices to various body parts all the time, but when was the last time you considered the womb to have a voice?  Not just the heart, or the head or the phallus, but the womb? Think about it.

Now imagine if you found a place tucked between meadow and forest where you were encouraged speak with that voice.  Dance with that voice.  See with those eyes.  Utter with that yonic intelligence.   Imagine relearning your body as though it were flowing with nektars, like a flower.  Imagine learning new tongues informed by wind, sea, honey and fire.  For those of you who have been wondering why my feed is periodically filled with photos of tea and cobblestones, that is why.

What is The Path of Pollen?  I can’t really answer that.  It is indefinitely ancient and ever new.  It’s part of a very old story.  It’s part of writing a new story.  Its fingers are made of threads, its head made of stars, its womb made of bees, its longing made of serpents entwined.  It is wombic.  It is phallic.  It is Both And.  It is Neither Nor.

I am part of a tradition that stretches its storylines back through the distaff path of ancient Europe.  It is a tradition of bee women, known as Melissae, and is very much alive and well in the modern world.  The Melissae were the bee priestesses of ancient Greece, most commonly connected to the oracular Temple of Delphi.  The Delphic Oracle, also called the Delphic Bee or Pythia (pythoness), was the prophetess for the Earth and of the Earth.  It is said the priestesses inhaled the breath of the Dragoness, Python, Gaia’s daughter, and entered a trance, uttering prophecy for all who came to the temple.  

I am here to remember how to listen to the voice of the earth, as she arises, a buzz, from within.   Ten thousand bees offering nectar on the breath of python.  May I be so lucky to glimpse her in the mirror.

And I’m here for tea, scones and whisky, because I’m multidimensional AF.

California, My Love

I was speaking with a friend today about the nature of range management and the restoration of California grasslands.  Thinking about what California used to be like when the land was stewarded by it's people.  Thinking about the effects of non-native grasses or the loss of habitatfor our wild creatures.  We got on the topic of the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone and how it helped to restore the land.  How much we have forgotten.  How much we have to learn again: the inherent wisdom of nature to create such an intricate system where apex predators are a necessary part of the ecology of a place.  He said the wolves are not a mistake.

This is a straight forward statement, but in the wake of this week’s wildfire devastation the feeling of it caught it my throat.  These fires may be natural, but the severity of them is most certainly a result of climate change and poor land management.  Sometimes, no matter how optimistic I am, I look around at what we’ve done as humans and feel the overwhelm of the pain and destruction our species perpetuates on itself and all other living systems.  If we are the dominant species on the planet how are we contributing to the ecology of place?  Not very well at the moment.  I’ve sat with this question all day of “Are we a mistake?”.  I don’t believe a single thing in nature is a mistake, but here I am, turning the knife inward and asking that question of the human animal.  What kind of salvation and duty lies in fully accepting that nothing in nature is a mistake including human kind? What then, is our role in the ecology of the planet?  I am not new in asking this question, and I am not new in my answer.  We are stewards.  It is possible to lovingly coax a wild, living thing to thrive at it’s fullest expression.  Ask any gardener who has that glint for the slightly untamed in their eye.  There is a way to help the forests renew themselves with fire in a manner that benefits the human and non-human species dependent on them.  Because we are dependent on them.  Don’t let yourself be fooled by concrete and convenience.  We need them more than they need us.  Or maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe we need each other equally.  Maybe this attitude that the world would be better off without humans is part of the problem.  Surely it’s time we move beyond such thoughts of manifest destiny, species privilege and the silly notion that the earth is ours for the taking.  But perhaps for us all to survive, we must also move past the idea that we are a parasite, that we only take, that the living planet doesn’t need us. 

 All week I have come back to the simple truth of the human animal. Since the fires broke out Sunday, I have watched the human animal respond to trauma, grief, and natural disaster. I have watched in my own self and other, our animal body's need for safety, stillness, movement, shelter, food, water and love.  I have never felt the grief for what we have done to our planet so acutely as watching human habitat and wild creature habitat burn to the ground.  California you were the Eden once.  Wildflowers for miles.  Birdsong symphony. Rivers like veins to the heart.  Help us remember how to take care of you.  We are not a mistake.  

We are guardians.  

We are stewards.  

We are animals.

Home Sweet Home Print by 3 Fish Studios. Click on photo for link to prints.

Dreaming with Nature

The dreams were waking me up at night.  Black widows inside my home.  Black widows all over the ceiling.  Black widows building webs closer and closer to me.  No way out.  I am not particularly afraid of spiders, although I am cautious of black widows, having grown up in an old 1930s home.  I tried to reason out why I was having these nightmares.  I read about black widow symbolism.  I questioned my relationship to spider, web and venom.  For two weeks my nights were filled with the dark ladies.  Then, one morning, after other terrifying infestation dream, I opened my eyes and said aloud “It’s my bees.  There is a black widow inside my hive.”

It was my first year keeping bees, and at the time I did not know how common it was to find black widows and other eight-legged in or near a hive.  It makes sense: honeybees must be a real juicy meal.  I told the bees I’m coming, and dawned my gloves and veil.  Sure enough, she had taken residence in the back of the hive, fat and deadly.  The bees couldn’t expand their nest, and they were living with a predator.  The bees had let me know what was going on, and I finally got the message.  I was dreaming with bees.

This was my first experience of consciously experiencing communication from the natural world through dreams.  In an age where talk therapy is our chief modality for addressing emotional and mental states of unrest, dreams become entirely self-centered.  We defer to the modern day agreement, that dreams are our subconscious at best and the detritus of our day at worst.  Don’t get me wrong, I love and have benefited from talk therapy and the psychoanalysis of dreams.  I think both have a very useful and important place.  I would agree that many dreams are the product of our subconscious knocking about. But what if it’s not always our subconscious claiming a seat at the table?  What if Fox is knocking at the door with a wink and a swish of his tail?  What if Raven is keeping a steady eye on your dreamscape, daring you to ask her a question?  What if your ancestors, in their moon-white bones, are clattering around the house rearranging the furniture?  To get to the point, what if we are not just dreaming “of”, but dreaming “with”?

I have dreamt with my bees since this first visit.  Sometimes they heal me.  Sometimes they cover me with honey.  Sometimes with sting. Sometimes they share things that are about me, and sometimes they are about the bees.  I had a hive visit my dreams and inform me of it’s passing shortly before it died.  I had another black widow dream and once again, went looking and found the same.  Even disregarding my personal relationship to bees, is it so much to imagine that the wild might be reaching in to touch us? From a shamanic perspective, dreams are a way to work directly with the spirit world.  What would the spirit world be without the language of the wild?  Nature is our interface with Spirit.  It is the color palate and Spirit is the hand the moves the brush.

"The Spring Witch" George Wilson - Creative Commons

When we invite the pad-footed spirit of the wild into our dreams we are asking to be worked.  As mythologist Martin Shaw says, we are being dreamt.  In my Dreaming with Bees course, I make it clear that we are not seeking to dream of bees. I am asking students to invite the bees into their dreams.  To dream with the bees.  Whether you dream of bees or not is a mute point. It is about the courtship with a nature ally, with a spirit and with a fellow living creature.  The living earth is dreaming her way into being, and we are dreaming with her.  If only we could break free of the ecological nightmare we’ve created and remember our body is her body.

People ask me all the time, what does dreaming have to do with beekeeping?  Why do you teach beekeeping and dreaming classes? The answer is this: whether we know it or not, when we set up a hive in our garden, become a player in it’s story, and share in it’s vital resources, we are seeking kinship.  Some conscious or not-so-conscious part of us is reaching out to a species that has been an enigmatic friend to mankind since prehistoric times.  A species that has never and will never be fully tamed.  A guardian at the gate to the wild.  An emissary between the worlds.  To know this creature, we have to do everything we can to break away from conventional beekeeping practices and the man-conquers-nature/woman mindset.  To do this, we must find the crooked, forgotten paths deep in the woods.  The ones that twist out of sight and have no guaranteed destination.  These are the paths of our animal memory.  Our ancestral memory.  Our indigenous selves.  The observer. The shaman. The Seer. The Dreamer.  The Wise Woman.  The other ways of knowing.  The ways that speak in pine groves, antlered visitors, ocher and sun on bare skin.  We dream with bees, because we are dreaming ourselves back home.

Dreaming with Bees Summer Session Tele-conference course begins Monday August 7, from 5-7pm PST