The Ceremony of our Lives

In February, I had the tremendously rich experience of teaching Apis Sophia Exstasis in my home state, after 3 years of teaching the same body of work in France.  Under a constant deluge of wet weather, a group of us gathered in the Mendocino oak savannah to experience what I now regard as six days of ceremony.  It was utter magic.

Shortly after, I taught my first online dream incubation course, centered around an all night dream healing ceremony.  Inspired by the dream healing temples of Ancient Greece, the program focused on ritual preparation, working with spirit guides, and eventually a night of liminal dreaming and vision seeking to support individual healing and transformation.

Having such profound ceremonies two months in a row, I started to think about how essential ritual and ceremony are to our lives.  When I look back on some of the ceremonies of my life, there is often a strong feeling of before and after.  Meaning, the ceremony became a marker point for some form of change, small or massive, in my life.  Usually that change began internally, but often there were real life ripple affects that I could have never dreamed of or predicted.

Ceremony changes us.  It weaves us into the creative fabric of the living earth.  It gives us a change to be of service, and to also surrender to the magic of the unknown.  I'm tired of the word manifestation.  I want rites of passage.  I want all night vigils.  I want dancing around the fire, and gazing into the wombic void.

Ceremony changes us.  It weaves us into the creative fabric of the living earth.  It gives us a change to be of service, and to also surrender to the magic of the unknown.  I'm tired of the word manifestation.  I want rites of passage.  I want all night vigils.  I want dancing around the fire, and gazing into the wombic void.

To get to those larger moments of ceremonial change, we also need moments of dare I say, mundane ritual.  Why mundane?  Because when we make ritual part of our every day life, it become the magic woven into the mundane.  When we leave butter out for the wee folk, or cut our hair on the new moon.  When we light a candle at breakfast, or leave a small plate for the ancestors, we are making the ritual magic ordinary.  

Yes, I love a grand, powerful, life altering ceremony, but it's in the daily ritual, or folkcraft, that we actually start to feel the magic of the more-than-human world, the magic of the mystery, permeate our being.

So I ask you, what are the small rituals you can create to keep to tied to the magic?  And when you don't have access to a week long retreat steeped in wombic oracular magic, what are the small ceremonies you can create for yourself?  Where can you set time aside to honor something, to prepare, to welcome, to end, to transform, to acknowledge, to heal.

As we come to the seasonal shift of the equinox, what small ceremony can you weave into your life?  Is it perhaps a ceremony to welcome the bee swarms back to the land?  Or a lunar eclipse ceremony to let go of what might still weigh on you from your winter's work?  Or perhaps a ceremony to bring life and abundance to the lands that grow your local produce?

Whatever it is, know that in the act of ceremony and ritual, you are not alone.  You are being witnessed by a myriad of beings who see the kindred spirit you are, and know you as part of the web of life.

Magnetic Maternal

I wanted to be held by a man.  Someone who loved me so much that he wanted to create life with me.  I wanted to share the moment of that positive pregnancy test with him, in joy and disbelief.  I wanted him to bring me hot cocoa and soup and marvel and my shapeshifting.  It was a fantasy, but not entirely unrealistic, after all, couples experience this all the time.  It took a decade of carefully picking apart the threads of love, partnership, and bearing a child.  I could not accept that they might be separate things.  Everything about my life had taught me to desire the coming together of two souls to create a third.  At the same time everything in my life has also taught me that family happens in a myriad of ways, and love does not equal someone who desires to create that new life with you.

When I love, I love big.  Not selflessly or with delusions of grandeur, but big like the way I feel when the ocean is lit up with phosphorescence, or when the songs sung by friends around the campfire make your heart want to burst.  Big like rivers and autumn.  It took a long time to learn the difference between desiring romance and desiring partnership.  It’s embarrassing to talk about wanting a man, wanting a partner, wanting love.  It feels like every statement of desire needs to be followed up by a disclaimer: “But I’m fine on my own.” “Oh, but I’m also a strong independent woman.” “Oh, but I’m not co-dependent.” “Oh, but I know I don’t NEED a man.”   Need and desire are two very different things.  What a perfect paradox of our times to be a woman who is at once longing to be met in love, and at the same time dismantling the patriarchy programming of a woman’s role in society.

It was some time around the 5th year after my miscarriage that I realized I may not meet someone in time to have a family.  This is when the unpicking of the threads began in earnest.  I was and remain unwilling to compromise on either of my two deepest desires around family: for a child and a partner.  I slowly came to the understanding that my time to grow life in my womb was limited, while love of a man was not.  I started to research the insemination process.  I began to make life decisions around the possibility of being a single mother.  I dated.  I cried over a broken heart.  I moved to a place with more access to friends, family, and community.  I doggedly refused to become jaded.  I took apart and rebuilt my life piece by piece. 

In this 10 year period of dismantling and becoming, I discovered an untruth I have been carrying with me: that I was not deserving of more than one good thing at a time.  I created either/or paradigms.  I can either be a strong woman or be taken care of by a man.  I can either have a career as a musician or have a child.  I can either have a child or a man.  I can either be a mother or a lover.  I can either be magnetic or maternal.  You only get one.

It was the bees who started to change this.  I was captivated by their ability to surrender so fully to the bliss of the flower, and return with soul purpose to feed the nest.  Behind them sat the Melissae, the bee women of ancient Greece, and all the teachings of their lineage.  The Melissae is a woman who is fully alive to her eros and with her desire to nurturing life.  Magnetic and maternal.  One does not beget the other, they are constantly in flow with each other.  No sequestered spiritual life for the bee women.  They are fully of this world, dripping with the milk of the stars and the blood of the Earth.  I owe my courage for conceiving a child on my own to the knowledge that these women existed.  They exist.  We exist.

What is it that crafts these mythic lives we live?  Everywhere we see the day to day struggle of career, loneliness, memories, health, finances.  Yet, underneath and swimming around this is the possibility that you are crafted from the same material myths are made of.  The stuff that reaches beyond the fantastical and straight into the soul of things: long journeys, transcendent moments, the dark night of the soul, the wise mentors, perseverance beyond the odds.  Whatever new story I am writing, I know now there will be at least one essential strand that I pass down to my daughter, and that strand is the red thread of Womanhood.   When we look back in time and lift the veil of history written by men, we find a rich sea of women’s spirituality, women’s traditions, and women’s stories. Cultures and traditions that revered the Mother as creator and bringer of life.  The creatrix. She who we both come from and return to; the void of creation, the magnetic Earth.  She who is both Mother and Lover.  She who is full bellied and entirely entwined with her own sexual potency.  She who gathers the winter to her breast for the long sleep.  She who dances wildly through the desert and gazes quietly into the moon-filled pool.  

Perhaps separating the strands of partner and child are less about coping with grief and longing, and more about inviting the night sea memory of reverence for the Sacred Feminine to take center stage for the new little woman that I am carrying from one side of the veil to the other.  Perhaps she chose me because I am just wild enough to choose to bring her fourth on my own.  I am not striking out alone, but rather sinking into an often unspoken of lineage of women.  Women who were not “single mothers”, but mothers within societies, priestesshoods, and tribes where a woman was not dependent on the nuclear family to survive.  

As I near the portal of birth, there is a candle burning for the pathenogenic priestesshoods we’ve nearly forgotten about.  A candle burning for the womb shamans.  A candle burning for the grandmothers midwifing their granddaughters.  A candle burning for the pythoness prophetess and her womb utterings. A candle burning for the red tent.  A candle burning for the way of the rose.  

I do not doubt that my desire is strong enough to weave a family for my daughter that includes a father.  I have no say over the timing, but I do know that she chose me now, and I chose her.  I chose her during a global pandemic.  She chose me when all the hands of community could not hold her as she enters the world.  I chose her despite the sometimes insurmountable heartbreak.  She chose me because I am alone, not despite it.  I chose her because I can, not because I’ve run out of time.  She chose me because I am strong and soft.  I chose her because I am brave, and because I wanted her more than anything in my life.

I have never felt more in touch with my womanhood.  

Together we are the maternal and magnetic, dripping into garden of life.

Photos by Koa Kalish

When the Death Goddess Comes

We’ve given her many names: Callieach, Persephone, Nepthys, Kali.  But her original name was Earth.  Mother.  Crone. Womb and Tomb.  There is no death goddess who is not also tied to, or herself a goddess of rebirth.  They are not separate, because life is not, and never can be separate from death.  This is why the Kelts built passage tombs or long barrows.  We are born of the Mother and return to the Mother, her dark and earthly embrace.  

In the modern era we often associate bees with symbols of abundance, industriousness, and springtime. However, bees have also long been associated with death in equal measure.  Bees and beehive are common symbols on tombstones, even within the Christian Era, but their association with death stretches deep into antiquity, where bees were seen by many cultures, including the Greeks and the Kelts, as messengers who could travel between the worlds, including between this life and the afterlife. This is part of the origins of Telling the Bees, when bee hives were visited after a death in the family to tell the bees of the loss.

The Widow by Charles Napier Hemy

Bees seem to be born of the Earth Mother herself, issuing forth from dark caves, tree hollows, and earthy hollows to bring life, honey, and springtime to the land.  Similarly they return, as the serpent does, to their interior slumber within the Earth each autumn.  Is it any wonder that in many parts of the ancient world bees were thought to be born from the carcass of a bull?  They are midwives to death and bringers of life.  

To be a beekeeper in the modern era, it is our sacred duty to befriend death.  The bees require it of us.  The midwives of death are asking us to midwife them.  How? Through presence, through grief, through ceremony, through surrender.  Bees die in the autumn.  If you become a beekeeper you are wedding yourself to an intimate relationship with life and death.  With abundance and the wasteland.  

To be present to, and witness death is to radically honor the feminine principle.  It’s feminist as fuck.  

There’s a reason the original goddess was the Earth herself, and the Earth was seen as the all-creating Mother.  Life and death were less of a duality, and more of an eternal cycle.  A cycle witnessed monthly in rhythm of women’s bodies: to blossom and to shed.  

To be a beekeeper you have to be able to sit with death.  Your bees will die.  Not always, and hopefully less and less.  But they will die.  From starvation. From varroa. From beekeeping practices you’ve been taught.  From chemicals.  From pesticides.  From treating.  From not treating.  From smoke.  From Cold.  We steward them, and do everything in our power to keep them alive, but without addressing massive systemic issues related to climate change, biodiversity loss, and repression of the feminine, the bees are going to continue to die prematurely and often.  Getting a hive to survive past a year or two is very challenging for new beekeepers.  

When the death goddess visits your hive, what can you do?  Honor her. Be fully present and alive to the death you witness.  Clean your hive.  Honor what’s left behind. Process the wax and the honey. Leave offerings of gratitude to the land. Bring your tears and your prayers. Feel that death move through your body, as a body made of the earth, who knows how to take and transform that loss. Celebrate the beauty they brought to your life and your land.

  Meet her at the crossroads. 

Content Theft: The residue of Patriarchy running the show.

John William Waterhouse -I am half-sick of shadows, said the lady of shalott

:Feminist Beekeeping Friday:

I am at a real crossroads this week.  I’ve got some unpleasant thoughts moving through my brain.  I’ve tried sorting through them with friends and colleagues. I’d like to have a strong argument or stance before writing about it, but I don’t.  I have a Scorpio full moon cocktail of compassion and raised hackles.  What I’m going to talk about may put you off. The subject is women stealing from women.

Let’s back track. This wee little Friday post is called Feminist Beekeeping Friday because it’s about time we have a place for women’s voices in the world of bees.  After all, bees have been associated with the feminine and the life-giving goddess for a few millennia now.  In ancient Europe, where apis mellifera comes from, the bee was held sacred and depicted in statutes of bee goddesses. In Greece there were temples kept by bee women tending the sacred arts of seership, healing, dreaming, and ritual.  These women were simply called Bees.

So I loosely base these Friday musings on bees, women, the feminine, and dismantling the Patriarchy. Cheers, darling!

Where were we?  Oh yes, the Great Silencer.  As Patriarchy entered Goddess culture, women’s voices were systematically silenced. Women’s ways demonized. Women’s power vilified and shamed.  Women’s bodies violated.  Right on down to the present era. We are raised in a society that is the adolescent offspring of a belief system which still encourages oppression, witch hunts, inequality, and ownership.  Capitalism is a byproduct of this belief.  So is egocentric individualism.  So is spiritual bypass. What a mire we’re in.

Some of it survived though.  Hidden in plain site, or just at the edge of your vision.  It has been waiting.

Enter the rise of feminism.  The rise of women’s voices.  The return of the sacred feminine. Here we are, carving a place for ourselves because it’s finally - maybe - safe enough again.  Here we are, the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn, seeking our own spiritual truth without very much guidance. 

Have you ever wept in longing for the mythic grandmother to come apprentice you to her arts? Have you ever sought pilgrimage, initiation, rite of passage, ceremonial transformation without a compass? Did you read that “how to” book and despair?  Go to that workshop?  I get it.  I did.  I spent over twenty years in study. Sometimes I found rare gold, and it stripped me to my bones. I wept for the lost wisdom.  I began to find where it was hidden inside.  I am still weeping.  I am still finding. 

I began to put all this study, work, and practice into form. I began to craft my own teachings.  People came.  I was overly generous.  I hear that a lot.  What does that even mean?  I wanted to give it away.  I wanted to keep it veiled.  I have ancestors’ voices in me that need it to stay veiled.  I have ancestors’ voices that need me to be loud and public. I want to be generous.  I want to make a living.  I don’t want to loose vitality in the process.

Women came to my courses and they changed my life.  I get to be the thing I longed to be but could not find at 15, at 25, at 30.  Somewhere around 35 I found my voice.  I found my stride.

Here in the present, it has been brought to my attention quite recently, there are women who are now repurposing my content, my class names, and my words with very little discretion and not a mention of their source.  These are women who have taken my classes. Pause.  What I do and what I teach is NOT proprietary.  Where I learned much of what I teach is open to all.  I am not special.  I don’t get the one diamond pass. Unpause. I have spent years cultivating my own form of teaching, my own practices, based on the spirit-informed integration of teachings I’ve received from others.  I’ve also learned from the land.  From my body. From my creative soul. 

What a sticky business.

How do we strike out on our own because we are inspired? Because someone’s teaching spoke deeply to us?  Because a school or a program awoke something in us?  Inspiration is the name of the game.  That’s the point.  That’s why a person teaches. 

I have no problem with inspiration.  I have no problem with people sharing things that came from me, that came from the woman before me, that came from the spirit within me, that came from the ancestors behind me.  What I do have a problem with is plagiarism.  With content theft.  With idea theft.   

What it comes down to is a deep internal sadness around loss of integrity.  Around the loss of the human hive in the oldest sense of women gathering.  We’ve learned to distrust each other.  So many women don’t trust other women.  We’ve learned to doubt ourselves.  To gaslight each other.  Where is the sisterhood? I don’t know the ethical call here.  There is a reason things stayed behind the veil.  Stayed hidden.  This experience is the modern version of that reason.  We are still functioning from within a male-centric, colonizer framework.  We appropriate. Take what you want.  Don’t give credit.  Commodify it. Brand it. Go for the quick fix.  Is your longing so great that you take with out notice?  Is this the spiritual starvation of the West?

There is a beauty in the exchange of skills, practices, and hard-won perspectives.  It’s perfectly human to share and share again.  However, don’t let acquisition stop the journey.  I don’t now much, but I do believe that mimicry is selling yourself short.  You don’t have to invent the wheel or be totally unique.  I most certainly am not!  I am a patchwork quilt.  However, you also don’t have to be that thing you see outside yourself.  There’s a chance that your desire to mimic someone’s work is actually an invitation to dive deeper within.  To excavate the hidden seas and rare silver rivers of your own body’s knowing.  The secrets waiting in your ancestral library.  The particular language spoken by the bit of earth you’re standing upon today.  Can you bear to turn your gaze to the hallowed keening of your longing? 

Meanwhile, there is a woman somewhere at her loom, weaving thread she died herself, with hands that have held the hands of many sisters.  She is singing an old song as she works.  It is rhythmic and hypnotic.  It took her years to learn the pattern.  It took many unravellings.  The warp and weave stretch your heart as you gaze on them.  She will spend her whole life making this cloth.  She is making it for you. 

Meanwhile, that same woman is you.  She is weaving with threads she spent lifetimes spinning.  She may be working a loom built by sisters, mothers, grandmothers, but she is the one who has earned her seat. She is singing an old song as she works.  The rhythm is like the hum of bees.  She has learned how to make honey. She has learned how to sting. She has mended many frayed threads.  Some she cut away. She has learned about boundaries. It broke her heart. It made her whole.  She is re-sanctifying the ground of herself, her sovereignty, and her safety. 

 She will spend her whole life making this cloth.  She is making it for herself.  

Dante Gabriel Rossetti -Penelope.

The Underworld Shadow of the Distorted King

Last night I dreamt I was in the arms of an Ash tree. Above me in the high, bare branches was a king snake. Below me, was another king snake. I remember thinking, as long as there are king snakes around, I won’t be in danger of rattlesnakes.

To understand this thinking, you must know I have a lifelong phobia of rattlesnakes after a traumatic childhood experience which invariably connected rattlesnakes with childhood abuse. I have spent my adult life repairing my relationship with the serpent.Back to the ash tree. In Norse mythology, the Yggdrasil, or World Tree, is an Ash tree. It's branches reach into the heaves and roots spread over the whole of the earth and into the Underworld. In ancient Ireland, the Ash tree is one of the guardians of the land. In Greek Mythology, the nymphs of the Ash tree were called the Meliae, which means ash tree and is a derivative of the word for honey (melt). The king snakes came directly from reading these words from Martin Shaw about the distorted King archetype and our longing for the honorable inner King:

“A King or Queen is a centralized point inside the psyche which has the power to radiate outwards, make decisions, hold boundaries, enjoy three-day feasts, and draw up the gates when necessary. There exists an interdependence between them and their servants and kingdom. This is a built-in posture of the self, not an argument for external monarchies or dictatorships.….The savage and distorted King is a force that anyone living today has experienced in abundance. We are far more familiar with this than a King image that is strong, decisive, cultured, and fair. When that image is denigrated or entirely lost, then the psyche is adrift from ancestral anchor-points that could root it in a fertile sea bed with the bones of captains and great ships.”

We are in a very real confrontation with the underworld shadow of the distorted King. The Queen or Sovereign Earth is speaking volumes through every possible language she has. Every shadow and every illumination is interwoven, and we are being asked to do the seemingly impossible: to both confront our collective fear, pain, and illness, and to heal ourselves and the planet.

 Note: Gopher snake baby died in my hands after I found it on the road

It must be stated that it is a privilege to be contemplating the “big picture” mythic undertones of this moment in the world. As I read beautiful poetry and inspiring words from people I follow online, I am also marking my privilege to do so. We can practice awareness around our projections of perspectives you or anyone else “should” have.

I, for instance, am privileged to work from home, even if I have trouble making rent. I don’t have kids who are out of school now. I am not dependent on the school lunch system to feed my children. I don’t have to juggle already sick family members and kid’s homeschooling. I am not forced to work in hazardous conditions. I am not currently in danger of eviction. There are so so so many people who are living through very real, terrible conditions that are now being hit with the virus and the nearly impossible need for social distancing. There are small businesses that may not make it. There are refugee camps with no preventative supplies. So while the big picture stuff is something anyone can ruminate on from any background, let’s also be collectively aware that any kind of talk as to the big “why”, or spiritual growth, or consciousness raising is often (at least on social media) coming from a place of privilege. As such, how then can I give back? What is my social responsibility?

I am going to make every effort to not impose any sense of what you or your family “should” think or do. I know social media can seem like a place of authority because we speak from an often unconsciously learned sense of marketing to the public. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I am doing my best. I am scared. I am hopeful. I am learning. I am privileged. I am also a small business owner. I have big picture ideas and many small anxiety-driven fears. The earth is speaking. We are capable of great harm. We are capable of magic.

Love you.

The Wounded Masculine

I just finished teaching a dream retreat based within the Path of Pollen/Lyceum methodologies. As a result, my dreaming has been turned up a notch.

I have been dreaming of love and pain. In my dreams, I am both a man and a woman and we are in love. We are each other. In all dreams, as the woman, I am trying to save the man. And as the man, I am trying to protect the woman. It is always the man who is riddled with bullets or wounds. Who is hunted by the underworld god. Who is bleeding out. Who is fevered and dying. And it is always the woman who is trying to save him. In one, as I wipe away the blood from many bullet wounds I realise that underneath the blood he is covered in a thin layer of propolis. When I see this, I know that he is strong enough to survive. Propolis is, after all, the immune system of the honeybee, made in reverence with the budding life sap of the trees and the inner alchemy bee.

I know that it is not my job to save the wounded masculine, but this week I have been feeling him so strong. In me. In the world. In men. I have been feeling all the places the divine masculine sacrificed himself. All the places the divine masculine has been exiled to the edges of the sea and the desert. Exiled from our tidy, hurried lives. All the places he took the bullet so that we could survive. I know that it is Patriarchy, among other systems of dominance, that has wounded women. Laid claim to our sovereignty. Violated our womb and our bodies. Silenced us. Killed us. The same belief structure has created systems that harm the Earth and all her living creatures. But I also know the this system has cut wounds so deep in men and the masculine that he/we are now fevered with the impact. Burning up. Breaking down.

Today I am simply feeling compassion for all the places in ourselves that have been suppressed, oppressed and violated by the current system of dominance we live within. I want to cry tears into the bullet wounds I witnessed in my dreams and watch them wash the injuries clean.

Call it resurrection of the self. Call it saving each other. Call it the deep work. Call it the shadow. Call it the beloved. Call it what you will, but regardless of where you fall in the spectrum of expression that we call the masculine and the feminine, we are in the laboured work of healing. We need all of ourselves. We need the feminine flow and masculine sturdiness. We need the women’s holding and men’s tears. We need the moonblood and the salt. We are calling our exiled, wild soul back to ourselves.

Oh, my beloved, come close: I am willing to look into that dark chasm of wounding and coat it with my tears, my love, my lion’s roar, my propolis, and my honey.

Let The Bog Witch Rule

How does one live a healthy, abundant life within the impossible economy, without succumbing to the dreaded “victim mentality”? Or worse “scarcity mentality”?! These have become bad words in the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps world of entrepreneurs and personal growth. But goddamit every goddess needs her day as a bog witch. Look ya’ll, Innana got dismembered by her own sister. Persephone was abducted, and worse. Lilith got exiled. Sekmet went into a blood-drunk rage. And Mary Magdalene lost the love of her life, her station, and then had to flee her homeland. 

The story of the feminine is long, dark, bright and unpredictable. It can handle the taboo words of victim and scarcity mentality. It’s been handling all the other taboos for 5000 years or more (Eve chuckles). I’m telling this to myself: you’re not wrong when you feel like you’ll never make enough money to provide for a family. This does mean it’s true. (I’ve checked in with Wonder Woman Witch when she’s ovulating and she’s absolutely certain you’re winning life). It’s just that you’re not wrong for feeling the weight of scarcity, and the oppression of victim identity in a broken economic system, built on a societal/political arrangement that values the masculine, hierarchy, capitalism, and oppression of peoples, plants and animals over basic rights. You’re not wrong to wallow for a minute, even if you are aware of your privilege. Even if you are aware of how good you have it. Sometimes, perspective isn’t enough, because sometimes the bog witch get’s her period on a Sunday in January and decides that instead of marketing her next course because she needs to pay rent (pulls hair out), she is going to sink into said bog and mutter untruths like: “you will never be loved.” “You should get a real job.” “You’ll never have a family.” “You’re so bad at budgeting, if people found out you’d probably loose all your friends and any future partners.” “You’re addicted to work and you’ll never meet someone because you work too much.” “You can’t take time off-how dare you-the list!-how will you manage as a single mother-are you fooling yourself?”

I took the day off.

Ok 80% of the day.

I played ukulele.

I know that this is space mostly for beekeeping intel and inspiration, but I also know that there are a lot of your using this space to run your business. It is not formulaic and it’s not just a mindset. Yes, learning good habits, lifestyle hacks, and mindfulness can and does improve your business, but not with a blind eye turned away from the darker sides of this little capitalist “anybody can be a millionaire” attitude. Lilith will have none of that. The bog witch will suck the marrow right out of your morning mantra. It happens. She has a purpose too. She is not interested in your success stories. She is going to march you into her hut on chicken legs and fatten you up, because this hustling situation you’ve been praising yourself for, is a whole big bag of hot air as far as she’s concerned. She is going to compost you. Don’t worry, Arianrhod will descend from her spinning crystal castle in a few days and extend a hand of positive inspiration, so you might as well climb on into the oven and let the witch cook you. 

Toodaloo.

You are the Bridge

Where did it begin? This love affair? This obsession? This reverence? Was it in our prehistoric ancestors, with fire in their hands, climbing the highest of heights to gain your nectar? Was it in the way your honey and pollen aided in the development of our ancient brains?

Did it begin with those first altars of honey? With those myths of rivers filled with honey wine? With a white she-goat dripping mead? With the tree whose sap means honey and whose promise is life?

There is no tracing the origin of our courtship with the bee. Only honeyroads to follow into and out of antiquity. See the bee nymphs, dusted in pollen, who whispered the art of prophecy to the sun god. See the tears of Ra who fell to the earth and became bees. Christ's tears as well. Hear the hum on the lips of poets. Trace the sisterhood in asterisms. Taste the food of the gods. What about when we wised up? Got rid of all this pagan polytheism? Forgot the Queen of Heaven and chose one god. Did our obsession end? We took Her out of the picture, but did our fascination cease? Ask the priests who brought hives to the new world, because no Catholic mass could be held without holy beeswax candles. Ask the Christian family who brought cake to the bees after Christmas Eve mass. Ask the men of industry and innovation who sought to find a way to better manage this nest of divine beauty. Were they any less mesmerised than Aristotle? Hafiz? King Solomon?

Where has it gone to? This love affair?

Into the many rivers of the inquisitive religion of the modern era: science. That beautiful achievement of the honed intellect. Science, who's “authority has grown so immense over the centuries that it now claims supremacy over all other forms of thought.” (William J. Broad). A gift, this science. And a limitation, if it excludes the old memory of body, poetry, spirit and the ineffable.

What comes next in this love affair? What does the reawakened feminine bringing to the conversation? What happens when we weave centuries of honeyed wisdom with centuries of scientific progress. What else is possible? You are the bridge.

Hymenoptera: veil-winged

Hymenoptera: veil-winged. An order of insects including wasps, sawflies and honey bees, but particularly connected, linguistically, to the goddess culture at its ties to the honey bees. Hymen is derived from Greek and means “membrane” or “veil”. It denotes not only the veil within the virginal maiden, but also the veil draped before in innermost sanctum of the temple of the goddess. It also came to represent the veil between the outer world and the hidden inner world of women’s mysteries, both physically and spiritually.

Honey bees are said to arrive with the heliacal rising of the seven sisters, or Pleiades, in the East every spring. Born of the constellation Taurus, the bull, the bees rise in the spring bringing life. The bull is an ancient symbol of the goddess and goddess culture. Through the union of the bees borne of the bull we receive the sustenance of life: milk and honey.

Mirrored in the stars, these seven celestial bees hold the story of the veiled one as well. With the suppression of the goddess culture many myths were rewritten. The seven sisters became seven daughters, one of whom was named Merope or “bee-eater”. She dared to love and wed a mortal and for this she was shamed, turning her face away and dimming her light in the night skies. While every Greek myth has many versions, it’s important to remember they all have threads running back to old memory and old ways that venerate the feminine instead of shame it. In another version these sisters are seven doves, like the doves or priestess that flew out of Africa and founded the three major oracular centers in the Ancient world, including Delphi, where the Delphi Bee gave oracle.

In some myths they were the nymphs of Artemis, who was deeply tied to the bee nymphs (melissae) and the guardian of the wild bees. And in still oldrer, obscure myths the stars were in fact, seven bees: six daughters and their queen, who remains veiled (hidden) in the inner sanctum of the temple of the bee.

Food for thought next time you don your bee veil to go whisper to the bees.

Witches? Why, Thank You.

I don’t speak on Halloween. I don't write. I honour my ancestors. It’s an exercise in liminality. I’ve been doing this since I was 15. Last night, a group of female friends and I decided to dress up all in white, paint our faces white, and pass candy out to kids. All this, while seated in a semicircle, silent. See, the town that my sisters and I evacuated to during the fires happens to be THE BEST town for halloween. Over a thousand trick or treater’s passed by the house where we held our silent counsel. ⠀

When you don’t speak on halloween, people like to guess what you are. It’s become half the fun for me. ⠀

We got a lot of good guesses: zombies, ghosts, ghost-brides, but what most people called us? Witches. Oracles. “Are you going to tell me my future?” “Are you the Oracle of Delphi.” “Look at the witches!”⠀

We weren’t wearing pointy hats. We didn’t have broomsticks. For goodness sake, we were trying to be creepy. Yet deep in the human psyche there is a recognition of feminine power. How could there not be? Women were spiritual leaders, shamans, priestesses and prophetesses for much longer than the genocidal claws of Christianisation. When every aspect of our spiritual and religious authority was stripped from us, we still found a way to hide it in our weaving, our cooking, our storytelling, our songs. ⠀

Witches you say? Yes. We’ll take it. Witches. Wyrd Women. Fates. Spinners. Pythonissa. Incantrix. Fee. Hag. All the different ways to say world-weaver, healer, woman who walks the edge places. Hedge-woman. Truth-speaker. Poet-prophet. Way-finder. Midwife. Night-Farer. Shapeshifter. Banfáith. Fate-seeress. Divina. Mystery-singer. Strega. Pharmakis. Blesser. Bruja. Heathen.⠀

Five women, clad in white, holding silence on the eve of the ancient heathen new year? Witches, you decide, as you gather candy from a basket. This is because something in you, no matter how deeply buried says “This. I recognise this. I know this. She is power. She is prophecy. She is not forgotten.”⠀

Mother For President

I’ve been thinking a lot about women’s voices lately. I’ve been thinking about what would happen if more women were voted into office, or if more women were invited to speak at basically any conference that’s not for, or already about, women. I’ve been noticing the changes too: how I can casually talk about my menstrual cycle around my male friends, or how pumping milk at work is suddenly something normal to see on Netflix shows. For god’s sake, it’s starting to be okay to talk about the normal function of our bodies.

Here we are, making all this progress about what we can say and do in comparison to our grandmothers and their mother’s mothers. Sure, that’s amazing. I can talk about having two miscarriages on social media and I won’t be publicly hushed or shamed. But also, how on earth do we address the grave transgression on the body of the non-human when we are still struggling for a place of equality among genders. Not to mention atrocities done to other races and nationalities. ⠀

We see all these cries of dismay: “the lungs of the earth are burning!” Yes, I agree, this is horrifying. Meanwhile, I’m grateful my bees are still alive because California isn’t burning...this year...yet. Count my blessings or pull my hair out? Which is it to be today?⠀

So here’s today’s thought: it’s not so much that we need to learn to respect our mother (which we certainly do), but rather we need to remember the Mother. Not just the archetype, but that age-old wisdom that valued Mother as synonymous with life. That same wisdom built shrines, temples, halls, even entire religions around Mother. Because you know what a mother does? She feeds her children with food she’s made with her own superhero body. She literally gives them life and then she protects them while they grow. And do her children burn her lungs in return? Not usually.⠀

It’s not just that there’s a need for the feminine voice in science/politics/agriculture/education/theology/everything, but rather a remembering of the Mother‘s voice. And no, I don’t mean the mother issues you talk about in therapy. I mean doing away with Freud and other such bullshit and coming back into relationship to the feminine voice that includes the Mother for all that she is: the Mother who is sovereign in her queendom, who is sexy as fuck in her body, heart, and mind, who is fierce in her rage, who is still learning from her elders, who is teaching her young, who trusts her intuition, who is revered, but not for her hierarchy. She is revered because she is her own being, and also, because, consequently, she brings life. Kinda like, oh, a queen bee.

Our attention on the feminine often falls to the maiden: she who is still becoming (she who is desired by men). I love the maiden. I also love the lover (a 4 female archetype to discuss another day). But culturally, we don’t really see the mother.

She’s not on our magazine covers, unless we want to show off how sexy she is while pregnant or how quickly she lost that baby weight. And if we do see her, she is only Mother. That is her only identity. We are so one dimensional in our seeing. No wonder we can let the lungs of our mother burn, or her blood dry out. We don’t see her.

Luckily, in this bubble experiment that is social media, I see mothers. So many of you. Using your voice as a mother and besides being a mother. More please. More mothers’ voices. Your true voices, stronger than the chains of patriarchy and social expectation. Full of the brazen authenticity and vulnerability that will wake us up from our collective amnesia. Oh and to all you women out there who aren’t/can’t be mothers with your bodies, but are creating life in your own way? I’m talking to you too. I’ve spent enough years in the maiden archetype, and I’m all about the crone, but it’s time to embrace the Mother, because we all know she’s a Queen.

#mother #queen #feministbeekeeping

Lavender: Giddy Calm

Lavender⠀
Lavande • Lavendre• Lavandula⠀
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Pollinators: ⠀
Honey bee, bumble bee, digger bee, carpenter bee, leafcutter bee⠀
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Medicinal parts used: ⠀
Flowers⠀
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Preparations:⠀
Teas, tinctures, essential oil, spice for cooking/baking, hydrosols, lotions and ointments, ⠀

I will never forget the way it hit me. Like a physical bath of scent. We arrived in Sainte-Croix-à-Lauze just as dusk descended. The crickets were declaring the glories of summer, while fireflies emerged to secret the sun away into the night. It was heaven. I got high. Quite literally, the scent of lavender so engulfed me, that I sort of lost it for a bit. I was a mess of giggles and wonder. A friend and I have meandered our way through Provence to the tiniest town in the Hautes-Alpes. There wasn’t even a cafe. It was just an old, stoney town with one central spring, and on all sides, Lavender. Fields and fields and fields of the heaviest, sweetest scent I had ever experienced.

My mother grows lavender. Heaps of it. It lines the apiary and turns dry and grey-violet each summer. It’s absolutely lovely. I cut bunches of it for making oils, sachets and wall hangings. This was NOT that lavender. This was otherworldly. I thought I knew lavender. This was something else. This gave me superpowers. This was a soup of scent. This was the the loosening of my hair. This was barefoot crush. This was an intravenous anti-anxiety drip, except with breath. Imagine breathing a sort of liquid, giddy calm. How can you be giddy and calm? Go to Provence in July in the evening.

Our AirBnB host was a tall, linen-wearing woman with a long sliver braid looped over her shoulder. She was celebrating a birthday in the neighbor’s yard with a weaver and a beekeeper when we arrived. They invited me down because, well…beekeeper. By the next morning my doorstep was filled with Oak honey and homemade rosewater. I knew, in that moment that I was about to fall in love. Not with the beekeeper, but someone. (I did by the way, shortly after, although it swiftly ended in heartbreak). I still eat a bit of that Oak honey every day. I still believe it will lead me to love.

I had just finished teaching Apis Sophia Exstasis, a women’s retreat in Aquitaine, and I was exhausted. My friend Nani and I drove 10 hours across France to hide away in a stone cottage and inhale lavender. She made me salmon that first night, but the kitchen was lacking basics and the nearest grocery story was a hour away. We made do with butter, salmon and red wine. It turns our a red wine butter sauce of salmon is quite tasty, and to this day, whenever either of us is in a bit of a conundrum we tell each other to just “Pour some red wine on it.” Can’t figure out how to keep your houseplant alive? Pour some red wine on it. Feeling confused about some nasty paperwork? Pour some red wine on it. You get the gist.

On our last night, we shared a glass (we are big lightweights, so one was clearly enough) and went for a midnight stroll through lavender fields, picking a stalk here and a stalk there, absolutely certain all wrath and furry were about to descend on us for our shitty tourist trespassing. Then we did the unthinkable (and by unthinkable, I mean I literally didn’t even think about it - whoops), and brought those stalks home in our suitcases. I know, we are the worst. No that lavender is infused into an oil that I use on my skin daily for nourishment and anxiety relief.

Used by Egyptians in the mummification process and cultivated for its oil in ancient Arabia, lavender has been a sacred and beloved herb in healing, cosmetic and culinary arts for millennia.⠀
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It is an herb used for calming the nervous system, treating wounds, easing headaches, improve sleep and offers a general feeling of wellbeing.⠀
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It was spikenard, a form of lavender, that Mary Magdalene used to anoint Jesus’ feet. ⠀

Lavender honey is very light, herbaceous, floral and pairs well with soft cheeses, figs, and my favorite: biscuits and Devonshire cream.

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Here are some of my favorite ways to love lavender:⠀
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* I use drops of lavender essential oil in my humidifier at night. ⠀
* I gather it every midsummer for making lavender infused oils (not EO). Oiling the skin is of a daily ritual for me, as I have every sensitive skin and live in a dry place. Lavender oil soothes mind and body.⠀
* I make lavender infused chocolate truffles which I used to take to Burning Man to feed all my friends.⠀
* I put it in sachets for dreams when I am needing lightness⠀
* I sprinkle it into almond honey cakes, which make great ritual offerings.⠀
* I hang a bundle over my bed ⠀
* As a hydrosol, it never leaves my side⠀
* I mix it in a calming tea blend, often with nettles, chamomile, and rose. ⠀
* I watch the bees dance through it.

Let the Bees Lead You

I know it’s called “beekeeping friday” and I ought to talk about beekeeping, but the thing is, nothing with bees is linear. This photo is all about beekeeping. It’s also about finding your voice, trusting the path, sisterhood, and magic. It’s also about hard work, discipline, punches to the ego, and realness. ⠀
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This photo is from yesterday in France, after finishing the evening’s work with my bee sister and trusted colleague, Gina. It’s taken a lot of trust and surrender to get here. We didn’t know this was coming when we stepped onto the lemniscatic path. I didn’t know work could look like this. So here we are: this is our debrief after after a hard day’s work. This is also a moment in my actual life where bees brought me to the south of France to teach bee shamanism in an open air barn with this view. ⠀
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What I’m saying is, I fell in love with bees. I fell in love with the mystery behind their ways and the history woven into women’s relationship to the hive. I started beekeeping, in part to save my heart (and life) after miscarriage. I have followed the strange and crooked path of listening to the wild one within and the wild ones without. That path has landed me in the gracious arms of a growing hive of bee women who are courageously facing their own tangled fears in order to become voices for the earth and the feminine once more. To claim sovereignty, eros, seership and the full expression of self.⠀
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So this is about beekeeping, because beekeeping is about listening to the bees, and in my book, listening to the bees goes far beyond the realm of “normal” and sails straight into the land of mythic reality. The bees fly on crooked paths through liminal thresholds, and when we let them, they show us how to do the same.