She Survived

Once, I drove through the narrow country roads of west Cornwall to find a sacred well. It was autumn and the sea looked Caribbean turquoise. The map wasn’t very good, but my friend and I found the well, partially overgrown with ivy, but not forgotten. One of the old places, where women’s water wisdom once offered healing and insight. A nearly obscured heritage. ⠀

The land owner, Trevor, met us at the gate, literal pitchfork in hand. He was happy to see us. He had learned a thing or two since he took over care of the property. He spoke to us of moon pools and the goddess Diana. He said Druids and shamans and all manner of pagan folk had visited the well over the years. It’s important, he said, because a well like that must be tended. He sent us on our way, we made our prayers, left our offerings and wondered at the lost ancient ways weeping through our veins.⠀

Then Trevor asked us in for a sherry. You never refuse a sherry from a white bearded farmer guarding a sacred well. There are rules. ⠀

Inside there was a spinning wheel and herbs. There were stacks and stacks of books. There was the love of a wife long past. Trevor handed us sherry in tiny glasses as said, “You know, this home used to be the home of a famous herbalist. Jessica was her name. She lived here in the 1600s. She knew how to make the secret preparations to call down the bees.”⠀

There it is. Not a mention of bees from my lips and here, this agnostic, curious farmer is telling me about the bees. How she could get them to swarm into the house. How she would heal the people with their remedies. She may have survived despite her arts, when so many women of her time perished. She who lived with these walls, and drank from the well, and walked in the ways of women’s mysteries. She who lived in a time when herbalist was synonymous with witch. Her wisdom meant death.⠀

Dear you, who tends the garden and sings to the bees in 2019, know that the thread survived in you. Remember that no matter how hard the men of the church tried to take women’s spirituality away from them, it survived, because it’s in you now.

They took the power of your weaving chants and called you an enchantress. For this you burned. They said no one could chant words of power but men. They took your healing arts and called you a witch. For this you drowned. No one could heal, save the grace of God and his doctors. They took your words and turned them against you. For this you were silenced.

But you survived, because the songs you wove were strong and made of the earth herself. You survived because you felt the warp and weft of life and death move through your own lunar tides, and you came to know cycles. You survived because you knew that someday you would be borne into the rich blood of your distant granddaughter and she would learn the secret ways to make preparations to call down the bees.

The Hobbyist Beekeeper

We humans love labels. We like neat little categories and stacks. One of the definitions beekeepers like to make is between professional beekeepers and hobbyist or backyard beekeepers. This is often used in ways to dismiss backyard beekeepers as uneducated, annoying, or quite possible the problem (re: why bees are dying). The thing is, people have been living with bees for far longer than commercial operations have been keeping bees. It’s not a hobby. There were ancient laws in Ireland established just for beekeeping.

Living with bees is a way of life. We need people in cities and countryside to find ways back to living with the natural world. Community gardens. Rooftop apiaries. Urban farms. Neighbourhood chicken coops. Calling beekeeping a hobby relegates it to something cute, but inconsequential. Ask any beekeeper if their relationship to their hive feels inconsequential. We are in need of more relationship with the non-human world, not less. The non-human world, I dare say, is also interested in relationship with us. Even if that relationship is simply saying hi to the songbirds in the morning. There is an exchange. It is felt. Only our modern, proof-driven minds question this. All indigenous cultures know the Earth and her creatures hear you. Your ancestors knew it. You know it too. It is the way of things.

Photo by @simon_weller

Paradoxes in Living

Staring out the window, my mind is ricocheting off various topics. The Coronavirus and systemic racism. Varroa mites and treating the symptoms. Climate change and the denial of human abuse to the planet. How you can be a feminist, and still really enjoy when a date foots the bill. How great it can be to foot the bill. The silencing of a women’s voice and the inevitability of two white men vying for power.

How do we measure abuse with the bees? How can we tell? If a woman grows up strong and “fine”, how can you tell what actually happened to her when she was too young to protect herself? The violation of a child. The violation of a woman. The violation of the bees. The violation of the earth. The violation of a peoples. We have to stop, but how? This is what the death of Patriarchy looks like. Seeing the abuses of power at every turn. Eyes wide open. Witnessing the patterns. Breaking them.

If the hive were your child, would you treat her that way?

You wouldn’t look at me and immediately be able to read the trauma of childhood abuse. I certainly never talk about it. But it’s there. It plays into my fears and my ferocity. It fuels empowered reclaiming of my body’s wisdom, and also still wakes me in terror from vague dreams. Shame prevents me from speaking about it. But the story of one person’s twisted use of their own physical power over another is playing out on every channel right now. So loud.

Does it mean I stop falling in love with plum blossoms, moving like honey is rippling through my body, or singing La Vie En Rose at the top of my lungs? Not at all. I’m fucking awesome right now. Life is doing that golden thing we always seek, but rarely get to swim in.

Regardless, I have found that the greater my capacity to swim in the dewy glow of life’s magic, the greater capacity I have to face the shadow of pain and trauma.

How do we teach our children better boundaries and more trust at the same time? How do we care for the bees without projecting our desires for “production” or connection” onto them? How do we stay connected? There is so much paradox in living.

That's My Language

Hi, my name is Ariella. I’m a beekeeper. It’s not a hobby. I don’t make my money from honey. I don’t make my money from carting bees around the country on semi trucks for mass pollination events. I only have a few hives. But beekeeping is part of my profession. I am a teacher of beekeeping plus some other real cool shit. It’s part of the business I run, because I’m also a boss. It’s not cute. Or sweet. Or adorable. I wear skirts. This is also not cute. Not sweet. Or adorable. But sometimes I am cute, sweet, and adorable. Running a business is not. That’s the difference. So today I want to raise a glass to all the bee business boss ladies out there who aren’t playing by the rules. ⠀

⠀

You might be tough as nails, dressed in overalls, selling honey at the local farmers market. You might be getting your nails done and discussing whether or not to expand your apiary with your bestie. You might be biking between hives in some metropolis, joyful and determined. You might be establishing a honey bee sanctuary while raising kids and writing your dissertation. You might be cute too. You might wear skirts. You might not. You might be fierce. You might be butch. You might be ethereal. You might be any multitude of multidimensional magnificence and also happen to run your own business DOING WHAT YOU LOVE. One thing I’ll say about running a business: it’s never cute. You’re never a busy little bee. You’re a Queen. Know the difference. Own the difference. You work hard. For every hour in a sun dappled field of apple blossoms, there are 10 hours of bookkeeping, computer screens, tough choices, late nights, early mornings, long schleps, invoices, marketing, bullet journals, and careful investments of your precious time, money and energy. You’re also doing this because you fell in love. Never forget it. You’re here for the winged ones. You made a place for yourself where the industry said there was none. You said, “See that language being spoken over there? The one filled with the hum of 60,000 sisters? That’s my language, so please, let’s go have a listen, or kindly get out of my way.”

They Made Me Do It

What is it about beekeeping that encourages so many dudes to mansplain and publicly shame other beekeepers? Particularly natural beekeepers.  Particularly female natural beekeepers?  In my Facebook group a female treatment free beekeeper selling honey at a local market was recently approached by a very aggressive and strongly opinionated male pro-treatment beekeeper who talked AT her while she just sat there.  What the hell dude? If this was an isolated incident, I’d say it was a guy having a bad day, but do you know how often women write me asking how to respond to the [insert shitty behavior descriptor] men at bee meetings/classes/online forums etc?  I know mansplaining and aggression is everywhere, but non-beeks, let me tell you, it’s seriously bad in the beekeeping world.  I’m also super passionate about music, food, hiking, travel, and wellness and in none of those areas have I experienced or witnessed the level of shaming from men.  

Pause to acknowledge: yes, men and non-gender binary beekeepers also experience shaming from men, women and non-gender binary folk.

Double pause to acknowledge: all the amazing men who are not like this at all and possibly suffer from same types of experiences.

Resume: I’m not here to bad mouth all men, but the question stands, what do we do as women when we are being aggressively shamed by men in our field? I wish I had it in me to tell someone to just eff the fuck off, but that’s *generally* not my nature.  So what else? Is the person lecturing me on how I’m the reason bees are dying really going to pause and thoughtfully listen to my counter argument?  What if I do say something?  Will the situation escalate? Because underneath the lack of response from women like me who have learned to be nice, and patient and not too “emotional” there is fear of violence.

Fear of violence pervades even if we know it’s highly unlikely that Angry Bee Man would be violent if we politely asked him to leave us alone.  It’s the fact that the fear it there, under the surface (or on the surface).  It’s not logical.  It’s not based on reason, but it’s there because well…look at history.  You could come from a community of the kindest, bravest, most nurturing men and history still has: the Burning Times, genital mutilation, child brides, sterilization of Native American women, women as property of men, honor killings, and of course domestic abuse and rape.  

Hey, kind, loving men, are your hackles up because none of this describes you?  Anybody wanna tell me I’m over-generalizing?  Choose love over anger?  Love over fear?  Anyone wondering how on earth do I get from Angry Bee Man to rape and murder?  Am I being too emotional?  We live in a time when the transgressions against women, the earth, people of color, and gender non-binary folx are being dragged into the light by everyone in those groups.  We’re living in a time where women are exercising their voice, which was silenced for centuries.  Is STILL being silenced.  But there’s more room.  There are walls that are crumbling to the many tiny hammers eroding the walls of Patriarchy.  

Is there a connection between Angry Bee Man and inherent violence?  There is.  Will he be violent? No. Not likely.  He’s just abusing his power.  Turns our he’s the product of a system.  He’s probably really passionate about saving bees.  You’re treatment-free way threatens him.  It’s not an excuse to warrant bad behavior, but he’s just doing what the men before him did.  The problem is, typically when a woman raises her voice and yells at a man, it doesn’t come with the potential threat of life threatening violence.  But regardless of how unlikely it is, when a man is aggressive with a woman, that fear can and often does lurk beneath the surfae.  Why? Because of frightening statistics like in the U.S. “The rate of women murdered by men in single victim/single offender incidents rose by 11 percent between 2014 and 2016.” (UNICEF)

I’m getting off topic.  Well no, it’s not.  Not really.   Violence against women. Violence against bees.  Violence against the Earth.  It all comes from the same place of gross imbalance perpetuated by over 2000 years of a world view that sees women as inferior and/or property of men.  The same view sees the Earth as inferior and in need of dominance by man.
I’m not pointing a finger at all men or saying you don’t have a right to your opinions and your anger. I’m saying women are learning not to tolerate bad behavior.  Women also have a right to their anger, especially when centuries of violence and oppression sit behind it. The ways to stop women-shaming behavior are manifold, but they include women’s anger. There is a kind of anger that arises out of fear of something you have (power) being taken away from you. This can be especially frightening if you are a man (especially a white man) who has experienced your privilege as the norm. There is another kind of anger that arises out of refusal to continually be abused by a social system that suppresses your voice, especially if you are a woman (or anything else that’s not cis gendered white male). Obviously there are degrees of extreme to what people endure at the hands of others. That being said, until women have an equal voice, equal right and are equally safe in their own bodies, men are going to have to get used to new rules.

Women are learning to use our voices to say no to dominance over us.  There’s a difference between explaining something in a conversation and patronizing a woman, talking over her, and telling her how it is without asking (and listening) to her opinion.  Until women’s voices are regarded as equal to men’s voices, men are going to have to deal with the sting of our words.

So what do you say to the Angry Bee Man who wants to know why you don’t treat your bees you naive-irresponsible-hippie-witch?  Here are a few thoughts: 

“I’d love to have an adult conversation, but since that isn’t an available option at this time, I decline further contact.”

“Did you know Saint Brigit sent a host of bees to defend against men trespassing on her land?”

“This is a great topic to bring up with someone else.”

And my personal favorite:

“Have you heard of the goddess Lilith? Persephone, per chance? They made me do it.”

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