The Long Dark Night is Upon Us

Every good story has a rite of passage. A dark night of the soul. Uncharted waters. The descent into the Underworld. The fall. The path that disappears into the woods. Persephone knows all about it. So does Eve. Isis. Princess Leia. Atreyu. Durga. Frodo. Rapunzel. And Aphrodite, but she’ll never tell.

If you’ve stumbled into a good one, there’s often a guide. A trickster. An old woman. A star. A raven. A ragged dog. A swarm of bees.

Everybody knows you have to follow that staircase down. Everybody feels the tension rise, but no one says, “Go back! The story will just have to end without apples this time.” We all know the only way to Grandmother’s house is through the woods.

But we got fancy. We learned to bypass the woods. We flew over the oceans. We got the app. We poured concrete over the passage to the Otherworld. We ordered delivery. We learned how to explain the reason behind the raven, the star, the dog. Slowly, the treasure map of deep purpose and wild transformation faded in the fluorescent lights of modernity, and nobody could figure out how to make a new one with a 3-D printer.

Some of us looked back, waaaay back, and decided they knew better then. We felt we were born into the wrong time. Some of us looked way forward and decided we’ll have the technology by then. We felt we were born into the wrong time. Sisters I love look at me and say, when will our wombs swell and children come? Men I love look at me and say, we can’t bring children into this world. Not now. Look at it.

Look at it.

Look at it.

The bees are dying. Look at it. Yes, my loves. And they are also birthing. The seas are dying. Look at it. Yes, my loves. And the whales still sing. The ice is melting. Yes, my loves, and it breaks me. Humanity is breaking. Yes, my loves. And the people still sing.

Down we go. The long dark night upon us. The trail lost. Too far in to turn back now. The footprints you were following whisked away by a fierce wind.

 The only way to the house of the elder is through the woods, and by God, when you get there, it may be empty. It may be forgotten. You might have to become it. You humanity, might have to follow Persephone right down into the place where you meet the Minotaur.

Look at it.

Grief. Rage. Joy.

Look at it.

The terror.

This old myth is retelling itself on the grandest stage. It is certainly FULL of guides: that last pod of Orcas in the Salish sea. The record loss of hives each winter. The coyotes in Central Park. We’ve had so many clues.

How long does a rite of passage last anyway? Now the work becomes that ancient art of seeing in the dark. Ask Luke Skywalker how he did it. Find the pieces of ourselves forsaken. Ask Isis how she did it. Reclaim the knowledge imprinted in our twisting helixes. Ask Eve how she did it. Defeat the Nothing. Ask Bastian how he imagined it. Be here, born for this moment, birthing into another. Ask the Earth how she does it.

How to Keep Bees

How to keep bees:⠀

* Flirt with the sea⠀

* Look through old volumes of botanical illustrations⠀

* Read books by Sharon Blackie⠀

* Skinny dip at least once in a slightly risky location ⠀

* Question why it’s called the European or western honey bee when it originated in Africa.⠀

* Go to France. Or Nepal. Or whatever place is calling the soul of your imagination.⠀

* Giggle all by yourself.⠀

* Take a course in eco-psychology⠀

* Tell her how you feel.⠀

* Leave offerings for the trees.⠀

* Get stung.⠀

* Spend time playing make believe with a child⠀

* Teach yourself about what’s growing and blooming in your area. Eat from the lands closest to you.⠀

* Be seduced by flowers.⠀

* Watch Martin Shaw tell a story.⠀

* Ask the wild bee what the druid knows.⠀

* Drink sunlight, tickle starlight.⠀

* Get your hands dirty.⠀

* Talk to your ancestors.⠀

* Bathe your mind in propolis.⠀

* Be curious about the family of ducks at the park.

* Question definitions of gender.⠀

* Dress in your finest just to have a chat with the moon.⠀

* Light beeswax candles and read delicious fictions late into the night.⠀

* Tell him how you feel.⠀

* Protest with Greta.⠀

* Backpack at least once in the wilderness.⠀

* Let spirit take you.⠀

* Stay up all night dancing.⠀

* Let bees lick honey off your fingers.⠀

* Lick honey off your fingers.⠀

* Dive into the reverie. ⠀

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.

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.

Thank You For Loving

🧡 To all the women out there who do and do and do. Who are the mistresses of the hive, tending to the young, the honey chambers, the fields of plenty and the fields of lack, thank you.⠀

❤️ To all the women who are trying to listen to the body, following their rhythms and learn how to listen to a body wisdom we were not taught, thank you.⠀

💚 To all the women who are teaching themselves how to express honey and sting in the same sentence; who are learning how to have boundaries and an open heart, thank you.⠀

💜 To all the women who are reaching toward sisterhood, despite the societal constructs of divisiveness and isolation; who are seeking to express vulnerability, authenticity, and know their own unquestionable belonging in the hive, thank you.⠀

❤️ To all the women who are looking for new ways to relate to the masculine, to see the wild god in exile, to see the lover in the flower, to hear the song of the drone bee, to celebrate his heart without diminishing your own sovereignty, thank you.⠀

💙 To all the women pollinating their lives with earth honouring practices, prayers, dreams, gardens, poetry, art, activism, education, and devotions, thank you.⠀

🖤 To all the women who recognise when the hive must turn inward to the silence of winter, dreaming of a new spring; who struggle to give themselves the gift of the pause, to create a new model of cyclical care, thank you.⠀

💛 To all the women who want to be all these things and are still trying, still stumbling, still experimenting, still human, thank you.⠀

Thank you for loving.⠀

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.”⠀

Untangling the Narrative

Yesterday I had another rude awakening in the long journey of untangling the poisoned threads of Patriarchy. Before I go any further, let’s establish once more that Patriarchy is a well-fed idea, whose systemic markers are expressing themselves within all of us. Dismantling the Patriarchy requires and inward gaze, as well as a recognition of its expression in society, infrastructure, classism, racism, and sexism.⠀⠀

Forward ho! So, I have an Instagram bookclub (#honeyreads) where I recommend books on bees, ecology, and the feminine. This month I recommended Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner's lectures on bees. I was vaguely aware of his racism, but felt his view on bees worthy of sharing. And that alone, irks me about the inherent nature of white blindness. Yesterday I discovered the extent of his racism and white supremacy. Here’s a quote from him: “If the blonds and blue-eyed people die out, the human race will become increasingly dense ... Blond hair actually bestows intelligence.” ⠀⠀

I feel like the only thing I can do is dismiss all his work. I feel angry at all the times I’ve heard people say “he was just a product of his times.” I’m a product of my times, and I can either be supportive of concentration camps for children in the United States or I can fight against them. The times don’t justify your beliefs about superiority over another rare, gender or sexual orientation. I want to cut him out the way we cut out cancer, but is that the answer? I went digging. Wanna know who else fits the profile or either racist or sexist/misogynist?

So many (mostly white) dudes who greatly contributed to, well, everything. I mean obviously, right? But here’s a starter list anyway: Albert Einstein, James Watson, Aristotle, Friedrich Nietzsche, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Jefferson, Mohandas Gandhi, Roald Dahl, T.S. Eliot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Charles Darwin. The cut-out-the-cancer model is one way to deal, but how do we address the whole body holding the illness? How can we recognise the uncomfortable, wrong, and unjust, and face it so that we can heal them?

 How do we tease out the fibers of value within the works of people who were/are deeply flawed and downright harmful?

How do we benefit from Einstein’s Theory of Relativity while also addressing his views on the Chinese? How do we celebrate the writing of Vonnegut while also looking at his beliefs that women can’t be educated? Or appreciate Steiner’s contribution to social reform (and bees) while untangling his sickening beliefs about non-white races. Perhaps it starts with looking at it. I wanna look away so badly. But looking at it and patiently examining how someone’s belief might just play into their brilliant findings/writings/philosophies. It becomes your job not to consume such works whole, but to ask: what is valuable? What is true? What is influenced by sexism/racism? What needs to be reworked here? What did I believe out of ignorance? How can I keep looking with more discernment? How can I take this work and bring more ethics, awareness, justice, and equality to it? Where are the resources that disrupt the passing on of nearly invisible systemic disease? Look it in the eyes. Nothing set out to sabotage the sovereignty of a race/sex likes to be seen with the curtains pulled back. It prefers to function in the subconscious corridors of conditioning. Keep being willing to look at it and ask the difficult questions. Not just about the oppressors, but about yourself as well.

The Face of the Hive

⠀⠀You know how you learn to read your dog? Her expressions of love, worry, silliness and eagerness? Or how your cat does that one tail flick when he’s proud of himself?⠀⠀

⠀⠀What happens when you can’t see the face or hear the meow? Bees, as individuals, have faces, but what is the “face” of the colony? A colony, after all, is an organism. A whole that is the sum of many parts.⠀⠀

⠀⠀As beekeepers in protective suits, we can manipulate the hive without too much consequence. Guard bees will try to sting you, but you are safe behind the suit. If you squish a bee no one yelps or cries out. If you move too roughly, just to get it done, and bees get crushed under a langstroth box or between topbars, guard bees will react, but we don’t see the face of pain. We hurt individuals, but we don’t see the effect on the whole.⠀⠀

⠀⠀How can we try to befriend not just the cute individual bee but the faceless being that is a hive colony? All too often I witnessed rough handling because we can get away with it. Why? Because bees don’t exhibit the qualities of stress and grief we are used to recognising in mammals. Every time I’m in a hive I ask, how can I slow down more? How can I listen better? Who am I seeing here? It is a “they”, but also a whole (whom I call a “her”). Brining in a more feminine approach to beekeeping isn’t just about intuition and skirts, it’s about how we can work WITH a being rather than dominate over a being.⠀⠀

⠀⠀Bees are not domesticated. They never will be. We will never conquer them. We will never replace them with more efficient robots. We will never successfully tweak their genetics without harming them. The influence of the feminine is needed here. It is part of the rebalancing needed in both men and women as we attempt to knit ourselves back into the natural order.⠀⠀

⠀⠀So let us be in service to the mystery. Let us attempt to befriend the faceless being who sings the Song of Songs and builds cathedrals of gold.

Male Beekeepers as Allies

How Male Beekeepers Can Be Allies For The Female Beekeepers In Their Lives: .

::Please Stop Bee Shaming Us::
In beekeeping there is an awful lot of vitriol and shaming, especially toward natural beekeepers. Many of those natural beekeeping humans also happen to be women. Just look at the Learning from the Bees Conference happening in Amsterdam this month. The ratio of presenters is 41/34 women to men. That’s more than half! Women are making waves in the beekeeping world. Considering that beekeeping is still a male dominant industry, this is a very cool thing to see. 
I recently spoke to a US hive provider and he said 70% of his clients are female. The face of beekeeping is changing and there are many more women out there dawning the veil (hehe - see what I did there?).
So dear men, please stop shaming us for our ideas, methods, relationship to bees and voices, be they scientific, spiritual, agrarian or urban.

::Listen::

I can not tell you how many times I’ve watched or experienced a man bulldoze over any conversation about beekeeping. I’ve seen it happen at countless beekeeping association meetings. I’ve watched women on speaker panels have to aggressively fight to get a word in. I witnessed silencing. This is nothing new in any industry.

I experience the worst mansplaining in the older generation of white males who either disregard me completely or treating me like a “cute” little hobbyist beekeeper who doesn’t know any better. Ask us questions. Ask our opinions. Ask why we are doing things certain ways. Wait for us to ask for your advice. Have a discussion, not a telling. Be curious.

.::Have Our Backs::

Participate in feminism. Be engaged in standing up for us and advocate for our voices to be heard. I know a lot of you are super rad feminist men who love bees and all those who support them. Show us.

::Learn From Women::

If you’re new to beekeeping, include books by female authors. If you’re looking for mentors, find mentors that are women as well as men. Educate yourself fully.
I love you. I believe in you. Let’s save this planet together.