Let Yourself Be Honey-Tongued

There is poetry in all things if you look for it. Language, and how we speak about a thing, carries incredible power. Language shapes our world view. It shapes our understanding and our relating.

Bees have been beloved to the poets since time immemorial. Sappho, Sylvia Plath, Kahlil Gibran, Pablo Neruda, Emily Dickinson, Maya Angelou, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mary Oliver, and Antonio Machado to name a few. Indeed to speak well, beautifully, or convincingly is to be “honey-tongued”.

One of the things I hold most dear about the bee shamanism pathway is the craft of poetic speech. Very rarely is anything laid out for you in linear fashion. Every teaching drips in metaphor, poetry, and carefully selected words. Rather than “the infinity symbol”, it is the lemniscate. Rather than “working with energy” we sup of the flower. When we explore language with our honey-seeking tongues, we drape ourselves across the bed of our imagination. Worlds open. New pathways of seeing and understanding occur.

When I say beekeeping, what do you imagine? When I say bee guardian, what do you imagine?

When I say, “a practitioner of bee shamanism can learn to energetically work with their endocrine system”, that’s interesting right? What about when I say, a melissae can become a mistress of her own alchemical garden? Something else happen. I’m roughly talking about the same thing. The first makes a certain kind of sense. You can nod along, say “sure, sure”. The second evokes. It beckons. It hints at much more than energetic work. Something nearly mythic is at play, and you are invited to be part of the myths stalking you. A mythic life doesn’t have any interest in easy explanations.

Bringing the liquid amber of poetry into our language addresses the hole that black and white thinking leaves in us. It is rather anti-establishment. Patriarchy doesn’t love it. Your head of marketing is wringing their hands.

The dominant narrative likes things to be laid out: steps 1,2, and 3. No crooked path through the gloaming. No dalliance in the meadow on your way to market. It’s all “how to’s”, quick fixes, and “7 easy steps to siphon the creative soul right out”.

I’m fairly certain the bees don’t approach life from a users manual. They are infinitely more complex than branded, market-approved language will allow. So are you.

We owe the magnificent creativity of this Earth a little attention to the craft of language. After all, she spins in the black void of the universe, who’s very name hints at the honey-dark stuff that binds it all together: poetry, song, verse.

When I name a course Apis Sophia Exstasis, Entwine, or Betwixt and Between, I’m not trying to be mysterious. I’m calling to the particular poetry of your soul with words from my own. I believe that we are magnetically drawn to that which will call us home to ourselves. Have you ever stopped in a town while traveling just because you liked the name of it? Yeah, that.

Perhaps we could step away from the confines of words that sell, or words that make it obvious, and step into the sensation you feel on your tongue when you speak the name of a beloved softly to the night air.

Maybe then we can start to sniff out the pollen-scented language of the bees.

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

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.