Business Tips: How to go From Zero to Campfire Coffee in a Few Decades

I’ve been in a big renegotiation about my relationship to work.  I’m coming out of my second maternity leave with a bang, and it’s a little jarring.  I worked all days and all hours throughout my entire pregnancy.  For those of you that don’t know, I’m a single mom who made the choice to become a parent on my own, after years of waiting for a partner.  I knew I needed to figure out a work situation that allowed me to stay home as a single nursing mother, and 6 years ago I started planning.

In 2104, after 4 years of beekeeping, Honey Bee Wild was formed.  It would become the vehicle through which this pregnancy felt possible.  I got very good at being proud of my work ethic. Hustling. Juggling. Getting things done.  Octopus-arms-for-brain.   I was usually up till midnight working.  Didn’t really know how to schedule my life, or really take a break. 

I have never really been secure around finances.  My sense of confidence in my income was emotionally and physically wobbly to say the least.  For most of my adult life I worked multiple service industry jobs (restaurants, coffee shops, tasting rooms), and offered services like piano lessons, admin assistance, tarot card readings.  I’ve always lived paycheck to paycheck.   That’s not to say I haven’t had my foray into wild ventures.  Did you know I spent a year as a chef and owner of my own Crepe stand? I spent another year running deluxe river cruises in Europe.  And I worked in the office of a predatory “spiritual” author.  I searched for my career for a LONG time.  Meanwhile I was searching for my partner so I could 1) love him 2) start a family.  This was also taking a reaaaaaaaaal long time and involved everything from ceremonies, to dating apps, to flights across the globe.

Lots of ergonomically poor decisions while baby slept.

When I mentally separated the need for a life partner from the ability to have a child in 2016 (it happened all at once during a Joanna Newsom concert), I pivoted my life toward building a business that could support me as a single parent.

I moved from Portland to Sonoma County.  I took part time restaurant jobs so I could build my business from home all day, and work in the restaurant industry at night to pay my bills.  I learned how to design my own website.  I became a virtual assistant so I could refine the skills needed to run a business.  I spent my money on beekeeping equipment and trips to England to study a small shamanic tradition connected to bees.  I treated my studies overseas like a masters degree: they were for personal growth, true, but they were also the investment I was making in my future career.

In 2017 I made a commitment to be out of the restaurant industry by 2019.  In October 2019 I jumped into running my business full time.  In 2020 I found a donor, got pregnant, agonized over the pandemic like the rest of you, and worked worked worked.  My business had its best year ever.  In 2021 I had a baby.  I ran my business from my phone while nursing.  I got hired to teach a program for the Shift Network, which was incredible but absolutely dominated my early postpartum experience (hence second maternity leave).  I hired an assistant, a nanny, a web designer, and a business coach.  I took naps with my baby, I grieved friendships, I worked till midnight a lot of nights.  When all was said and done, I stunningly doubled my income in a year.  I didn’t go from 0-6 figures in 12 months like so many of the Instagram biz coaches talk about. I grew my business slowly, year by year, with a fuck-ton of intention and methodical planning.  In 2021 I surpassed my financial goals.  

I got out of debt.  Let me say that again: I. GOT. OUT. OF. DEBT.  Nineteen years of debt.  I’m not sure if I can maintain the same income, but the year I gave birth, and ran my business for months from an iPhone while I nursed at 2am, while my insides turned outside, and my body, mind, and soul got permanently rearranged…THAT year was the year the benevolent spirit of my business spread her wings.

I remember when I was briefly connected to the 30-something crowd of coaches who all sold different variations of how to get from nothing to x figures in x amount of weeks/months.  Really makes you question your turtle shell.  But something about that always smelled off to me.  The get rich quick model does work for some people, but it was never going to be my model.  I like campfire coffee.  You know, the kind where you wake up in the back country in the morning and even though your hands are frozen and you have the quick light stove right there.  Even though you know you could have your cup in under ten minutes, you chose to gather the twigs, coax the small campfire into being, find the perfect rocks to balance the kettle, listen to the birds while it boils.  Alright, I’ll admit, I’m super into someone else building the fire, and then crawling out of my sleeping bag, but then you miss the precious magic of first one awake with the wild.

Campfire and image by Rob Totoonchie - a damn fine back country fellow, photographer, and friend.

Campfire coffee is how I built my business.  And the thing is, I don’t think my business would have allowed anything less.  Honey Bee Wild is its own creature, and just like humans, it has it’s own divine timing.   We forget that in the hustle market.  And god do you have to hustle when Big Bro Capitalism, supported by patriarchy, Chistocentrism, and white supremacy is in charge of your rent, access to health care, student loans, etc.  I digress.

I made campfire coffee, and it took a long time. 

 Last week I bought $600 worth of furniture to help baby proof the house: a nightstand, a cabinet, an ottoman, a shoe bench. I questioned every inch of those purchases, until I realized I am 40 and this was the first time I have ever bought a piece of furniture.  I have often referred to my interior design as “college dorm” style, meaning any left over piece of furniture nobody wants I’d take.  It was really damn nice to be able to buy a nightstand and say adios to this yard sale stool.

I don’t even know if I’ve “made it” or just had a really good year, but what I do know is that for the first time in my adult life, I’m not worried about how to pay my bills.  Well, mostly not, bc my bills tripled with health insurance and child care now that I make more dollars (yes, I see you hamster wheel).

The point is, I didn’t know what to do with my life, or what career to have, or how I’d ever feel even a little bit financially secure.  I’m not a one hit wonder.  I don’t have a secret recipe to my success.  I’m a single mom who kept one eye on the ground and one eye on the cosmos. 

Now what?  Do it all again.  Rinse, repeat, and hope to  stay afloat on the melting iceberg of our current reality? What I want is another month just to brainstorm.  Candlelit dinners with friends.  I want all these creative ideas inside to have room to bubble up.   A year to write my book.  I want to take an entire day off, and go to the beach with my daughter. 

I am learning to exhale.

Motherhood as a River

So far, parenthood hasn’t been the hard chore so much of the internet (and people I know) implied. Every day is a joy of discovery. Granted, I have amazing help, but not always. It’s often just little Cricket and I trying to find a way eat breakfast before 11, composing work emails while breastfeeding, and circling the neighborhood wearing an ergo.

What I’ve learned so far:
• My lifelong battle with anxiety has significantly diminished and now there is a low hum of contentment in my being.
• Said anxiety, when present, is no longer existential, but very much about the well-being of my daughter.
• it’s good to have neighbors.
• Bath-time is happy time. Naked butt is happy time. Morning wake up is happy time.
• Getting out of the bath is sad time. Putting on clothes is *#%! bs sad time.
• It is possible to make lunch one-handed.
• It’s also possible to pee while wearing a baby.
• Apparently watching a human figure out how to be in a body is the most darling thing.
• The wrinkles on my face are from years of practice making silly faces, which are now in high demand.
• Babies can literally grow bigger in the space of a nap.
• It’s okay for my body never to be the same again. Mom’s are warriors.
• I still love coffee.

Everyone’s motherhood journey is vastly different, and the kind of support you have plays a huge role.  That being said, my experience of it being more joyful, content, and fulfilling than expected comes from my own history of grief, longing, and years of preparation.  It has taken me a decade to get pregnant again after a heartbreaking miscarriage.  Between 17 and 30 I attended four births.  I watched and supported my goddaughter grow up.  I had a lifetime of adventures and travels. The whole time I wanted to be a mother.

Many people were very supportive of my choice to have a kid on my own, but I also heard a lot of warnings: it will be very hard. Am I sure? Do I know how I’m going to make a living. Am I ready? Why don’t I wait a little longer? Really now? Do I know I’ll lose my independence? 

I also heard to prepare myself for grief and identity loss.  I was very scared of postpartum depression.  I had experienced a version of it after my miscarriage: the hormone dump, the fatigue, panic attacks, anxiety and depression.  I didn’t know if it would happen again, but I did know that I am prone to anxiety and depression.  (Side note: interestingly, I haven’t dealt with panic attacks, serious anxiety, or depression since discovering I have the MTHFR gene mutation - common in 40% of population - and starting to take methyl folate as a result).  

I had spent so many years processing grief around miscarriage, longing for family, loneliness for partnership, rejection, fear of my biological “clock”, etc that I had gotten used to things being hard.  It became part of the narrative of my spiritual journey.  But if the spiritual journey is all shadow work, then in some ways, you run the risk of finding yourself addicted to shadow work.  You’re subconsciously looking for the next underworld journey. To the big excavations.  Somehow it makes to good stuff acceptable as something you’ve earned.  Oh hello, culturally prevalent Christocentric programming.  👋🏻.   It’s not all that different that spiritual bliss bypass, so common in the washed-out versions of western spiritual capitalism (⬅️yeah I called it that). 

I’ve done my share of “shadow work”, and I even let my ego start to tell me that it was somehow more valuable than all the “light work” so popular today.  Either way, if you are only working with one end of the spectrum, you’re stuck.  Life is a lemnicaste ♾ when we spend to long in the underworld winter, we forget that sometimes ice melts and rivers just flow.

My pregnancy was a flowing river.  It  scared me so much.  I had to consciously remind myself to accept that my body was healthy and things were flowing.  Around me the world literally burned.  I stayed inside with air filters on for four months.  But I was a textbook healthy pregnancy at 39.  I felt luscious.  I felt the most beautiful I’ve ever felt in my life.  Good thing the medical industry made sure I knew I was a geriatric pregnancy 🙄.

When Aurora arrived, the panic came back for a couple weeks.  If I napped while someone held her in another room, I would wake up with an animal-dread and burst into tears when I saw her safe and contented in a loved ones arms.  It was hormones, for sure, but also a deep unwinding of fear, and slow acceptance that indeed, just because the other shoe CAN drop any moment, does not mean it’s going to.

Therefore, when I say I am delighted by how content and happy I feel, it’s not because all mothers should feel this way, it’s because I didn’t know I could.  I was preparing for the inevitable identity loss and grief for my former self, and instead I have landed in myself in a way I really didn’t expect to experience in this lifetime.  I though I had figured out how to be in my body before. I spent a decade studying under a shamanic tradition that centers around embodiment and womb connection.  It prepared me for this, but I could never have imagined what motherhood embodiment actually felt like.  

I know not every mother experiences things this way.  This is just my story.  But I do think it’s important that we acknowledge there can be ease.  The river can flow.  Even if there are rapids, whirlpools, and the occasional eddy.  I will not step into the Christocentric model that motherhood is martyrdom.  If other mothers feel that way, remember that we are responding to a colonial, religious, white suprematist, patriarchal system which has methodically suppressed and oppressed women’s spirituality, women’s voices, and women’s leadership for thousands of years.  The village was dismantled in exchange for the factory.  The woman doctor (midwife) was literally murdered.  The multi-generational household was exchanged for the nuclear family.  Of course women feel abandoned and alone as mothers.  It can help when we hear that other moms are having a rough go of it too.  To hear we’re not alone.  

However, it also helps to hear that motherhood can be joyful, easeful, rich, content.  Even if you’re single. Even if you don’t know how it’s all going to work out.  Even if you gave birth during the Anthropocene.

Mothers are the fiercest, strongest, most earth-shaking force in all of human history.  We move mountains.  We break hearts open and rip down dams and blockades alike.  We craft estuaries of safe haven.  We build temples to the imagination.  

She, the mother, is in you, regardless of whether or not you ever bear life from you womb. She is in everything you create with you precious life. She is in every way you mother the land, the community, and the furred and feathered ones in your charge.  

This is a hard time to be in the world, but the babies still come to us, the spring still blossoms.  Clearly, there must be some delicious goodness worth the grace of our presence.

There Is Still Magic

My daughter is one month old today.  I am still landing in the steady belief that she’s really here, she’s really my daughter, and I get to keep her.  Becoming a mother has been a lifelong dream of mine.  I walked into it with no illusions.  I knew it would be hard.  I knew I’d need a lot of support.  I knew I wouldn’t sleep much.  But there really are no words to prepare you for what happens to your heart when your make a whole human, and they look up at you and smile in the early dawn light. 

The in-between time of postpartum has been full of responses to her every need, and a few tiny pockets of reflection.  I am always amazed by the series of events that conspire to create major life changes.  If it wasn’t for the pandemic, this baby wouldn’t be here.  If I had been partnered, this particular divine baby wouldn’t have been the baby I conceived.  If I hadn’t spent years building up a business and a following here on Instagram, I would not have put the call out to raise funds for the donor/insemination process.  The right people might not have ever known I was trying to have a child.  The donor may have never come into my life.  All the various pieces might not have fallen into place to bring this little one earth side.  

We all buy into the story, consciously and unconsciously: the great career, the big love, union, a child, a family.  I wanted it all, it that particular order.  Life is much more creative than that.  I chose to try for a child by donor because I wanted this baby more than I wanted to wait and hope  for a partner.  

I remember feeling sad and a bit guilty that I couldn’t have a magical, intentional conception with a partner who was also wanting her.  Insemination felt so cold and clinical.  My fantasies had to be firmly moved out of the way to make room for consciously conceiving this baby.  And let me tell you, on the day she was conceived, it WAS magical.  I was able to do the insemination at home.  The way the donor came into my life was synchronistic, unexpected, and incredibly timely.  Due to the pandemic, the potential donors at the cryobank (who I had  painstakingly selected over months to make my final choice) were all running out of vials and the cryobank wasn’t taking any new donations.   

I also found that I could do the insemination at home with a midwife.  I tracked my ovulation, but the machine I was using broke and got the day wrong.  I inseminated 3 days too early.  

Since I knew it would take a number of tries, I wasn’t too upset when I discovered the error.  We had already set things in motion.  

On the day of my first try, the bees swarmed and gathered outside my window: a potent symbol of female fertility. Beneath the swarm I found the antler of a stag: a potent symbol of male fertility.  We did two inseminations twelve hours apart.  In between, I went into my hive named after the serpent of Delphi.  While spotting the queen, I looked down and saw a huge gopher snake slide past my feet: an ancient symbol of both male and female fertility and power. Then a close friend called to tell me she was pregnant.

Three days later I felt implantation.  I was having a smoothie in town and it happened.  I didn’t dare believe but early symptoms showed up right away: abdominal cramps, water tasted metallic,  abdomen rounded out a bit, breasts got fuller, dizziness, and a heightened sense of smell.

After a decade of grief and longing, it took one try.  One magical convergence. So I’m here to say, even if it doesn’t look like how you planned, magic is still afoot.  The most modern and seemingly clinical of procedures can be surrounded by ancient power and mystery.  Life can always surprise you with gifts.  By the Gods, this Instagram account made it possible for me to raise the money to do the insemination and was directly responsible for connecting me with the donor.  You all made this possible. Magic. It takes being willing to see the magic when it happens: the signs, the synchronicities, the flow, the unexpected.  I hope I can remember this as I endeavor to raise this little human to the very best of my ability.  In a world full of chaos and strife, in the midst of climate crisis, there will always still be magic. 

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

Honey Bees as Heart Healers

We women of the bee work in cycles of six.  Six-sided, six threads, six sisters, six revolutions.  Six years.  On this day, six year ago, I found out I was pregnant.  It’s a old story really, one that’s been told before, in different words by different women, but it’s also my story with the bees, and therefore, it has a place here. I found out I was pregnant because of a dream. Not my own; that of a friend.  On this morning, six years ago I woke feeling dizzy and out of sorts. I phoned up a friend, who gently informed me that she had a powerful dream.  “There’s nothing wrong with you honey," she said. "You’re pregnant.”  The spirit of my daughter had come to her in a dream the previous night asking her to tell me about her and remind me to trust. 

In that moment, standing dumbstruck on a busy sidewalk, I felt the most euphoric wash of warmth spread over me, and I understood unconditional love for the first time.  I knew she was right.  I was pregnant. It was the happiest moment of my life.  

Three months later, I lost the baby.  She left on a spring day when a late April storm brought fat, lazy snowflakes drifting down on the roses lining the hospital courtyard.  I spent two days in that hospital, on the maternity wing, loosing my baby while listening to other babies being born between bouts of sleep and an emergency surgery.  I dreamed then, during surgery, of myself giving birth while the spirit of my lost daughter acted as midwife.  We were in ancient Greece, surrounded by women and the scent of beeswax and crushed herbs.  I was in an order of priestesses that worked with the principals of parthenogenesis. I heard again to trust. It was year later, when I found out these priestesshoods actually existed and that many were associated with the Melissae, or honey bee priestesses.

A recovery bed was prepared for me in the guest room of my parent’s home.  A bed which shared a wall with a colony of honey bees.  You see, the summer prior, I had gone to The Sacred Trust in England to study with a British shamanic tradition called The Path of Pollen.  My introduction to bees was not in fact through beekeeping, but rather through a very old tradition that sees the women of its ways as Melissae, Greek for Honey Bees.  While I was in the UK, a wild colony of bees moved into a hole in the exterior wall of my parents home.  They built honey comb and raised their young in the space between my recovery bed, and the outside world.  The bees kept me company through the darkest hour of my life.

Miscarriage is common.  It’s a story that countless women carry in their bodies and memory, but it's not a thing we talk about very often.  We are told it’s common, that we’re probably still fertile and to try again.  What isn’t included is that for some women, it can include postpartum depression and PTSD, not to mention the unyielding torrent of grief.

I buried what was left of my pregnancy in the garden, beneath an new, empty beehive I built myself.  I prayed to the spirit of my baby to bring me bees so that I could be a mother to something.  Three days later, I received a call about a swarm.  It was my first.  The swarm was hanging in the shape of a heart from a blossoming apple tree.  Honey bees swarm are an act of reproduction, a great issuing forth of fertile optimism.  It happens in the spring, once hives have made it through the long dark winter and new forage abounds.  The colony prepares the hive mother (queen bee) for flight and waits for an optimal spring day to rise from the hive is a swirling cloud of wings.  A third to half of the hive will leave with the initial spring swarm and fly to a nearby perch, such as a tree, where they will hang in a cluster until a new home is collectively agreed upon.  The remaining bees inside the hive will raise a new virgin queen and life will proliferate.  It is a truly magical event to witness.

Six years ago I became a beekeeper.  A bee mother, in as far as one can mother a highly intelligent super organism that’s been thriving for thousands of years without human intervention.  A bee guardian perhaps.  Or rather, I fell in love.  For me, they became the anchor through which I slogged through PTSD and heartbreak.  They kept me tethered to life, when on some level, I just wanted to bleed out.  They taught me about the honey and the sting.  They were patient with me.  They forced me to be present, and sharply brought me back to my body if I drifted.  They permeated my dreams.  The hummed the song of life, fertility, forgiveness and order. The bees made sure I kept feeling.  

The grief story is a human story, and a story we all share.  As author and teacher Sobonfu Somé says, “We need to begin to see grief not as foreign entity and not as an alien to be held down or caged up, but as a natural process.”  So here I am, still grieving someone I never met.  Here I am with tears of the empty womb, for the lost ones, for the motherless ones and the childless ones.  Here I am, sitting at the precipice of another swarm season and wondering at the strange synchronicity of life.  Wondering about what makes you a mother and when does it count to call yourself one?  Is it when your baby is born?  Is it when you conceive? Is it when bring a child into your home?  Is it when you say yes to raising and caring for another life form?  

We bee women work in cycles of six, and today marks six years.  Today things are more piercing than usual.  Today the memory is close, and the journey of healing is arching out behind me in its multitude of colors.  Since that day, when I discovered I held the most precious spirit within my womb, I have started a business dedicated natural beekeeping, initiated dream workshops centred around the honey bee, worked intimately with women and their womb-stories, traveled multiple times back to England to train with The Path of Pollen and found home in a new city.  In one week, I will embark on my sixth trip to England to study once more at The Sacred Trust.  

Moving into my sixth year as an apiculturist, I am acutely aware of the gift bee-centric beekeeping can be to the beekeeper.  Bees can be a bridge between ourselves and the natural world.  A way to address the collective grief of nature-deficit disorder by engaging with a species vital to the weave of life on this planet.  A way to serve. Beekeeping has been utilised to treat PTSD in veterans and assist in nature-based therapy for inmates in prison.  It offers a reason to watch the seasons, to connect to the cycles of life and flowering plants.  Without meaning to, we become aware of the fertility of the earth, the places we need to tend and coax into thriving, the places that offer prolific life-sustaining nectar.  We hear the hum of a healthy hive, and we are soothed, even if we don’t understand why. 

So often, my question is how do we serve the colony?  How do we become bee-centric, and not human-centric?  How do we see through the lens of the bee.  But bee guardianship is a relationship, a two way street, an agreement.  Every once in a while, I take a moment to remember the grace of what the honey bee offers us, because, she is after all, central to the fecundity of all life.

My daughter’s hive lived for four years, dying during the summer I moved away.  Now, a tree is planted on the site of that old womb/tomb.  I became a bee guardian because my womb needed to heal.  Because my heart needed to know about the other side of grief.  Because even in sorrow, the bees bring me immeasurable peace.  Because every day that I grieve my childlessness and dream of a new womb-story, I am also reminded that there is an ineffable joy in the love between a bee and a flower.  From that love the earth remains a fertile mother, showering her children in meadows.