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.

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.