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.