Love as a Living Presence I remember the first time I encountered the Spirit Beloved beyond human form. I was 16 and heading to school on an early, misty morning. Alone on the street in the dawn light, I encountered a majestic stag. We stood there, facing one another, a few yards apart, and in […]

Dawn light on the hives. Mid January is when I start gearing up for bee season in Northern California. The magnolias are in bloom and we are only a few weeks away from the plum tree blossoms. It’s a good time for making lists.

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.

In February, I had the tremendously rich experience of teaching Apis Sophia Exstasis in my home state, after 3 years of teaching the same body of work in France.  Under a constant deluge of wet weather, a group of us gathered in the Mendocino oak savannah to experience what I now regard as six days of ceremony.  It was utter magic.

What calls you to a place? A path? A sacred text? What is the source of that invisible bell tolling a tone only you can hear? We speak of callings. Being called to a profession, a city, a tree. People come to my work more often than not, because I speak within the textured landscape of honeybees. They share a feeling of being called by the bees. I too had a similar call, but it didn’t start with bees. I’m not exactly sure where or when it started, but a I recall a similar bell tolling through my being on a school trip to England at the age of 17. I was part of a high school band visiting and performing in Cornwall. We were on a bus with the usual chaos of a bunch of kids who couldn’t care less about the landscape we were passing through. But I knew. I was aware of just how many sacred sites piled atop one another.

There was once a temple built of beeswax and feathers.  It sat in a mountainous region near a cave where bees, or was it souls, came and went.

On looms of spirit, nymphs wove the purple threads of form, while honey pots filled, and the the divinatory bees in their maiden nature, swarmed in and out.

We’ve given her many names: Callieach, Persephone, Nepthys, Kali. But her original name was Earth. Mother. Crone. Womb and Tomb. There is no death goddess who is not also tied to, or herself a goddess of rebirth. They are not separate, because life is not, and never can be separate from death. This is why the Kelts built passage tombs or long barrows. We are born of the Mother and return to the Mother, her dark and earthly embrace.

I have often struggled with what it means to be a third generation Californian living on stolen land. I love California dearly, but I am also someone who has always longed for a deeper sense of roots.

I found the siren song of ancestral roots early on in Celtic myths and European herbcraft. This drew me to England and Scotland by the age of 17, and I have spent the rest of my life feeling as though I were of two places.