Unclocked

In the final hour before Trinidad's orthopedic appointment, my yard vibrated with the harmonic resonance of many, many hands helping. An NVC student of mine bent to earth with buckwheat seeds for the sowing. A three year old neighbor took our water wand to the lettuce bed. My eldest son and his seven year-old friend picked a panoply of green leafy weeds from the garden to make "rabbit salad," and three more children, aged 4-8, sat down on the deck to sort garlic into piles by size in preparation for braiding.

I looked at the clock: 30 minutes to departure by bicycle to the fancy new skyrise across town. Hmmm. Time to check the bees? No snacks had been packed, no faces washed, nor shoes located. Two families of children and one adult would need to make their transitions homeward in those final minutes. Still, the flow moved me; honey called.

Turning my back on the clock, I swept up my hive tool, brush and bee veil under one arm. Those not engaged in Serious Work watched me light up the smoker and wove themselves into the story of the bees in summer harvest. Why does the smoke calm them? What do the bees do? What will you be looking for? Their wide eyes watched me as I crossed the yard and pried the boxes apart, lifting each frame to measure capped comb. These children have seen our bees emerge for their first spring flights last March, and they will follow the honey flow as it is pulled from the hive next month. Each will go home then with sticky hands and stories to tell.

Parents returned through the back gate and gently collected their children. The bees circled round in seemingly chaotic loops, an insect ballet, each returning to the hive with food for the morrow. All of these circles, sacred, and me, through a beeveil, watching.

I set my tools aside and announced our imminent departure. Another miraculous season well-timed from planting to harvest with little thought on my part, all hands and heart in the working. My boys met me on the driveway with shoes on their feet. I grabbed a water bottle and slipped the afternoon sandwich outcasts into my backpack.

We had twenty-five minutes to bike across town, and we arrived exactly on time.

Time to Swarm

"The bees have swarmed again," I told Seda.
"What? How do you know?" she asked, incredulous.
"Because I looked into the backyard just as they left the Naboo hive. I watched them circle and drift upward, over the fence, and into the neighbor's tree."
"But, that's impossible!" she cried. "I just added a new box to the hive so they would have more room a week and a half ago!"
"Yes, but they had already built a new queen cell. She has been gestating since before you added the box, and when she hatched, they were ready and flew."


The human heart is not so unlike a colony of bees. The time to take flight intuitively known, kept secret and nurtured deep within to gestate into manifestation. Time to leave home as a young adult. Time to leave a job, a career. Time to leave a lover.

The whys and why nots of leaving shift across the landscape of our day as other parts of the heart, the colony, continue the work of the moment. But the egg has been laid. It is only (plus however much more) a matter of time.

We are often impatient. We know the egg has been laid. We wonder why and whether the wait. The gestation period as mysterious as all the inner workings of our hearts, set by some internal clock that sounds the alarm loud and clear on the day of departure. When will we be called to fly? How much more honey shall we bring to this hive?

Our work is our work is our work. Whether in this hive or the next, our efforts in this world are seamless. I doubt the bees waste their time in wondering. The growing up, the growing old, the growing present goes on and on.

And this I pray: that departures may be peaceable whether I am going or letting go. That I may stretch forth my arms to the sky as I did the day I saw that swarm depart and declare my letting go a gift to the world, so many efforts in nurturing sent forth to grow and prosper as they may.

Calling Holidays

Today, with temperatures soaring and the children playing outside with such powerful inertia that all mothers were washed away (for the second day in a row) and forgot, simply forgot, to cook dinner... my neighborlady, Evelyn, and I declared it a holiday. Because we could. We had that power.

I know we have that power because today, after writing a post to this blog, the Universe took me by the hand of a child to my backyard where ("look! look!") my bees, 10,000 of them, were swarming for a new home. If I had not followed that child, I would have missed it. I swept them into a makeshift hive and served lunch. As we finished and prepared to bike across town for the kids to have a playdate while I grafted trees at a Community Nursery Raising (thank you, Nick, and all!), my youngest child said, "Oh, they're going out. All of them."

In minutes, the bees had swarmed in a dizzy massive cluster over the roof and across the street. The children were dressed. "Follow them!" I ordered, and we raced out the door, across yards and through alleys where we saw them light in a pine tree.

To the great entertainment of a construction team next door, we ran back and forth with ladders, beehives (2 deep this time; I think they determined the single Western insufficient), and veils to the heavy laden branch. I brushed them and received a few more stings for my impudence. Then I got clever (or perhaps I only listened to good guidance) and grabbed my pruning shears to take the branch off and lay it gently atop the open hive.

"That was awesome!" shouted a passerby. "It looked very scary there for a minute!"

I left a quick note for the residents upon whom I had assumed a trespass based on their groovy bumper stickers, ran back, dropped off the kids and made it to the grafting only 5 minutes late. A check on the bees 4 hours later showed them still in place.

So it was that Evelyn and I stood on the street corner watching sprinkler soaked blond children throw dirt at each other and we said, "Yes. A holiday. This day will be called 'Cloud Rising.' For all of the clouds that have risen today. (More than you know, said Evelyn.) The bees have named it."

And tomorrow? Tomorrow is a holiday, too. We couldn't resist. Tomorrow will be "Dam Breaking." So prepare yourself to open, let flow and heal. Prepare the channels you wish your flow to enter. Prepare yourself for the ride.

Bees here now

$2700 in bees delivered by a Russian who drove them up from Chico in the backseat of his truck (50 colonies in small boxes, wedged in) with 130 hives, bees flying, on the flatbed, a BobCat vehicle in tow. My bee man, Philip Smith, was impressed. "The vision," he said, eyes shining, "I wish I had a video."

One suburban mother with two children under eight in tow. A cell phone with a camera only they can operate. Four jars of honey for hungry bees.

Philip and I share the love of bees. For their pollination, their ruthless devotion to community, each being EveryBee, the queen the workers All.

It's about getting our hands sticky. It's about breaking out of classrooms to get our sensory experience by nature's design. It's about the invisible umbilical cord that holds us close to the hive, the fields. It's about learning the pathway home.

The boys and I spun open the tops of Ball jars, slathered honey by hand across the combs that would hang in deep frames side by side in cubicle hives. This tinkering isn't in the bees plan. We invade their sacred rhythm to support ourselves in the nourishment we provide them. Each uprooted colony hungry. "It's like landing them in a home with the refrigerator stocked," I told my sons.

Their hands so sticky. The honey, liquid gold, slid into upturned caverns and set. The bees flew around us, in our hair, our clothes. My boys quietly honored the bees on their foreheads, cheeks, wrists. "Look," they said. "Look. Isn't she beautiful?"

I took the last full frame to Philip who invited me to shake the boxes of bees into their new hives. I was not wearing veil or gloves. Philip's ease and expectation of peace is infectious. Hat tilted against sudden spring hailstorms. Clothes untucked. "Philip gets stung fairly often, and it doesn't seem to bother him," I told the boys.

"I've only been stung a few times today," he said. The boys snapped pictures on the cell.

I went into the hives, took the box full of bees, and shook it as instructed. They fell out in balls. They crawled into my sleeves. I stopped taking care not to touch them and rested with a more peripheral sense of their traffic. I shook them out from under my sweater. "This is a celebration," I told Philip. "My first time without protective clothing. Suburban mom turned beekeeper."

"I've never thought of you as a suburban mom," he said.

"You didn't know me before I kept bees," I said.

When dark clouds opened and let loose over the bee yard, I took my small swarm and drifted back across the fields, over the hill, and into our city. I called a friend on my cell to report the triumph: "I didn't even get stung!"

We took a cart at the grocery store and began our rounds. So much food in packages, plastic, paper. And then, the sting. Inside my underwear, a bee. On aisle seven, city girl took her reckoning. Or was it baptism on the wing?