Transcript from Jules Evans Interview

In September Jules Evans approached me asking for an interview.

His email wrote:

“These are the questions Id love to ask you, maybe you could reply by email? 

- how do you feel about the plagiarisms by Simon and his and Naomi’s apparent concoction of the whole alleged-tradition? 

- how did you feel about Shift Network removing your course? 

- how do you feel about ‘European bee shamanism’ now? As in, do you still think it’s real?”

I feel things were not represented clearly or truthfully, especially my experience with the Shift Network. I’ve included my relevant responses that were sent over voice recordings:

Introduction:

My name is Ariella Daly. I am a beekeeper. I teach natural beekeeping. I'm currently getting a Master Beekeeping Certificate from Cornell. I've been beekeeping since 2010 and I teach a mixture of beekeeping work, dream work, and what I now call bee animism, because I no longer believe bee shamanism is real. Bee shamanism in the sense of people working with bees in a shamanic way, I do believe is real, but as far as a European bee shamanism, a folk tradition with roots that date back to ancient Greece? I absolutely do not believe that is real.

In 2010 I came across this work and I traveled to England because I had a degree in anthropology, and I had spent time in Ireland studying Arthurian fiction and Irish mythology and culture. I have had a very long standing relationship with folk traditions and folk cultures. I have a background in studying anthropology; studying folklore. My main interest is: where do pre-Christian traditions span time, and show up, even in the Modern era? Such as the practice of telling the bees which is not a bee shamanism thing, it's a folk tradition. So that's my area of interest. And then, of course, ancient cultures.

I've spent a lot of time studying pre-Christian traditions in relationship to women and women's traditions and the sacred feminine.

Now I went to to England because of Simon's book. Because when I read Simon's book, I was so overcome with a sense of familiarity and profound just relief that, oh, my god, something survived. I can't believe something survived. That was my feeling. And I was not the only one. Over the years, American women in particular went to England to study at the Sacred Trust, because there was this feeling of, here I am a settler on unceded land in the United States, feeling like I want to connect to roots. And here's something that actually survived and has roots.

The history:

The work over there - I met Simon once in person, very briefly - all the work was with women, and Naomi. Naomi and Kate. They were very dedicated, in particular to empowering women and the bringing forward the feminine principle in all things. One of the main teachings that I still work with today is this idea of direct revelation, meaning having a direct relationship with spirit, not having an intermediary: going directly to the source. That's why you have things like shamanic journeys. A version of a shamanic journey is a figure eight walk, and that is inspired by the bees. Now we know that that walk is not, in fact, something that came down from the bee tradition, but if you research the figure eight - eight in relationship to spiritual traditions - you find it all over the place, and of course, it's how the bees communicate. So in terms of, does something like the infinity symbol still have meaning to me? Absolutely. Do I think that it came from a long standing tradition? No.

And so there's this, this— I can mostly speak for my American sisters: we went there, in part because of this book, and in part because this work was so deeply empowering. Ultimately, it was womb shamanism. It was about the power of deeply listening to the body, of reclamation of the womb as a center for wisdom and knowing. And I continue to study that.

In 2015 someone told me that Simon made it all up. I thought “Oh, my God”, that actually just completely devastated me. So I went to Naomi and let her know. “Hey, this happened. I want to know the actual story, the actual origins of this work.” And as far as she knew, it was absolutely true, but she sent me to Simon to have a conversation with him. We had a zoom call, and we talked about the tradition. And he told me all of these things about his experience with these women, his experience with Bridge, the supposed elder that we now know never existed. And these were details. Up until this point in my life, I had not encountered a pathological liar, so I didn't have the radar to pick up on it. I was just like, “oh, this has got to be true, because he's talking about, literally, chopping wood and some really mundane things.” These were very detailed personal stories that weren't in the book, and that answered it for me. In my mind, no one could lie to my face with detailed stories about their experience. It just didn't make any sense. And so, of course, I believed him.

The Shift Network:

When it [the extensive plagiarism] first came out, the way it was presented was that anybody teaching, any women associated with this work are complicit by nature. That was also very harmful to a lot of people. And at that point, the staff had no idea. The women teaching this work had no idea there was that much plagiarism. So when it came out, I went to the Shift Network. They had already approached me because they wanted to rebrand the course I had taught (European bee shamanism) and and I actually saw this- that we're going to reteach the course - as “this is actually interesting. this happening while this plagiarism [discovery] is happening, because we we need to talk. We need to talk about what I teach.” I let them know about what was going on. They decided to take all references to Simon out of my course and out of the promo.

I was working with one of the PR people to to really try and…. they/we went back and forth about an email to send out to students, how to say it, what to say. And this was all as this [the plagiarism/lies] was coming out and unfolding. I was emailing my boss. I was emailing all these different people involved. I was reaching out to saying, “Hey, this is a red flag. We need to talk about this, etc, etc.” Then the staff from the Sacred Trust finally had a meeting, probably about a month later, maybe three weeks later. I can't remember the exact dates, but I do remember that on november 5, 2023 they [The Sacred Trust female faculty] had a meeting with Simon, and he admitted that these (the book/his story) were things that happened in “non ordinary reality”. So we found out that Bridge wasn't real and that these women [who] supposedly taught him in secret, weren't real.

Part of the problem with all of this is that Naomi had conversations with a woman over the phone named Vivian, who had given her "transmissions", and so now she had no idea what was real, and if this woman was complicit in something, who this woman was, etc. She had been given a last name, but supposedly her first name was a code name, so Naomi still doesn't know who it was that she was having conversations with, [this woman] who was supposedly an elder of this tradition.

As this was coming out, I was updating my students with things that felt true, like “what we know now is that there is plagiarism”. “What we know now is that Simon made up a large portion of this work”. “What we know now is that there's an amalgamation of various traditions in Simon's work”. What I wasn't doing was a blow by blow of every little thing that Simon said or didn't do. I wasn't picking it apart. During that time I had many meetings with concerned students to talk about what I knew, and what was going on. I had one student in particular start to threaten me, threaten litigation that I wasn't giving every last detail about Simon. I wasn't, for instance, talking about how there's a potential that there is a person named bid Bon bot, who was part of the Golden Dawn who might have been who Bridge was. These were details that were so strange and murky that it was too…. I wanted to just have very specific like, “this is what we know. This is what's still being asked. This is what I don't know.”

I went to the Shift Network once I found out that Simon had made things up, and I offered to step down, offered to stop teaching at the Shift Network. And they said, “No, no, everything's fine. It's no big deal. It's not a big deal for us. We love your teachings.” They wanted to proceed with the course. I met with them to prepare the next course, and out the gate, they said, Okay, we're going to call this European bee shamanism. And I said, "Absolutely not. I cannot teach a course on European Bee shamanism anymore: we know that it's not real." And I asked them to actually, go back to the drawing board with each other and discuss, because apparently the departments weren't talking to each other. I never heard from my boss about me offering to step down. I never heard from my boss about all of my concerns. I just heard from everyone else that it was totally fine, no big deal. Then a group of students threatened litigation against the Shift Network if they didn't take my courses down and basically get rid of me. And so it was literally one day, I was telling them I couldn't teach a course on Bee Shamanism. And they said it's no big deal. And I said "it is a big deal". And the next day they let me go. We've had a lot of discussions since then, because I was very, very frustrated that they didn't take me seriously about how important it was that this was handled ethically around the veracity of bee shamanism. They have since apologized to me. They have actually invited me to come back and teach. They really like my teaching, but because that was all handled so messily, I have not gone back to teach with them, because ethics are really important to me.

I feel like it was the right move to take my courses down. Like I said, I had offered to take them down, but we were also in the process of redoing a course. So I saw it as an opportunity to no longer teach it as bee shamanism and work with different principles around the bees. So yeah, I think it was the right move. I think the way it was done was was handled very poorly.

HOW DID IT AFFECT ME:

I lost more than a third of my yearly income as single mom. There are three things that I think are truly awful about the situation. One is obviously Simon and his lies. It's so out of this world, in my experience. I couldn't fathom that somebody could lie for that long, to that degree. Two, the way women who had studied in this work treated each other, especially around what people were experiencing and what people believed when it was still being discovered whether or not it was real. The way women treated each other was was pretty awful. The way some people treated the female staff from the Sacred Trust, who were also floundering trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I think that was really sad because, you know, we, we'd spent so much time together, learning how to be cohesive and in a hive, and I think for a lot of people, it sort of turned a lot of people off from spirituality in general. Those are two of the most terrible things. But the third thing that I think is truly awful is that this work, the revelation of this not being real, really created a crisis of faith for many people who had come to this work, including myself, with this belief that there was an actual folk tradition behind it, and that something had survived, something of the Sacred Feminine had survived all the decimation, all of the devastation of women's traditions over the centuries, and that it had survived by hiding in plain sight through bees, beekeeping and women's traditions like weaving. That was really heartbreaking.

Women like me also lost significant income and livelihoods. It's one thing for Simon to lose his livelihood based on his lies, but entirely a different thing for women who have spent 1000s of dollars. I flew to the UK 11 times. I spent 1000s of dollars trying to learn more about a folk tradition that was based in women's spirituality. I based a lot of my business off of having studied so long and so diligently that I felt…. I had taken literally a three year training so that I could teach this work and continue this work forward. One thing that I was doing that no one else was doing is combining this work with actual beekeeping. And I think that, at this point, is now a big red flag: Why wasn't that happening? It was a bee tradition. Why weren't we learning about bees in that way?

But I found a beautiful synthesis of this work in the bees, and actually really started to understand where a lot of the practices were related to bees and in these beautiful ways. Since then, I have just been really honest with my students. I was in the middle of teaching classes when this all took place, so I offered refunds to everybody. I had very candid and honest conversations during my courses with people, and the response that I have gotten has been, please don't stop teaching this. I've had to say I cannot teach it as a lineage anymore. I have had people begging me to keep teaching it, feeling very sad that they can't go back to the UK and keep learning it, feeling like they were in the middle of training, and they just don't care about whether it's true or not, because the practices were so powerful. So that has been a really interesting thing to navigate. People asking me to keep going, and a lot of people just saying “We don't care. These practices are beautiful. It doesn't matter where they came from.”

It matters to me. But I just want to say that that has been the majority of response from my students. I lost very few students in the process. I was very honest with people. I was very candid. I had one student ask for a refund. So it's just something to be aware of, because perhaps there are other people that are painting a different picture, but when it all comes down to it, the income that I lost was with the Shift Network, and also because I had to take time and pause and try and figure out, what can I teach? How can I move forward with my work?

Do I believe Bee shamanism is real?

No, I don't. What I do believe is that there are threads and shards of women's spirituality out there that are throughlines, that are that are true, that are universal truths, like the connections between life, women's work and weaving, which was a big part of the work we did. I think that's true. Working with the intuition as part of the sacred feminine principle, and working with oracular practices, all of that doesn't feel like it belongs to bee shamanism... and and you can find it in the historical record.

I do think some of the practices still have tremendous value, and I still use them to this day in my personal spiritual work, because they were taught as avenues towards direct relationship with the with the bees, with spirit guides, with ancestors, with the body and I will not let a man's fallacy and lies take away my sovereign relationship to my physical body as a vessel for spiritual, physical, and emotional truth.

My takeaway from all of this has been to continue to seek spiritual and emotional and inner truth through connection to the land, to the body, and to the more than human world. That is what I've been doing since I was 15, and what I continue to do. The tragedy for me is that something that I thought was precious and had been preserved did not, in fact, survive, and it just brings up that much more grief around the systematic oppression of women's spirituality in Europe over the centuries.

The harm beyond the lies:

I also want to let you know that even though we haven't spoken this experience, what happened was fairly traumatizing and harmful. We lost the thread. It could have been really about what this one man did, but instead, women really went after other women, myself included, and it was done in such an aggressive and painful and harmful way that even talking about it is scary for me, because I have been directly threatened. My livelihood has been threatened. My reputation has been threatened, which isn't as important as being able to put food on the table for my daughter. As a single mother who built her career around this, it's pretty intense.

There's been a lot of repair work. I'm interested in repair. After trauma comes repair work, and that's what we have to do. Because, you know, this is not the first time a white man has been in a place of power and has deceived others. And while there may not have been the typical sex scandals or anything like that - there was so much beauty in the work and we don't want to lose the beauty of women coming together In support of women's empowerment, women's intuition, women's embodiment. We don't want to lose that at the hands of another patriarchal figure who never even taught us. We never sat in the room with him, at least I never did. He never taught the women's work. And so it's a very vulnerable thing to even interview about it or talk about, because those of us who were teaching this work were really aggressively maligned. And that can be very, very painful to experience, especially with people who you trusted. And so for me, that's my caution in speaking to you, is that this doesn't need to be sensationalized any more than it already has been. This is about a man who plagiarized. A man who created an amalgamation and called it a tradition and then taught it to people who believed it to be real and carried it forward as a tradition. I lost some of my faith. I lost income, for sure, but I gained so much more from working with these women to the degree that I was able to move forward in my life after a devastating miscarriage, through the healing work I did and the empowerment and the embodiment work I did, I was able to move forward and have the child that I have always wanted on my own.

Final Note (not part of the transcript): I think the one thing that hasn’t been explicitly said, is how awful it feels to have passed something on to students as a teacher that I believed was real, and turned out to be made up. That’s certainly something to contend with, even if I didn’t know it wasn’t real at the time.

If you want to learn more about this whole thing you can read my article “What is Bee Shamanism”

The Bee Kisses the Flower

I've just gotten off a call with a friend, and we were talking about the difference between sexual energy and eros.  I was struck by how much I feel the bee and the flower represent the essence of eros.  It is something that is both intangible, and all around us.  Yes, it can include sexual energy, but it its expression is not limited to the sexual.  It is life, vitality, sensuality, and something more.  

My daughter asked me the other day how apple trees make apples.  We were looking some apple blossoms and I shared with her that in order for an apple blossom to become an apple, the blossom first must be kissed by a bee.  It's both innocent and deeply erotic.  Natural and completely divine.

It is the entwinement of essence between two things that are wholly individual by belong to one another.  It is the vine entwined with the tree.  The river snaking into the sea.  The sparks from the fire mixed with the pin-pricks of the night stars. 

 As spring unfurls, we become that much more aware of it.  We have the chance to surrender to it.  To dance with it.  To be mistress to the unfolding multitudes of unions.  We too can become the shore desired by the sea.

Eros brings us into contact with The Beloved.  It reminds us of our longing and our belonging.

We can call the Beloved to us through dreams, through poetry, through prayer, through offering ourselves to the mystery?  Why?  Because the spirit of the beloved moves through all things.  Twin to Eros, the Beloved awakens to our call, and wakes us up to its call.  It is the great shapeshifter, coursing through our lives, steady and tangible; ineffable and fleeting.

Whatever the state of your heart, you can encounter the Beloved.  It a spirit that moves through all things, and yet particular to you and the shape of your being.  You’ve met it before.  You’ve dreamt with it, of it.  Them? A person? A color? A passing warmth?  A moment in a storm.

This spring, as the Beltane fires light, and we gather in the quickening of the blooms, I invite you to join me for 4 weeks of actively working with the Spirit of the Beloved through dreams, ritual, and the intimacy of nature.

Entwine: Courting the Beloved begins on Tuesday, 4/23/2024.  All classes will run 2.5 hours and be recorded.  We will work with:

• How to recognize and work with your own Spirit Beloved

• Ways to invite more Love into your life, whether or not you are in a romantic partnership

• Tools for encountering the spirit world and bringing back messages, support, and actionable guidance.

• How working with Eros and the Beloved gives you greater access to your own creative energy

• How to divine and determine the ingredients to a Sacred Beloved Cordial (and how to make it!)

• Heart as healer, body as healer, beloved as healer.

The Ceremony of our Lives

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.

Shortly after, I taught my first online dream incubation course, centered around an all night dream healing ceremony.  Inspired by the dream healing temples of Ancient Greece, the program focused on ritual preparation, working with spirit guides, and eventually a night of liminal dreaming and vision seeking to support individual healing and transformation.

Having such profound ceremonies two months in a row, I started to think about how essential ritual and ceremony are to our lives.  When I look back on some of the ceremonies of my life, there is often a strong feeling of before and after.  Meaning, the ceremony became a marker point for some form of change, small or massive, in my life.  Usually that change began internally, but often there were real life ripple affects that I could have never dreamed of or predicted.

Ceremony changes us.  It weaves us into the creative fabric of the living earth.  It gives us a change to be of service, and to also surrender to the magic of the unknown.  I'm tired of the word manifestation.  I want rites of passage.  I want all night vigils.  I want dancing around the fire, and gazing into the wombic void.

Ceremony changes us.  It weaves us into the creative fabric of the living earth.  It gives us a change to be of service, and to also surrender to the magic of the unknown.  I'm tired of the word manifestation.  I want rites of passage.  I want all night vigils.  I want dancing around the fire, and gazing into the wombic void.

To get to those larger moments of ceremonial change, we also need moments of dare I say, mundane ritual.  Why mundane?  Because when we make ritual part of our every day life, it become the magic woven into the mundane.  When we leave butter out for the wee folk, or cut our hair on the new moon.  When we light a candle at breakfast, or leave a small plate for the ancestors, we are making the ritual magic ordinary.  

Yes, I love a grand, powerful, life altering ceremony, but it's in the daily ritual, or folkcraft, that we actually start to feel the magic of the more-than-human world, the magic of the mystery, permeate our being.

So I ask you, what are the small rituals you can create to keep to tied to the magic?  And when you don't have access to a week long retreat steeped in wombic oracular magic, what are the small ceremonies you can create for yourself?  Where can you set time aside to honor something, to prepare, to welcome, to end, to transform, to acknowledge, to heal.

As we come to the seasonal shift of the equinox, what small ceremony can you weave into your life?  Is it perhaps a ceremony to welcome the bee swarms back to the land?  Or a lunar eclipse ceremony to let go of what might still weigh on you from your winter's work?  Or perhaps a ceremony to bring life and abundance to the lands that grow your local produce?

Whatever it is, know that in the act of ceremony and ritual, you are not alone.  You are being witnessed by a myriad of beings who see the kindred spirit you are, and know you as part of the web of life.

Why I don't like the phrase "find your purpose."

“Find your purpose” is a phrase I’ve never been too fond of.

It’s used to market to people’s pain points.  I would know.  I spent most of my early adulthood feeling like a an unmoored misfit, trying to make it in a music career, but feeling like (gasp) music wasn’t quite enough.  Don’t get me wrong, I breathe music.  I adored it as still do.  But, I didn’t know how to reconcile my love of music and performing, with the feelings of “what am I supposed to do with my life?”

Bees changed that of course, but that’s another story.  Now, almost a decade into this bee-centric career, I get asked a lot, why bees.

Let me tell you: bees are not my purpose.  Bees are the vehicle that powers my soul’s drive.

I’ve worked with marketing teams before, and they always ask me to “find your ideal client’s pain point.”  They want to know the “results” working with me will drive.  They get really excited if they can throw in the mouth-watering hook “find your purpose.”

But what if looking for purpose isn’t the point?  There are many direction I could have gone with my life.  It could have been music.  Or folklore.  Or therapy.  Or travel agent.  It needed up being bees, for now.  But it’s not just bees is it?  It’s bees, folklore, travel, dreams, women’s wisdom, shamanism, animism, eco-literacy, mythology, and spiritual ecology.

What if, it’s not so much a question of finding your purpose, but rather, asking what drive you.  What propels you forward in this one wild life?

It a way it’s the same question, but rather than finding a catch phrase or a job, you’re asking yourself what moves you to act, create, live.

For me, it’s a love of the animate earth.  Beyond that, it’s a drive to help people fall in love with the Earth.  You could fall in love through gardening, hiking, clouds, rocks, bats, phosphorescent seas.  You name it.  It was bees for me, but the bees are the vehicle, not the purpose.

What drives me is a belief.  The belief that if we fall in love with the earth (any aspect of it), we are more likely to develop a relationship with it.  And in developing a relationship with it, we learn to listen to it.  In learning to hear the non-human world, to love it, to relate to it, we naturally want to support it.  Whether that support looks like climate action or helping kids identify weird cool bugs, it doesn’t matter.  What matters, is that you have more love in your life, and that love is reciprocal.   

I believe that the only way we turn the tide on this massive ship of the Anthropocene is through falling in love to the point of relating, and from that point, finding different ways of being with the earth.

What about you?  What drives you?  What calls your soul onward?  Forget a catchy, well-defined purpose.  What does your soul ache for?

Origins

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. I put my headphones on, leaned against the window, and transported myself outside, galloping on a horse along the green road. I merged. I journeyed. Without framework, or definitions, I intuitively traveled the inner pathways of my imaginal self and experience a different state of being, where I got to weave through the standing stones no one spared a second glance for. Where I was wild, and free, and alive in a brightly living ancient landscape. The Celtic soul of the land was ringing its fairy bells, and I was following.

The bees brought me back to England for many years after, as I found myself drawn to an obscure spiritual pathway that somehow combined the taste of my many years of Celtic studies with something ineffable and yet utterly housing me in my own body, in the midst of modernity. It was the first time I no longer needed to cast a lonely gaze back to antiquity, because in these practices I found a way to be a woman, here in a broken America, able to function in the modern world, with the mysteries alive all around her.

Colonialism and Christianity, the old buddies that they are, didn’t just steal the heart, land, and culture of other continents. It did it right in the great backyard of Europe first.

Women’s spirituality, folk traditions, and indigenous, local practices and ways of life were oppressed, suppressed, overwritten, or destroyed in the name of one male god.

Ways of thinking and ways of life were dramatically altered. This part is important, because the world view that supports the vibrate, living, animate Earth was replaced with what we have now. The modern West lives in a Christocentric, scientifically-based society, built within a framework of Patriarchy and colonialism that values certain types of peoples, behavior, and knowledge above and to the detriment of others.

This thinking permeates all of our systems. It affects our ways of relating, parenting, and working. While I adore the intellect, and love love love some good science, we are out of balance. The one truth, one god, one explanation, singular deduction model leaves little room for hunches, intuitive tugs, nuance, and a little everyday witchery. Ironic then, that so many of our greatest discoveries have come from hunches.

Even within spiritual pathways of non-Christian origin, we still seek that which is pure, proven, and backed by empirical evidence. I see it all the time in my work. I see it in myself - a desire to find “THE” origin.

Could it be that part of our desire to find and practice something of pure origins is ingrained in our psyche due to one book being referenced as an ultimate truth for centuries? Could this drumming of “only one God” into our collective psyche have affected our ability to hold nuance? Is this, in part, where we get the eternal damnation of cancel culture? Although at this point, the rise in cancel culture does serve to hold accountable the damage done by the power structures of colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, and in this there is absolutely a place for the collective call out.

Other schools of thought and animistic ways of being or world views were never pure in origin, because there was no one ultimate supreme being. There are thousands of variations of spirit, alive and well, all around us, available to us, and part of the fabric of who and what we are.

There are cultural origins. There are place-based origins. But for any tradition to survive into the modern era (without the peoples being relatively isolated), the peoples will have met other peoples from other regions, and swapped, shared, integrated, and adapted spiritual and folk practices based on that exposure, whether that exposure is seen as positive or negative. It’s just like myths and stories. You can find them again and again, wearing different clothes and different faces, if you look. There will never be a pure origin, because that’s not how folk traditions or animism works.

Animism works in direct relationship to a vibrant, living, ensouled world. A world we can cultivate relationship with on a daily basis.

One of the affirming and beautiful things about animistic and spiritual traditions, is that you can often find mirrors and similar practices across the globe and through time. Spiritual truths having been reached by various cultures, individuals, and groups that are echoed in other practices, such as the common symbol of a great tree of life between the earth and the cosmos.

We also often see an attitude of exclusivity and originality that permeates spiritual pathways. Really, what we’re looking at in differing traditions is a particular hue in a wide color pallet of experiences. One hue might speak more to your particular relationship with the world than another. The flavor and spirits of the desert might resonate with you, while the teachings that emerged from the jungle or a snowy mountainous region might resonate with another. It’s the same with particular animals, elements, or plants functioning as spirit guides and motifs for spiritual insight or growth. What one learns from the bee might be quite specific to the bees themselves, and that very beeness is what opens up pathways of insight and epiphany within particular individuals. The language of fire, or the calling of a god of gateways might be the basis for another tradition that speaks more directly to a different individual.

This does not mean it’s acceptable to blatantly appropriate indigenous cultural practices and rebrand them in a glossy western package. But it does mean that when looking at, for instance, spiritual traditions emerging out of Europe, where women’s spirituality and indigenous wisdom was systematically destroyed? We find it in the remnants, layers upon layers of beliefs and practices borrowed from many cultures echoing each other.

The point I’m making is that every animistic or folk tradition that inspires you has no definitive origins, but did at some point emerge from people who were living in a way that was informed by very specific spirits of the land and the ancestors associated with that land, plant, animal, weather pattern, etc. Some of these, in turn, met with other peoples from other lands. Other peoples who also had direct experiences with spirit, the gods, place. These traditions, practices, ceremonies, beliefs, were woven together to form an ever expanding tapestry of relationship to that which we call the divine.

Folk traditions and spiritual traditions kept going. Kept evolving. Kept being added to. Kept borrowing from other places, other peoples. Nothing is stagnant. Nothing sits only in ancient origins. Everything is always being added to and created. Feels sticky and confusing doesn’t it? How do we hold this ever evolving form of spirituality as true, but also stand against the appropriation of indigenous traditions?

In the bee tradition I practice, some pieces were brought in from Wales, others from Lithuania, others, it is said, came from Ancient Greece. During my studies of bee shamanism, my teacher, Naomi Lewis brought in the Meisner-based work of Kate Maravan. My other teacher, Kate Shela, brought in her incredible dance and embodiment work, adding this to what was passed down. The “tradition" evolved before my eyes, and brought me ever-closer to myself.

If you are part of the global west that has been severed from its animistic origins, then you’ve also most likely been heavily influence by a dominant world view that is Christocentric, monotheistic, and based on rational thinking.

The Christocentric view of a single truth, written down for all time as the Word, is false even in its own making. We know there were many gospels, many accounts, of the teachings of Jesus and his disciples. But nonetheless this pervasive idea of one origin, one truth, influences even our thinking around finding the one truth or one origin of folk traditions or modern spiritual practice.

When I was studying at University in Ireland, I focused my final paper on the conversion from Paganism to Christianity in Europe from the 5-9th century. What I was struck by was how there wasn’t just one “pagan” religion in old Europe as I had naively perceived (influenced by a Christocentric telling of history). There were many local flavors and variations centered around a worldview that supported interaction with the living spirits of the land, and later Gods/Goddesses, who were eventually vilified or became Saints.

Furthermore, these Pagans of various beliefs and practice were constantly borrowing and adopting from each other, both from invading and conquering groups, as well as through trade. What then counts as authentic origin? What if some of these practices and beliefs survived into the modern era by hiding in plain sight? By adopting Christianity, and molding pre-Christian beliefs and practice into their version of Christianity? Who gets to claim rights to such things as the Easter egg, Halloween costume, or Christmas tree?

Some bells that ring through us will never be backed by proof of their truth, singular origin, or even come with enough material to satisfy your thirst for more. Sometimes, all we get is a tattered fragment of an ancient poem to spark something so deep, we must pursue it. In doing so, we find that ultimately, the only way to spiritual truth is through your own relationship to the gods, plentiful in their numbers.

Bone Memory

Aurora on Dartmoor. Devon, England.

There is old memory in all of us. Or perhaps what I mean, is there is human animal memory in all of us. Call it ancestral, call it instinctual, call it past life. It comes from the same place. Bone memory.

I witnessed this in my daughter when friend and author, Sylvia Linsteadt took her up to the ancient bone lands of Dartmoor, where the crone mother presides over bog and changeable mists. Where young foals and lambs test their new legs.
We could not hike far. It was more of a wee ramble over stone and grass, avoiding prickly gorse, and foot-snaring holes.
Sylvia recognized the cuckoo’s call fist. Unmistakable. Just like the famous clocks. Cuckoos are good luck. To hear the first cuckoo of spring is incredibly fortunate. Indeed, other hikers stopped to listen and look for this rare blessing.
Of course we left the songbird offerings. My 2 year old daughter, understanding the magic of the moment then requested that we all take hands and dance a little fairy jig in a ring. She doesn’t know about fairies, or dancing jigs, or May Day dances, or any of the customs of her heritage, but there she was, directing us in a little dance. When she was finished, she requested we lay down on three separate stones, and close our eyes.

If you know anything about fairy lore, hearing a magic bird, dancing on the moor, and falling asleep on a rock is most certainly the beginning of an otherworldly tale.

She knew. Bone memory knew that here, in this land, as the newly born foals wobbled near their mothers, here is where you dance. Here is where you lay your mortal body against the ancient stone. Here is where some part of you remembers: yes, this. I know this. I am this. This place is in me. I recognize this land, because I am eternal, and all my grandmothers are alive within me.

Elephants who Remember Water ~ Grief in Late-Stage Capitalism

Grief hides in strange places.  This weekend I decided to assess my business month to month, starting in January 2022.  As a creative person, getting into the nuts and bolts of business can feel foreign and clinical.  However, honey bees are impeccable mistresses of their homes; always cleaning, always tending.  As the only income stream in my wee family, this impeccability both necessary and empowering.

When I compared monthly incomes I discovered something jarring.  From January to June my income was a fountain of abundance.  I was overflowing with creative juice and course offerings.  My business was flowering in a way it never had.  However, starting in July, my income dropped by 30%….and kept dropping by roughly the same percentage month by month.

What happened?  On June 24, my father died. I helped wash his body.  I clothed him.  I ringed his body in flowers, I held his cold hand, I wrapped him in the white shroud, I watched the undertakers carry him away.  The next day I developed asthma after an anxiety attack.

It’s been eight months, and I have not been able to keep up.  I can’t keep up with emails, with friendships, with creative impulses, with my body’s needs.  The best of me goes to my daughter.

Our society has no room for grief.  Late stage capitalism has no room for grief.  Despite all the support I’ve sought (somatic, therapeutic, shamanic, etc), my life has no room for grief.  Not in the way we need it.  I long to be gathered up by the women, taken to the cave by the sea, sung over, drummed back in, nourished, anointed with healing oils, cried over and with, bathed, buried and reborn.

We hear so often about the importance of slowing down.  It’s a catch phrase climbing the ranks like “self-care”.  It is an essential turn towards health, but the call to slow down can so easily morph from a loving invitation into harmful thinking patterns.  Slowing down is not all on you.  You are not failing if you struggle to make room for the space-taking grief animal. Society is also not failing you.  Society is all of us, and so many of us are trying. We are neither victims of society, nor victims of our choices.  We are a collective organism seeking to heal a greater planetary grief, without knowing how it is we will survive.  We are feeling beings.  We feel things through every sensory aspect of our bodies.  We feel subtle changes in the air, a person, a home.  We feel the sentience of rocks, mountains, and rivers. We feel the dying, we feel the imbalance, we feel the disease. We also feel the birthing, the unfurling, and the vibrant.

When the queen bee dies in a hive, the whole hive changes tone.  To human ears it sounds like the hive is moaning.  To the sensitive self, you can feel the distress.  This social super-organism is collectively grieving.  They, as one body, are keening.  They often stop working for a time.  They loose motivation.   The only way for them to survive is if a bee guardian intervenes, and brings them a new queen, but even then, the genetic makeup of their being is forever changed.

Our life is this oneness, and when a part of our world is lost forever, every aspect of our life is altered: body, finances, friendships, family, home, sexuality, and creativity.  We are both the bees and the keeper.  When a beekeeper hears the moaning, they know something is wrong.  When we audibly grieve, when the pain is recent and acute, our human collective rallies and responds.

But what happens after the keening? The hive seems to go back to normal, collective pollen and nectar.  But it is far from normal.  The hive has no fertility.  The have no going to raise.  They have no mother to help them continue.  In a few months, they will dwindle and die.

I’m not feeling that level of grief.  I’m not dwindling to nothingness, but this more somber aspect of bees’ lives makes me think of all the hidden ways we continue to grieve.  All the places grief is still affecting our creative life, and our relationship to fertile growth.

How then, do we reconcile the long road on grief with the need to sprout and flower?  Or with the need to make a living? I turn to the Earth to remind me that even in the most fallow periods, the soil is quietly regenerating.  I remind myself that time doesn’t just move in seasons, it also moves in geological ages.  It moves in the way that certain seeds move, waiting years and years, until the wildfire comes and causes them to germinate.

I think about how elephant matriarchs will remember a watering hole that is usually dry, but by reading the land and the seasons, knows to lead her herd to this spot, somehow remembering it after decades, and somehow knowing that this year, the water will be flowing.

Always, I find the mirrors for hope in the land.  In the stories of our many kith and kin.

In the meantime, rather than starting my Monday in a panic of how to generate abundance again, I took myself to a favorite cafe for breakfast (something I haven’t done since pre-pandemic).  And then I opened my journal and read the long list of creative ideas I’ve had over the last two years, knowing that within them, are more than enough seeds to make a garden.

She Was A Bee: The dance between myth and fact

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.

After some time, the Temple far below the ancient cave of mysteries, renewed itself in stone, for stone is the most lasting of substances to the mortal eye.  Yet still beneath its cool, firm walls, remained the hidden remembrance of holiness formed from bodies who fly on veiled and feathered wings.

***

We are always reinventing the past.  Reweaving myth and retelling history mythically.  Borrowing from poets of old and calling them historians, we seek to divine what was.  We beg the old pages and stone tablets to reveal facts which we call truths, but is it not all part of a story ever-changing?  Are we not always dreaming and being dreamt in mythic time?

The above words are threaded together from ancient texts depicting Delphi and the Corycian cave further up the mountain from this divinatory temple complex.  It is said that the second temple of Delphi was built of beeswax and feathers.  How are we to interpret these words?  How do we make meaning of the presence of nymphs and bees in the cave above? Does it have anything to do with the priestess who offered lasting prophecy being named the Delphic Bee?

I find the further into the past I delve for truth in the form of facts, the more the certainties of what was crumble in my hands.  What we want to be there, written for all to see, is not.  The mysteries we seek, are called mysteries for a reason.  We romanticize the gleanings and glimpses.  We cast aside the story that the oracles were frothing, babbling, drug addled.  We reawaken the story of women seers, learned, and adept.  We remember that women’s spiritually has been looking for ways to remember itself.

The further I go into following the bees into antiquity,  the more my longing for the romance of it all is slowly replaced by a different, more sure-footed knowing, that places the mysteries of the ancients within the same labyrinth my feet have always been walking upon.

At what point did we decide that the historian and the artist were cut from different cloth? At what point did the historian become one who deal in reality, and the poet, one who does not?

There are truths in the poems and stories.  Deep earth, ancient selves, universal memory kind of truths.  Yet how do we draw meaning from the pin pricks of light that we glean from ancient records and art, while also appreciating that we will never truly know the past?

Why? Because history too is part of a mythic working, where poets become historians and record keepers were artisans.

Always we seek not to assume, and yet always we fill the cracks of lost history with thoughts, desires, and assumptions of our own.

Delphi is a place where prophecy was given by the Delphic bee, also known as a Pythoness, for over a thousand years.  And somehow, mixed into the cooking pot of Delphic history are our friends, the serpent and the bee.

What history tells us, is that only women gave prophecy at Delphi.  What I hear, is that once, the the hearts and minds of the people, it was believed that a woman could sit in the dark and become the voice of divine wisdom, and in this wisdom she was called Bee.  In this wisdom she was called Snake.

Meanwhile, in modern day mayhem of our fast-paced lives governed by global markets, productivity apps, and information overload, there is a European folk pathway, based in animism, that turns to the serpent and the bee as guides in the living practice of giving oracle.  Who is to say if some spark of the bee nymphs and the pythonesses did indeed find its way from antiquity to the present?  Who is to say that when we drop into the dark, and open our bodies to the magnetic earth, we might in fact, be singing the same song we have been seeking?

photos by Koa Kalish

The Sister-Twins Enriching Your Life

When the bees rained down on me, I had two choices.  To panic, or to merge. It was 2010 and I had never been around a bee hive before.  I was visiting a honey bee sanctuary, but having a clump of bees fall on top of me wasn’t exactly how I thought the day would go.

I wouldn’t say I was particularly adept at merging at the time, or even knew what that meant, but I do know it happen.  Something shifted in me so immediately, that I was no longer just Ariella.  I was Ariella and these bees crawling over my skin and under my skirt.  I was ecstatic.

To be ecstatic means to stand outside oneself, or to enter into a state of rapture.  It is one of the moment of magic we sometimes get to encounter through experiences with music, dance, art, eros, nature, and ceremony.   I talk about magic a lot, but what I’m really talking about is the moments where everything seems to come together in some kind of divine synchronicity.  It’s the moments when you touch something ineffable.

Magic affirms life in this world and in the Otherworld.

The bees came into my life in a cascade of magic.  One holy, synchronistic event after the next.  They pounded down the doors of my heartbreaks again and again, lathering my raw sorrows with balms of beeswax and honey.

I was looking at my daughter today, thinking about the magic that brought her here.  The tired years on longing and praying.  The synchronicities that brought the donor father into my life.  The bee swarm on the day she was conceived.

This was followed by the thought, “I’m not really experiencing much magic anymore.”

Hold it! Don’t scoff.  Of course there is magic in every day life with a baby.  What I was referring to, is the kind that happens when you’re on your way home from work and decide to take the long way round, by the sea, just because you can, and no one is waiting for you.  And the whales that appear just as you step out onto the bluff.  I’m talking magical events.  These can be somewhat easier to come by when you aren’t a full time working solo parent.

The truth is, life with a toddler is all magic and all mundane and the same time.  It’s the same with bees and beekeeping. There’s an awful lot of regular, old to-do lists in beekeeping.

My relationship with the bees isn’t quite as mystical as it once was.  This is because they are literally less mysterious to me.  I understand them better.  I understand their behavior, to the best of my ability.  It feels more like a long marriage, when the initial romance fades, but new layers of discovery and depth present themselves as long as we stay curious and open.

Suddenly, there is great beauty, and dare I say, magic in the mundane.

The mundane and the magical are sister-twins.  They are symbiotic forces of good.  You can actively choose to oscillate between the two, brining that much more richness and meaning to your life.

However you have to be willing to do two things:

1. Believe that magic is possible for you

2. Embrace the mundane when it’s time to return

You may be someone drawn to the bees for mystical reasons.  Wonderful. Be prepared for the reality of the day to day life of a beekeeper.

You may be fixated on the abc’s of beekeeping, dotting all your i’s and t’s along the way.  Wonderful.  Be prepared for their magic to seep into your life and sweep you off your feet unexpectedly.

What we love most is always connected to a sense of magic, but what sustains that love is the day to day reality of being in relationship with it.

I may not be having euphoric meditations on the daily, but my daughter is also no longer a whisper on the wind.  She is real, solid, present, and not particularly interested in all the mystical experiences I had in my long journey to bring her into this world.

We move between states of being, and stages of life.  The bees show us this over and over again as they expand, contract, go inward, reappear, expand, swarm, and start again.  They show us what it is to encounter the numinous and batten down the hatches when appropriate.

Moving between the magical and mundane of bees and beekeeping is how I run my 10 month apprenticeship.

Tending the Sacred Hive: Women’s Beekeeping Apprenticeship is open for enrollment for our January 2023 program.

May your experience of every day reality be always threaded with a bit of magic.

A Galactic Spray

What is your relationship to the stars? The actual stars in the sky, not the metaphor, although that's lovely too.
Can you see them at night where you live? A few? Many? I grew up in a place where I could count shooting stars before bed and make up my own constellations. As a teenager, I sleep outside most of the summer, and well into the autumn. I would fall asleep staring at the expanse, memorizing the forms as they passed. I could tell time by the position on the stars. I knew what point of night it was if I woke in the dark. 

Daughter and I went camping for the first time. We laid in this hammock and slept as dusk crept across the mountain. We watched the trees become silhouettes. 
We cuddled at night by the fire before making our short, slow trek back up the road to our tent. It was the second night that she found the stars. Secure in my arms, head back, mouth open wonder. Not a word. No exclamation. Silent wonder. 

A galactic spray. From the root words, gala and g(a)lakt, meaning milk. The milk of the stars with it's forever-river pouring sweet nourishment into our imaginations.

When was the last time you were in silent wonder? Arrested by beauty. Alive with the impossibility of such magnificence.

#stars #earth #nature #breastfeeding #lactation#milkofthestars #galaxy #milkyway #camping #motherhood

Loving the Land As It Is

California has always been hot and dry, but not this dry. There have always been fires, but not this many, not this big.

When I look at the land I feel parched. I feel an aversion to this field where my bees reside. I don’t want to be in it. There are too many stickers and burrs. I love this field in the winter and spring when it turns soft and green. In my mind, there’s a voice that thinks the soft green field is “right”, and the dry parched field is “wrong”.

Intellectually, I am aware that nothing in nature can be be broken down to such binary statements, but there is also an animal body in me, sniffing the air, and feeling the cracked earth beneath my shoes.
“Move away from it”, says the animal. Find shelter, water, shade. “You don’t know how to feel safe here.”

Psychology tells us to love the wounded parts of ourselves. Can we do the same with this earth? What does it feel like to extend love toward the brittle, dry field? How do we do this authentically, without falling into the trappings of “love and light” spiritual bypass. Can you love the rattlesnake while listening to its warning?

I am in love with this green earth, but often when imagining my love for nature I picture rich valleys, vernal springs, shaded woodlands. I don’t live near any of those environments. I live in dry dry dry California. How do we let ourselves love exactly where we are? It’s almost as hard as learning to love exactly WHO you are, scars and all.

What if, even knowing the imbalance this dry field represents, I gave it an offering of my love. Not a prayer to be different or verdant or “fixed”. To love it for everything it is in this time of profound environmental turbulence.

This is where to work is. Not just forest bathing trips, and meditations by a crystal spring, but a raw, uncomfortable commitment to place. Like a long marriage, with its pitfalls and its grace, can we choose again and again to love the land, even in our animal grief for what it’s become?

Dreams for the Children

I was asked today, what is my dream for my child? Two things come to mind:

First, I want my daughter to fall in love with the Earth. And second I want to help teach my daughter to like people. To love humanity.
Risky I know. That first goal seems natural and tangible.
The first one feels like the heroine in me, heeding the clarion call. In some ways, it’s so easy to love the earth. There is so much beauty. There is so much mystery. I can feel the crowds nodding. Yes, we have to Save the Earth after all don’t we?
But to fall in love with humanity? This feels edgy. Unpopular. Not en vogue with the collective investment in cancel culture.
I want my daughter to be streetwise AND to believe that people are inherently good. I want to come back from the grocery store and remember there’s a toddler listening before I flippantly say, “God, people suck today.”

I’m not interested fostering naiveté. Falling in love with this earth didn’t happen because I loved rainbows and dolphins (which I did and do). That may have been the romance, but the real love came when I had to learn to love, appreciate, and honor rattlesnake. I had to learn to be with the darkness of the woods.

I’m not interested in teaching her if she just smiles, everyone will invite her over for a piece of pie and a high five. People are messy and often wounded. Collectively, we are going to be sorting through the PTSD of the pandemic, climate change, and global de-stabilization for the rest of our lives. We’re not going to Save this Earth by coming up with wittier ways to say “I hate everybody” (and, yeah, sometimes I say that).

Something else has to happen. That something else is relational. It’s remembering the longing for love behind every pair of eyes you meet. It’s choosing to affirm the inherent goodness in people, with eyes wide open, fully in the reality that people do hateful, selfish things. But people are also capable of great wonders. Of astounding beauty. Of unending mystery.

I’m interested in the monumental task of remembering that we are mythic beings, living through mythic times, with the ability to tell a different story than the one we’ve been selling each other.

I like you.

Let Yourself Be Dreamt

Do you remember the first time you felt claimed by the Earth? By a place? A particular seaside cove? Grove of aspens? An entire land?

Do you remember the first time you were named as beloved by something other than human? The dragonfly perhaps? Or the wolf? Or the orca whale? Where did they find you? In the wilds? In a book? In a dream?

Have you touched that intelligence that is so "other" there are no words to translate it's voice, and yet you hear it, with the tuning forks of your bones, and the antenna of your hair.

What if we could court that feeling? That encounter? What if we could lean into our own belonging?

This is what my dreamwork is about. It's the love language between deep ecology, poetry, and the mythic. The vehicle is intentional dreaming with bees, or serpents, or the Earth, but the material is your own chthonic relationship to dandelions, stars, pavement, dew, dust, creeks, wastelands, badgers, alligators, horse maidens, bardic heros, murmurations, and wildfires.

Let yourself be dreamt.

For the Love of a Tree

I remember when I first read the Holy Thorn tree had been cut down in an act of vandalism. I cried out and burst into tears. I was at my parents home and was crying too inconsolably to tell them what was wrong. I was acting like someone had died. In many ways, someone had.

We can wax poetic about how we’re all interconnected, but the true sense of kinship and belonging to this Earth happens in relationships. A relationship to one beach, one particular herb, one particular tree. Relationships that go beyond imagining the tree has a spirit, to the simple feeling of “this tree is my friend.”
I get so overwhelmed with existential grief around what’s happening to our planet, but there’s no healing when it’s that far out of our scope of relating. When the grief is for one place, one being, one spirit or group of spirits lost, then there is movement, catharsis, and possibly resonant change. When we feel feel the grief of lost relationships, we begin to understand just how tied we are to the more-than-human world. Sometimes we learn of our belonging through our loss.

I have made pilgrimages to Wearyall hill and the Glastonbury Thorn since I was 17. I knew this tree well. I have given it many offering, tied many wishes to its protective ring. The Holy Thorn was a wishing tree, a blessing tree. Across Celtic nations, there is an old tradition of tying cloth to sacred trees, both standing alone, or near sacred wells. The cloths are often wishes or prayers for healing, health, or good fortune. This tree, in particular, was connected to a local legend that claims Joseph of Arimathea visited this sacred hill, while carrying the Holy Grail into hiding. For some, this is the Grail of King Arthur’s legends, and they say the Once and Future king himself is buried in the local Abbey grounds. They also say this is where the mists parted and the priestess isle of Avalon was revealed in Arthur’s final journey beyond the veil.

The Grail Joseph of Arimathea was said to carry, is also though to have been Mary Magdelene herself, as well as the children she bore with Jesus, as the grail is considered symbolic of the Magdelene line and essence. There is even a telling that Joseph of Arimathea brought a 12 year old Jesus to Glastonbury during one of his trade missions. The tree represents Joseph’s staff, which he planted upon arrival to Wearyall hill.

This land is full of myth and legend. What I share only scratches the surface of the confluence of myths living in the landscape.

This tree too on a deeply symbolic meaning to me, but it was also a tree I came to know as friend over the years.

It was both a symbol of the greater mysteries of the sacred, as well as a point of reference. A place where I could tangibly feel the meeting of the worlds: nature and human, magical and mundane, this world and the otherworld. It was a place both solid and liminal at the same time. Many prayers of mine were given to that tree. Many have been answered.

I think in our quest to reunite with ourselves as relational members of the more-than-human world, we have to remember that it starts with individual relationships. It starts with love affairs. These can be near and far. A moment with a sea turtle in an underwater queendom. A conversation with a rock in a desert. A friendly swell of the heart when seeing a favorite creek spot. A deep sigh when gazing on a familiar mountain. Who have you befriended in this wide, wonderful earth? Which cave, tree, cactus, or meadow calls you kin? Calls you home to your own belonging?

The 3 first photos are of the intact tree in 2013. The last is 2015, after it was killed.

Underworld Journey

In Ancient Greece, one of the (many) reasons bees were associated with the Underworld was because they could often be found inhabiting cracks and crevices in rocks. These cracks and crevices were thought to lead into the Underworld: the domain of many chthonic gods and goddesses such as Persephone, Hekate, Rhea, Gaia and others. In fact, there is a story that the Delphic Bee (the Oracle) sent a party of questions to find another oracle in another land. When they arrived, they couldn’t find the Oracle she had spoken of anywhere. The Delphic Bee then sent them a swarm of bees who led the questioners into a hole in the ground and down into the oracular subterranean temple where the Oracle and two snakes lived.
The Underworld is the place of ancestral memory, deep earth-womb mysteries, renewal, transformation, regeneration, mother, darkness. We go to the underworld to be nourished, to be remade, to die into ourselves and be reborn like a swarm of bees in spring.
The serpents greet us because they too are self-renewal made manifest.

If you’re in the underworld of your life right now, while in the underworld of our global rite of passage, leave honey for the bees and milk for the snakes. They just might know the labyrinthine way through.

#ancientgreece #underworld #death #rebirth #snakes #bees

Folk Traditions for Modern Life

How do you marry the sacred and the scientific? I could say this so many ways: the sacred and the mundane, the spiritual and the pragmatic, the ineffable and the physical. What I’m asking, is how do we allow ourselves to source from more than one pool of wisdom?

When it comes to beekeeping there is a lot of stuff you need to know. It’s not as simple as ordering some bees and putting them in a box. Unless that box is a tree. A lot of well-meaning folk want to let the bees be bees, to leave them alone, and to let nature do it’s thing. There can be an incredible reverence for the sacredness of bees that comes with this approach, which is vital. We need rewilding movements. They spur a deeper understanding of the nature of the honey bee organism on a physical, spiritual, emotional, and even energetic level. However, once we put bees into a human made bee box, we become stewards. I daresay, once we turn our gaze towards supporting the wellness of the bees at all, we become stewards.

The reason bees are dying is not a bee problem. It’s a human problem. What we have done to the earth and the practices that are standardized in beekeeping are the heart of the problem. We mechanized beekeeping. We covered the earth in monocrop food deserts, and then sprayed the earth in poisons.
I understand why so many people who feel a sacred connection to the bees, don’t want to “do” anything to them. Simply let them be. However, we have incredible depth of knowledge available to us through science and the study of bee behavior and biology.

To serve the ancient partnership between human and bee, we need science and the sacred. It’s not an either/or situation. You will support your bees better with both your rituals and your understanding of who they are. Sometimes, when all else fails, ceremony, meditation, and energy practices cause the hidden world to shift toward wellness. Sometimes, when all else fails, a new discovery in the study of bee behavior provides the missing link to our understanding.

For me, I find empowerment in bringing folk traditions into modern life.

The cloth in this photo is a Brigid’s mantle, hung outside in early February to gather the healing dew from the Celtic goddess Brigid. It can be used in the future to wrap around a person or an animal in need of healing. I can place it over my hive, as a ceremonial act if my hive is struggling. An old tradition, made new, in a new land.

However, I’m also going to continue to learn and do as much as I can to support the bees when they are struggling. The more I understand their biology and behavior, the better I can support who they are. This might not look like it does in all the beekeeping books, I might not do alcohol shakes, chemical treatments, or use antibiotics, but I will use what I am learning about bee behavior to shift my overall approach to beekeeping.

I’ll never forget my religion professor at Lewis and Clark college. When he was doing his thesis on the experience of God, he went to the theology department to ask the people who were best qualified to answer his question. They said, “What is God? Don’t ask us. We’re all atheists. If you want to know about God go talk to the biologists, they look at God all day long.”

How do you weave the spiritual and the pragmatic together in your life?

#beekeeping #bees #beesofinstagram #brigid #stbrigid#imbolc #folktraditions #sacredscience #beesteward#beetending #naturalbeekeeping

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.

Early Spring To Do List for Beekeepers

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. January might not be when you start to prep. It really depends on your bio region and bee season. Ours starts as early as late February. Yours might not start till April. When things do start to warm up here are some of my “2 months out” to dos:

- check on food stores for existing hives.
- clean up, scorch, weatherize hive bodies that lost colonies.
- order/ build any new equipment I might need.
- check my tools and equipment.
- source where I might get my honey to feed bees if I’m low.
- clean up ground around hives.
- get a new bee journal for the year
- begin to make full moon or Imbolc offerings and blessings for the new colonies to come.
- prep and install swarm bait hives.
- Dream with the land to see if there is anything needed.
- Energetically sweep out the old energy of dead hives. I use a besom broom and a smoker.
- Tell your existing hives your plans for the new beekeeping year.

12 Nights of Dreaming

Happy Christmas Eve. I have joined up with writer, Sylvia Linsteadt, to offer you twelve winter nights of dreaming. This time of winter holy days has long and ancient origins in many of my ancestral lands, where the heart of winter darkness became a time to watch for, and celebrate the return of solar light and the promise of new life. Each day for the next 12, we will offer you a writing prompt, crafted by Sylvia, and a dreaming task. You are invited to write on the prompt and then set the intention to dream with the understanding, that we are dreaming with spirit. In animistic traditions, there is a belief that everything is filled with spirit or “energy”. When we dream with spirit, we are co-creating dreams with the purpose to seek knowledge, connection, healing, blessings, transformation, and so forth.

12 Nights of Dreaming - Night 1 -

Here is your writing prompt:

”In you there is a bright, deep hearth where a fire burns that has never gone out. Beside it, in the sacred adornments of your ancestors, sits a grandmother who loves you beyond words, an ancestral grandmother who carries great healing and blessing in her whole being. Approach this grandmother. Reach into your pocket and pull out a gift to give her. Pay attention to what gift emerges from your pocket. How does she receive it? Now, sit with her, letting her hold you, stroke your hair, cradle your hand. Feel the immense love she has for you. When you are ready, ask her for a message, from her and from all your well ancestral mothers, a message that addresses the deepest and most mysterious question in your heart right now.”

Dreaming Task:

Your dreaming task tonight is in honor of Mother’s Night, or Mōdraniht. Mother’s Night is found in ancient Britain and Germanic/Scandinavian cultures, and usually takes places on Christmas Eve or Yule eve (before solstice). It's considered the beginning of the 12 days of Christmas. It's a time to honor your matrilineal or collective mother ancestors with food, prayers, songs, and if you choose, dreaming.

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- Night 2 -

For the second night of dreaming, our theme is The Divine Child.

We may all be familiar with the birth of the divine child celebrated in Christian religion on this day, but the birth of the divine child at mid-winter is much older and found in many cultures. In Old Europe, the winter was the time of deepest darkness, with only the shifting light of the sun at solstice marking the promise of new life to come. For example, we can find the divine child of the sun and/or rebirth in Greek myth of Dionysus, Egyptian Horus, Welsh Mabon, and Irish Grian.

Whether you identify with the dominant myths associated with this time of year or feel drawn to other folk pathways and traditions, the divine child is a spirit we can all tune ourselves to. They are the spark of new life, the promise of light and growth, the hope in the dark, the gift born of our labors, the spirit of our creative forces.

Here is Sylvia Linsteadt’s writing prompt for today:

“Up the high mountain in the snow, there is a cave. There, the divine child was born, and is resting now in his mother's bright arms, with the sacred goat and the mothering bees around them. In a manger in the starry dark, the divine child was born, and is resting in the warm, sweet hay. You enter this cave, this manger, this space of divine birth, and are engulfed in the miracle of new life, the kind that emerges out of the longest dark. You have gifts in your hands. Look down and discover what gifts they are, as you place them at the feet of mother and child. Sit quietly in this healing place, and when you are ready, ask yourself--what has been your longest night, your furthest inner darkness, in the past year? And what, now, is your child of divine light, the one you are birthing from winter's heart? Finally, what animal knowing is present in you, there to greet and guard this newborn light?”

Dreaming Task:
Your dreaming task is to dream with the Divine Child. You can approach this as dreaming with your inner divine child, or as the overarching spirit of new life celebrated by so many traditions this time of year.

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- Night 3 -

Tonight’s dreaming task draws inspiration from the Celtic and European tradition of Hunting the Wren. The wren was considered a sacred bird in medieval Europe. It was associated with divination by the Druids, and with rejuvenation and renewal in medieval Europe. In Welsh the word Dryw means both druid and wren, and its song and flight were used in divinatory practices. Wrens are small birds, typically very hard to see, and even more difficult to hunt; the yearly ritual hunting of the wren was also a hunting of the elusive wisdom of the divine.

The hunting of the wren involved either the sacrifice of a wren or the capture of a wren, who was later paraded around the streets by a troop of young men or boys as a symbol of abundance, renewal, and fertility in the year to come. The boys dressed up, often in straw and masks, and sang songs as they traveled from house to house. In some parts of Britain, the wren was captured and carried about in a small wren house, or decorated with ribbons and then set free.

In many parts of Europe, the name for wren translates to “king” or “little king”, such as the Greek basiliskos, or French roitelet. The winter Wren is the king of birds, representing the winter king, who must die, or be sacrificed in order for the summer king to reign. Beneath the practice and the legends is an ancient understanding of the balance of light and dark, played out yearly in the lemnsicatic dance between summer and winter.

Interestingly, in an old Manx legend, the wren was a she, and she became the king of birds by outwitting the eagle. In another variant, she was a beautiful fairy who lured men to their deaths. In another, she was the bird who warned Jesus of eminent danger in the garden of Gethsemane.

We humans have often looked to birds for signs, portends, messages, and wisdom. From the dove as Holy Spirit to the raven as symbol of death goddess, birds speak to us of shapeshifting and the liminal nature of spirit who sits between heaven and earth, wearing the guise of feathers.

Writing prompt from Sylvia Linsteadt:

“If you can go outside in that crepuscular time just before sunrise, as the sky lightens, to hear the dawn chorus; how the birds sing the sun back up, how they weave the world back together every morning, their voices like bright, storied threads. Listen for one thread and follow its pattern with your ears and your mind.

“Let the sound speak its language to you, whether or not you know the name of the bird it belongs to. Listen for the story in it, a story from the earth where you’ve woken up. Trust what you hear. Take dictation from the birds today.”

Note: This writing prompt can be undertaken in the morning after your night’s dreaming with the birds.

Dreaming Task:
Your dreaming task is to dream with the birds, or a particular species of bird that evokes a sense of connection or fascination within you. It may help to think of birds you associate with winter. Before bed, invite the spirit of the bird(s) to dream with you, perhaps by lighting a candle, or speaking the invitation into the night air.

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- Night 4 -

For our 4th night (last night) the dreaming task is to connected with a body of water you feel drawn to, and invite the spirit of that water to dream with you. You can do this any time, so don’t feel stuck on doing the dreaming in order.

As we dream through these twelve days, we are dreaming with different aspects of the earth. In doing so we can start to feel our own personal connection to the natural world strengthen, as well as becoming dreamers who dream into the collective field of possibility. By doing this we court the idea that we are part of the earth dreaming, and we can be both dreamt and actively dream a better world into being.

Winter is when the waters rise, the lakes fill, the rivers run. It’s an essential time for the replenishment of water to drought-parched lands, and it’s also a time when we confront the power of water in the way of storms, floods, and snow.

May your cups be ever-full.

Sylvia’s prompt:
In you are all the bodies of water, all the springs and aquifers, reservoirs, seas, rivers and lakes, that have fed and nourished you throughout your life. Write the memory of one, full-bodied, sensory encounter you've had with a body of water that is holy to you, that lives inside you still. Next, remember that in you are all the bodies of water your ancestors knew, all the waters that nourished them, that fed their fields, that cleansed their bodies and held the imprints of their dreams. Allow a loving ancestor to come forward in your imagination, to tell you something about a body of water that they loved.

Dreaming Task:
Your dreaming task is to think of a body of water you feel drawn to, and invite the spirit of that water to dream with you.

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- Night 5 -

In the heart of winter, there is a constant reminder of lasting life found in the proud council of evergreens. During winter folk festivals across Europe, evergreen boughs and trees are brought into the home to symbolize everlasting life. This is where the Christmas tree tradition came from.
Prior to the Victorian era (when the Christmas tree was brought indoors), festival trees were decorated in the village square, often with fruits and nuts.
In Poland, the tops of fir trees were cut and hung upside down over the dinning table. In Rome, evergreens decorated the houses and streets for he winter festival of Saturnalia.
When you look to different myths in old Europe you find various stories of sacred trees. In Norse mythology, Yggdrasil is the world tree and tree of life connecting the worlds, with its roots in the sacred well of memory and it’s branches in the cosmos. The druids of the Celtic isles used to meet in sacred groves. The Oracle of Dodona, Greece, recorded prophecy by listening to the sacred oak in the temple grounds.
Trees are kindred to us, providing home, shelter, protection, food, medicine, and companionship.

Here is Sylvia’s writing prompt:

Call to mind a tree that you have known well. Perhaps a tree you remember climbing as a child, or resting beneath, or a tree you know now, be it on a city sidewalk or in a deep wood. Perhaps, further back, it's a tree that was very sacred to your ancestral people. In your imagination, approach this tree and look for its precious, hidden door, the door that leads to its mysterious and sacred interior. Leave a gift at the door's threshold. Enter the tree. Who or what meets you here? Breathe, and observe what you see around you. Listen for the knowledge, long-denied, that the tree would like, at last, to return to your heart.

Dreaming Task:
Your dreaming task is to dream with your tree (from prompt) or to dream with the community of trees as aspects of the world tree itself.

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- Night 6-

I am sitting in the living room of my parents house with the fire crackling away in the hearth. We kept it going all night because it’s our only source of heat. The power has been out for three days after a rare snow storm in Nevada City, CA. We have curtained off the living room entry and are all sleeping, reading, eating, drying clothes, warming bodies, and playing games around the fireplace. Five adults, a baby, and a dog.
When I planned these 12 days, I had the hearth spirit set for today, but did not anticipate what a hearth-centered experience I would be having.
Who is the hearth spirit? They are household spirits who look after the members of the home as long as they, in turn, are honored and cared after. Hint: leave them honey or milk! In Slavic culture they are the domovoy, often connected to ovens. They are often depicted as bearded, little old men. In in the Scotland, England and Ireland, the brownie is a household spirit who comes out at night and does small chores (unless you offend them). There are regional names for similar spirits in Scotland, Wales, and the Isle of Man. The Lar Familiaris of Ancient Rome was the household spirit protecting and ensuring abundance and fertility for the family. A shrine was kept for the lares in each household, often near the hearth. There is also the German Kobold, the Danish Nis, and the Scandinavian Tomte. The list goes on and on, with many small regional differences, all connected to the little people or fairies.
You do not need to identify with a particular ancestry to form a relationship with your house/hearth spirit. Nor do you need a traditional hearth or fireplace. The hearth spirit come to life with your attention and desire to relate to this aspect of place.

Light a candle tonight in honor of the invisible energy that tends to the wellness of your home. Enjoy the prompt from Sylvia Linsteadt:

“In you is a fire that has never gone out, an ember-bed tended lovingly for a thousand generations, a hearth whose lineage is life’s, and your ancestors’. Feel how this great, deep, all-nourishing hearth has come to be housed in you. How the embers and their flames can be your sanctuary and your strength. Take some time in your notebook to investigate the hearth within. What state is it in? Does it need sweeping, stoking, tending? Does it need a song, or a story, a slice of bread, a glass of wine? After you have attended to these needs, look into the dancing surfaces of the embers. What patterns do they show you? What messages do they share?”

Dreaming Task:

Your dreaming task is to dream with your hearth spirit, or similarly, your household spirit who tends the wellbeing of your home.

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- Night 7 -

There is something about the winter stars that give us hope. Pinpricks of light agains the dark blue endless nights. Stars provide many of our origin myths, whether it be the birth of humanity, the birth of a god, the birth of bees, or the arrival of the divine child.

When asked, I find most people feel a sense of home in the stars. They are the eternal mystery. They are the promise of infinite possibility. It is possible to feel home is both this vast green earth and the distant strange stars. They are the companions in the dark, the way showers, the navigation points, the time keepers, the wish-bringers.

Your dreaming prompt is to dream with the stars and seek to receive some of their secrets.

Follow Sylvia’s Sylvia Linsteadt’s prompt to go deeper into this theme:

“Open up an atlas of the night sky, a map of the stars and planets and constellations. Let your eyes and your heart guide you to the name of a star that isn't immediately familiar to you, but that lights up something deep within you. Or maybe it isn't the name, but the shape or pattern of the star that captivates you— the third star in Lyra maybe, or the smallest star in Orion. Follow your gut. Next, in writing, address this star with words of praise, generosity, and love. Tell it your name, in whatever simple or elaborate way you want to. Ask it to tell you its name— which may or may not be the name you saw written on the sky map. Tell it a secret you've been carrying. Observe how it receivers your secret. Then, ask it to tell you a secret of its own. Carry this secret close to you, for it is a treasure

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- Night 8 -

Tonight’s dreaming task and prompt is a bit strange, and is coming to you rather late, since we’re still recovering from an epic snow storm.

We will start with your dreaming task:
Your task is a dream prayer for those who have left us this year (or previous years), as well as anything that is ready to be offered up to the sweeping winds.

This dreaming prompt is inspired by the legend of the Wild Hunt. It’s a stay indoors and get cozy kind of New Years for Aurora and I, and with it comes the reminder of the old legends surrounding Yuletide and winter in many Northern European countries. The time of the darkest part of winter has long been considered a time when spirits are out an about. It’s not a time to be caught out in the dark, alone, for the fairy court, or the Wild Hunt, or Herne the Hunter may swoop you up.

As with most folk traditions of Old Europe, there are regional variation of the Wild Hunt. These in turn, have been heavily Christianized, often connecting the Wild Hunt with the devil or demons. However, if we scrape beneath the surface of this story we find common threads linking myths that center on a great host of spirits, often lead by a god, goddess, or long-dead king, traveling across the night skies, accompanied by hunting dogs and fearsome winds. In some stories, they are gathering up evil-doers or unbaptized infants (do I hear some Christian undertones?), but in others they are responsible for gathering up the souls of the departed to carry them into the afterlife. At times this host is the fairy court out on a wild ride through the countryside, at others it’s the fallen heroes of Valhalla. In parts of England, it is led by the antlered God Herne, in Germany the fertility goddess Holda, while in Rome it was the moon-bright Diana.

On the nights of the wild hunt, it is recommended to stay indoors, and perhaps leave an offering of food or wine outside. So on this New Years eve, if you happen to be avoiding crowds like so many of us, I invite you to listen to the winds, and send your prayers for that which is departing onward, carried on the wings and hooves of the Wild Hunt.

Your writing prompt from Sylvia:

“There is a great wind sweeping through you tonight. A great wind that knows your name, your family history, your past, present, and many futures. Inside this wind are benevolent but powerful protectors of your who are here to gather up what is dead in you, and what is dead in your life. What wants to fall away from you, what wants to be winnowed? Let this great wind and its people gather all this up from you now.

“Tale a moment to reflect — what does the wind gather from you? What words or gestures do you need to make in order to let go? Where does the wind carry what you have let go of? Watch how it is returned to the heart of the world.”

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- Night 9 -

Your writing and dreaming task are one in the same tonight. We are stepping into the new, and using our dreaming selves to dream our wishes into being. Tonight take some time to write down all your wishes. Then focus on three main wishes that include:
1) A wish for yourself
2) A wish for your family and/or community
3) A wish for the world.

When you’re done, distill each of the final three wishes down to a short sentence and write it on a piece of paper. Place that paper under your pillow and dream them into being.

When the time feels right, you can give these pieces of paper to the earth by burning or burning them, belong to being the spark of life or the fertile soil of growth into your year.

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- Night 10 -

Where would we be without the winter season’s most magical friend? We certainly wouldn’t have a Santa. Nor any flying reindeer. And life on earth probably wouldn’t exist. Your dreaming community tonight are the mycelium. They who thread through all things. Know all things. Take us into our deeper knowing.
Since we’re still in the night-dark wonder of the winter festival season, I must give a special nod of appreciation to eye-catching Amanita muscaria. This red and white capped mushroom 🍄 is associated with the shamanic origins of flying reindeer in Siberia, where the term shaman originated among the Tungus people. Both the Tungusic and Sami people of the far north are nomadic reindeer herders. The Amanita muscaria mushroom grows beneath evergreen trees and is sometime consumed by reindeer, causing an altered state, which anthropologists believe first led the reindeer herders to sample the mushroom themselves. After drying the mushroom on evergreen branches, the local shaman would bring gifts of the “flying” mushroom to the people, helping to evoke otherworld visions and bring sacred knowledge to the people. This is part of the origin story of the benevolent elf/man who brings gifts with the aid of reindeer.

Whether you have ever sampled a mind-altering mushroom or not, the nature of mushrooms and the mycelial network is akin to the web of dreams we weave: mutable, ancient, sentient, and able to transform reality.

You are invited to dream with these wisdom keepers and earth tenders tonight.

Writing prompt from Sylvia:

“In your imagination, visit the tree you met with a few nights ago, a tree beloved to you now, or a tree sacred to your ancestral people. Go stand barefoot under this tree, and et your feet sink into the humus and soil there until they are buried in earth. Earth full of mycelial threads, the threads that connect one tree to the next at the root tips, acting as vast messengers and networks of language and love between trees. Imagine your feet growing roots, and these roots gently, respectfully, joyfully, joining the web of tree roots and their mycelium. You are part of the web of communication of this earth, the web of communication between trees. Visualize sending a wave of love from your heart down your body, out through your feet, and into this web. See it moving along the threads. What do the mycelium do with this offered love of yours? Where do they take it? Listen, and write what you hear. What nutrients and blessings do they bring back to you, into your own roots? Listen, and write what you hear.

Dreaming Task:

Your dreaming task is to dream with the mycelial community. They who thread through all things, know all things, and us into our deeper knowing.

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- Night 11 -

I grew up in a town that was small enough to still have caroling. I used to love going from house to house singing tunes. We gathered before a house and sang until the owners opened the door. Sometimes they ignored us, but sometimes they would join in. If I had been doing this a few centuries back, perhaps the owners would have offered treats, money, or gifts. Or, perhaps we wouldn’t have been singing to homeowners at all; we would have been singing to the trees.

Wassaling the trees is a custom that stretches across the Christmas season, and well into February. The word wassail comes from Anglo Saxon “vesheil” meaning “be well” or “be whole”. It is both an action and a beverage. As a drink, it is typically made from a spiced wine/ale or cider and sometimes an egg. In medieval England, where abundant apple orchards grew and livelihoods depended on a bountiful harvest, folk would go down to the orchards with a large bowl of hot, spiced wassail. Often they dressed colorfully, wore feathers in their hats, and even performed masked plays. Songs were sung to the trees while wassail was sprinkled over the branches. The bowl of wassail was also shared among revelers, and at the end, the villagers went to the largest tree in the orchard and poured the remaining wassail into its roots. Toast soaked in cider or beer was placed in the forks of the tree. Ever wonder where the term “toast” while drinking came from? Now you know. All this was done with the intention to wake the spirit of the trees and ward off an evil spirit that may harm the harvest.

In the spirit of our ancient ties to the land, your dreaming task is to dream with the spirit of Good Health for yourself and the land.

Enjoy Sylvia’s writing prompt to help inspire!

“In you is an orchard. Over the last year, the trees in your orchard have flowered, leafed, swelled, ripened, been harvested, lost their leaves, and gone into winter’s dormancy once more. Perhaps you’ve tended this orchard diligently this year. Perhaps you’ve let the elements tend it for you. Either way, your trees have borne fruit that has fed and nourished you in both seen and unseen ways. In the heart of the winter now, as you walk through this orchard feeling the dreaming of the first buds still held in the trunks of the trees, imagine that you are addressing the old spirit of the orchard. You are carrying a beautiful jug full of cider or mead made from the fermented fruits of this orchard of yours. It is strong and delicious. Pour it out under each tree, to feed and bless your orchard for the coming year. An old man or an old woman—the spirit of the orchard—emerges from between the trunks to receive this gift. What do you say to them? What do they say back to you? How might this spirit of the orchard counsel you to tend to your wellbeing?”

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- Night 12 -

Our 12 nights of dreaming come to a close with the winter witches. January 5th (tomorrow) is the eve of the Epiphany. In western Christianity, this marks the day the three Kings, or three Magi, met the baby Jesus.
It Italy, the eve of the Epiphany is celebrated with great anticipation by children waiting for La Befana. She is the Christmas witch and flies on her broom from house to house, bringing gifts for the children. It’s traditional to leave out small cakes, and to leave stockings up by the fire for La Befana to fill with dried fruit, nuts, and sweets.

Who better to represent this time than a benevolent witch who somehow found her way into Christian myth? The broom is one of the most powerful symbols of Old European women’s spirituality. It is the symbol of the spirit flight of the shaman, the witch, and the seer. It is the world tree. It is the spine, the Axis Mundi, the sacred tool.

La Befana is said to sometimes use her broom to sweep your house before she leaves, sweeping out all the troubles of the year before (yes, we could all really use a La Befana sweep right now). When women’s spiritual authority had to retreat into hiding, the broom became a symbol of the witch. This is in part due to the use of every day domestic tools as objects of power: broom, cauldron, loom, spinning wheel, oven, and others. The power of the witch lies in her intention, not in how fancy or obvious her tools are. The threads of remembrance are alive within us because women’s spirituality learned how to hide in plain sight.

Join La Befana, the three fates, Frau Holda, the Callieach, and the many witches of winter as we spin the wheel of the year, celebrate the good, wish for luck, and fly out on our brooms to bring that good fortune to the world.

Thank you so much for participating with Sylvia (@sylviavlinsteadt) and me in this winter dreaming and writing exploration.

Sweet dreams and many wonders to you all!

Writing prompt from Sylvia:

“Across the winter sky, over the winter earth, under the fur of the stars, a benevolent guardian is traveling toward you with a bundle of gifts. Perhaps this guardian is robed and crowned, coming with rare resins, like one of the Magi. Perhaps this guardian is a kind of witch from a like of kind of witches in your blood, the sort of witch who can divine by patterns that horses leave in the snow, or by the patterns in your coffee grounds, or by the dancing letters in the embers. Go out, in your imagination, to meet this benevolent, magical being under the winter stars. Bring them inside, offer them food and drink, and observe what gifts they unwrap from the bundle they have brought you. Observe what it is they choose to divine by, for you. What do they see? What unexpected gifts have they brought? Describe the gift that surprises you the most that you have received, and the one that surprises you the most that you are compelled to give back.”

Dreaming Task:

Your final dreaming task is to fly with the witches… To fly your broom across the dreaming night with the winter witches, receiving their gifts, their divinations, and their blessings.

Death of a Colony

When a colony dies, it’s important to investigate the cause so that, perhaps, you can improve in your stewardship the following year. This is a photograph of a colony that lost their queen. What you see are a number of emergency queen cells. There were more on the other side of the comb. Emergency queen cells are different than swarm cells. Swarm cells are found along the bottom and edges of the comb, often preceded by queen cups, which the bees have been diligently preparing for the potential queen larvae. They invite the old queen to lay eggs in these cups, and start a daughter queen and hopefully a new colony.

Emergency queen cells are built directly on the face of the comb when the bees suddenly loose their queen and don’t have queen cups prepared.

An egg can only be turned into a queen in the first three days of gestation, before it hatches. That means the bees have three days to raise a new queen, and if they miss the window, there’s no hope for the colony.

Why did this colony loose its mother? She was killed by yellow jackets wasps.
In a bad wasp year like this one, yellow jackets will attack a colony, biting off the heads of bees, eating larvae, killing the queen, and eating honey. The bottom of the hive was littered with the bodies of bees with their heads bitten off. I’ve never seen it so bad. This was a strong colony, but the yellow jackets were stronger.

What makes it a bad wasp year? A preceding mild winter and lots of dry conditions. A mild winter means some wasp queens survive and start raising their young early. With a wet, lush spring and summer, they have lots of other food sources, but if it’s 90 degrees in early May and dry AF all summer, the wasp population skyrockets. Furthermore, bee colonies hit their peak population in midsummer, they start to diminish in size, whereas yellow jackets hit their peak numbers in late summer and fall. This equation can spell doom for the bees.

This colony had a strong brood pattern and lots of honey, but the excessive heat and months of wildfire smoke weakened them to the point of vulnerability, and once the wasps took out the queen, that was it.

#bees #queenbee #yellowjackets