Thank You For Loving

🧡 To all the women out there who do and do and do. Who are the mistresses of the hive, tending to the young, the honey chambers, the fields of plenty and the fields of lack, thank you.⠀

❤️ To all the women who are trying to listen to the body, following their rhythms and learn how to listen to a body wisdom we were not taught, thank you.⠀

💚 To all the women who are teaching themselves how to express honey and sting in the same sentence; who are learning how to have boundaries and an open heart, thank you.⠀

💜 To all the women who are reaching toward sisterhood, despite the societal constructs of divisiveness and isolation; who are seeking to express vulnerability, authenticity, and know their own unquestionable belonging in the hive, thank you.⠀

❤️ To all the women who are looking for new ways to relate to the masculine, to see the wild god in exile, to see the lover in the flower, to hear the song of the drone bee, to celebrate his heart without diminishing your own sovereignty, thank you.⠀

💙 To all the women pollinating their lives with earth honouring practices, prayers, dreams, gardens, poetry, art, activism, education, and devotions, thank you.⠀

🖤 To all the women who recognise when the hive must turn inward to the silence of winter, dreaming of a new spring; who struggle to give themselves the gift of the pause, to create a new model of cyclical care, thank you.⠀

💛 To all the women who want to be all these things and are still trying, still stumbling, still experimenting, still human, thank you.⠀

Thank you for loving.⠀

A crown of Ivy

Ivy (Hedera Helix)

ifig • efeu • eidheann

Hedera - from Proto-Indo-European meaning “to seize, grasp, take”

Helix - Ancient Greek to “twist, turn” 

Main Pollinators: Honey bees, ivy bees, bumble bees, butterflies

Pollen color: Yellow

It happens every year.  I am on a walk on a warm fall day in November.  The kind of day where you start your walk with a hat and a sweater and end your walk in a t-shirt.  It’s always the sound that catches my attention.  So late in the season, it’s unusual to hear the loud hum of many foraging bees.  Especially when that hum is coming from above you.  The bees are foraging on the late winter bloomer: creeping ivy.  You know, the kind of ivy that curls up redwood trees or along the brick of old houses?  Ivy is found in most of North America, Europe, North Africa and Asia. It spends it’s first 8-10 years focusing on growth, and then turns it’s attention toward flowering.

Ivy Bees in England

I bet you’ve never even noticed the ivy flowers, but the bees sure have.  Ivy is a key resource for autumn-foraging bees.  While it does provide pollen for many pollinators, honey bees are mainly after the nectar.  Ivy honey sets very quickly.  Once set, it looks more like crystallized fondant than honey.   Bees use this honey as an important food source in the cold winter months.  To do so, they have to mix the ivy honey crystals with water to dissolved them enough to be digestible.  Humans also harvest and sell ivy honey.  To do this they have to slowly warm the honey, being careful not to melt the wax.  it’s a tricky process and must be done with utmost care, as to not steal the last of winter stores from the bees.

Ferdinand Leeke

Ivy sometimes gets a bit of a bad wrap.  It’s annoying to gardeners and often associated with darkness and “creepy” places such as graveyards.  In truth, like other powerfully medicinal plants (seriously, ivy honey is so good for you), ivy has a long history as a plant sacred to the gods.  In Celtic lands, Ivy is often associated with the tree alphabet letter “Gort” and carries the serpentine wisdom of transformation within its twisting vines.  Throughout Celtic myth and folklore, ivy can be found at the doorway between this world and the fairy kingdom.  This is no small thing.  The fairy kingdom was more than a place of fancy, it was and is the Celtic Otherworld: a land of mystery, magic and spirit.  Ivy marks the doorways where the veil between this world and the world of spirit is thin.  They are places to seek wisdom, but also be cautious of, for encounters with spirit can be quite altering.  

Ivy is also famously sacred to the god of intoxication, wine and pleasure: Dionysus.  Similar to Zeus, who was secreted away and raised on honey by nymphs, the infant Dionysus was hidden from Hera and raised by Nysiades (nymphs) in the ivy-thick woodlands.  It is said he was bathed in the spring of Cissusa, meaning “Of the Ivy”, where the waters sparkled like wine and tasted as pleasant.  His nymphs and priestesses carried staves entwined with ivy.  Dionysus himself wore a crown of ivy, which was meant to protect and guide the experience of intoxication, so that the drinker may only experience the positive benefits of the wine.  While Dionysus is commonly associated with drunken revelry, his cult rituals ran much deeper than that.  Intoxication does not only come from a heavy night of drinking.  One can be intoxicated with spirit and enter a euphoric state.  Ivy was not simply a plant of protection, but also a euphoric plant of prophecy.  The nymphs/priestesses of Dionysus, known as maenads, were said to be as intoxicated by ivy as they were by wine.  It is interesting to note that Ancient Greek brides often carried ivy at their weddings, symbolizing fertility, fidelity and union made in love.

As with most symbols of power, we find a reoccurring theme of polarities.  Ivy is associated with death and transformation as well as evergreen life and fertility.  It carried both the intoxicant and the sobering effect.  It is the twining, serpentine feminine around the sturdy oak and holly king.  It guardians the Otherworld and bears it’s nectar to the honey bee, she who fluidly flies between the world of the living and the world of the dead.  It brings the transformative powers of deeply altered states and it binds and entwines through the commitment to love.

John Collier - Maenads

Witches? Why, Thank You.

I don’t speak on Halloween. I don't write. I honour my ancestors. It’s an exercise in liminality. I’ve been doing this since I was 15. Last night, a group of female friends and I decided to dress up all in white, paint our faces white, and pass candy out to kids. All this, while seated in a semicircle, silent. See, the town that my sisters and I evacuated to during the fires happens to be THE BEST town for halloween. Over a thousand trick or treater’s passed by the house where we held our silent counsel. ⠀

When you don’t speak on halloween, people like to guess what you are. It’s become half the fun for me. ⠀

We got a lot of good guesses: zombies, ghosts, ghost-brides, but what most people called us? Witches. Oracles. “Are you going to tell me my future?” “Are you the Oracle of Delphi.” “Look at the witches!”⠀

We weren’t wearing pointy hats. We didn’t have broomsticks. For goodness sake, we were trying to be creepy. Yet deep in the human psyche there is a recognition of feminine power. How could there not be? Women were spiritual leaders, shamans, priestesses and prophetesses for much longer than the genocidal claws of Christianisation. When every aspect of our spiritual and religious authority was stripped from us, we still found a way to hide it in our weaving, our cooking, our storytelling, our songs. ⠀

Witches you say? Yes. We’ll take it. Witches. Wyrd Women. Fates. Spinners. Pythonissa. Incantrix. Fee. Hag. All the different ways to say world-weaver, healer, woman who walks the edge places. Hedge-woman. Truth-speaker. Poet-prophet. Way-finder. Midwife. Night-Farer. Shapeshifter. Banfáith. Fate-seeress. Divina. Mystery-singer. Strega. Pharmakis. Blesser. Bruja. Heathen.⠀

Five women, clad in white, holding silence on the eve of the ancient heathen new year? Witches, you decide, as you gather candy from a basket. This is because something in you, no matter how deeply buried says “This. I recognise this. I know this. She is power. She is prophecy. She is not forgotten.”⠀

Can You Let Her Lead?

Have you ever found yourself guilty of the general assumption that western history didn’t REALLY start until the birth of Jesus?  Okay Okay, maybe we can go back to the Roman Empire and it’s conquests.  That’s when what matters got going right?  Or possibly Ancient Greece?  Aristotle and all that? It’s a sneaky thought.  It’s a thought that perpetuate the idea that prior to the birth of modern society (let’s call it the Classical Greek era for now), people were just a bunch of warring tribes made of barbarians, heathens, and savages.  The history I was taught didn’t discuss how these “heathens” were actually rich, well established societies that centralized leadership, spirituality, art, and culture around women and matrilineal lines.  In such a short span of a few thousand years, we effectively erased the trace of women as political and spiritual leaders from the common populous.

Since 2010, I have studied under a European bee shamanism tradition that is, at its heart, gynocentric.  I mostly teach women, but I have always known that this work needs to be offered to both women and men, so last year a bee sister and I created a workshop that was inclusive to all genders.  On two different occasions I invited a male friend to attend the workshop.  I invited each of them because I saw how much they might love and be empowered by the work, but also how much they would bring to the table.  It was an invitation.  Do you want to know how they both responded?  Friend “A” wrote and asked if I wanted him to teach it with me.  Friend “B” didn’t even ask. He assumed the invitation was to co-facilitate, even though I was already teaching the workshop with another woman.  I do not believe I miscommunicated here.  Friend ‘A’ has never studied this work and friend ‘B’ has taken one workshop in England.  Meanwhile, I had 9 years and 11 trips to England behind me.  I do not completely fault these men for their assumption, but rather the paradigm we live under.   Neither of these men would openly question my worth, my knowledge, or my expertise, but the habit to question a woman’s ability to lead is so deeply embedded in the social structure of Patriarchy, that they both assumed I was asking for their leadership.  They both assumed I needed their help leading something they had no experience in.

Words like “I would love you to attend” or “I think you would be interested in this work and I could see you there” somehow got interpreted at “I would like you to teach this with me.”  While I would love to co-facilitate work with men, this blatant assumption was deeply off-putting.  I value the extremely hard work and dedication I have put into my work, but even as a leader in my field, I am still questioned by the subversive and undermining nature of a social paradigm that favors male authority over female authority as if it was a singular truth.  

Turns out, historically, matrilineal and women-honoring cultures thrived for much longer that Patriarchy.  They thrived, not at the expense of men (or the natural world), but rather as societies that honored the life-creating wisdom and power of the feminine.  Dearest, beautiful men who are are partners and loves, thank you for your help and your desire to do right, but also please consider this:  Can you let her lead you?   Can you let her lead without turning her into your mother? Can you let her be sovereign in her sexuality and not assume it’s just for you?  Can you let her lead others, without feeling emasculated in your relationship?  Can you let her be powerful and a feminist without assuming that she disdains men?  Can you let her shapeshift, as is her nature?  Can you welcome her vulnerability and her power? Can you allow yourself to be lead and to follow?  Can you allow her to be lead and follow?  Can you allow roles to be fluid?  

I want you.  I want your kinship, your love, your eros, your leadership, your wisdom, your protection, you humor, your intellect, your magic.  I want me too.  I want my trust, my vulnerability, my power, my sexuality, my protection, my humor, my intellect, my wisdom, my magic.  Fight for these things in me, believe in me, because I am also doing the hard work of championing a world where these things can be freely expressed in both of us. 

That's My Language

Hi, my name is Ariella. I’m a beekeeper. It’s not a hobby. I don’t make my money from honey. I don’t make my money from carting bees around the country on semi trucks for mass pollination events. I only have a few hives. But beekeeping is part of my profession. I am a teacher of beekeeping plus some other real cool shit. It’s part of the business I run, because I’m also a boss. It’s not cute. Or sweet. Or adorable. I wear skirts. This is also not cute. Not sweet. Or adorable. But sometimes I am cute, sweet, and adorable. Running a business is not. That’s the difference. So today I want to raise a glass to all the bee business boss ladies out there who aren’t playing by the rules. ⠀

⠀

You might be tough as nails, dressed in overalls, selling honey at the local farmers market. You might be getting your nails done and discussing whether or not to expand your apiary with your bestie. You might be biking between hives in some metropolis, joyful and determined. You might be establishing a honey bee sanctuary while raising kids and writing your dissertation. You might be cute too. You might wear skirts. You might not. You might be fierce. You might be butch. You might be ethereal. You might be any multitude of multidimensional magnificence and also happen to run your own business DOING WHAT YOU LOVE. One thing I’ll say about running a business: it’s never cute. You’re never a busy little bee. You’re a Queen. Know the difference. Own the difference. You work hard. For every hour in a sun dappled field of apple blossoms, there are 10 hours of bookkeeping, computer screens, tough choices, late nights, early mornings, long schleps, invoices, marketing, bullet journals, and careful investments of your precious time, money and energy. You’re also doing this because you fell in love. Never forget it. You’re here for the winged ones. You made a place for yourself where the industry said there was none. You said, “See that language being spoken over there? The one filled with the hum of 60,000 sisters? That’s my language, so please, let’s go have a listen, or kindly get out of my way.”

Re-piecing A Hive Together

I dreamt last night of a hive torn to pieces. Every bit of comb on the ground was covered in bees. It was the largest hive I’d ever witnessed. Night was approaching and I had to gather all the bees and broken comb. I had to provide them with a new home in a hollow under my bed before it got too cold. Many people around me were oblivious, but some unexpected friends and family came to help. No one had protective clothing. We gently took up each comb with bare hands. Despite the darkness, despite the cold, despite the gravity of destruction, the bees didn’t sting. They understood we were here to help.

I was reminded this morning of the delicate balance of relations. A bee, in her nature, stings. It would be unwise to pretend the bee doesn’t sting, the snake doesn’t bite, the lion doesn’t devour. Yet, it would be equally unwise to assume their instinct stops there. All beings also feel. They also have the ability to sense intention. How often have we recounted amazed stories of human interactions with the wild where an animal that should have roared, charged, balked and bit, instead remained still, while the fishing line was removed from her great watery eye, or the steel jaws loosened from the trap?

Our human-centric greed has torn the nest asunder, but it is our very humanness that can defy fear and reach bare handed into the broken system to mend it. You just have to do it. Screw careful planning. Start the garden, risk love, write the book, speak to the trees, march with the youth. The people who join you may not be who you expect. The people who are listening may not have revealed themselves yet. Do it anyway. Mend the nest, mend the weave, mend the rifts despite the odds.

Just Another Animal Experiencing Autumn

Warning.  

This isn’t about bees.  It’s about love. Except, maybe stick around, cause I *might* throw some bees in for good measure.

Ever notice how love, loss and longing get stored in your body the same way seasons do for every other temperate animal on earth? There’s a kind of body knowing that arrives.  It sneaks in and gives you emotional responses to things that feel out of context, until you examine the seasons of your life.  The bees feel it.  They react accordingly.  It’s not a surprise, it’s instinct (see how I did that). 

We talk about calendar dates, but what’s really running the internal clock is seasons.  Autumn has always been my love season.  Maybe it’s because the first time I fell in love was in early fall.  When autumn rolls around I feel Love courting me.  Grief works the same way.  It slips in with the seasons.  Something about the particular angle of the light, the smell of dry grass, the color of the hills.  This week, as late summer heat merges with early fall chill I’ve been experiencing an unexpected wave of grief.  A longing and sorrow.  I didn’t even realize it was exactly a year since my last heartbreak.  My body told me.  The body remembers.   We store powerful experiences in our body.  They emerge with all sorts of prompting, but seem especially prone to blooming when the earthly seasons shift, creating the same sensory experience you had when that thing happened to your heart that one time.  Tragedy, ecstasy, love.  It all percolates up from the depths of you just so it can meet the season of its birth once more.  I believe if handled with care, this is part of what we call Healing.

Last summer I fell in love in Paris.  How cliché. But hear me out: it was with a long time friend  who lives in Europe and whom I’d been in occasional rendez-vous for 13 years.  Okay okay, it’s super cliché.  Still, it was vey real and very mutual. Change your life real.  Do things you’d never thought you’d do.  Willing to make sacrifices.  That kind of real.  Obviously it didn’t work out.  Reasons? Something complex mixed with something as simple as I wanted kids, he didn’t. 

It doesn’t change the love for each other.  He’s still one of my favorite, long-life friends/lovers.  Our entire love affair is based on walking through ancient city streets for hours in a never-ending labyrinth of delicious conversation.  I gave it my best.  I flew back to Europe in September.  I put it all on the line.  My heart broke.  Enter Autumn.

Now here we are, flirting with Autumn and all her potential affairs, while the season moving through my body is also reminding me that this is a time to weep.  I think this is what it is to be an animal.  This is what it is to let the natural flow of emotions move through you.  Call it the feminine rising.  Can we make room for it? Can we allow room for grief and love to pass through all the ventricles of our heart, without setting mandates on when we’re allowed to feel what and for how long?  Take April for instance.  I always get irritated in early April.  Short tempered, easily frustrated and prone to cry.  You’d think I’d remember by now, but as time goes by it become more subtle and I have to slow down to notice.  What happened in April 9 years ago still plays out in my body-heart even when I’m not paying attention. All that frustration and irritability is a cover for the insane grief of miscarriage followed by years and years of praying for a partner and a baby.  No wonder I get snippy in April.  Once I realize what’s going on and have the breakdown with the big tears, everything shifts and the season of April is tolerable again.  It surprises me every time.  

Whatever it is - falling in love, the day your mother died, the birth of your child, the time the fires came - it’s tracking the seasons even if you are not.  Give it room.  Give yourself time.  Usually all it wants is to be noticed and respond to accordingly.  When the flowers dry up and the nectar stops flowing, the bees respond accordingly.  When the smell of rain is on the wind, the birds begin their migration.  It’s natural.  Every animal has learned how to respond to the season.  We may have learned a lot of big-brained tricks for pacifying the seasons.   We can even try to escape them entirely.  That is, until we remember that they are moving inside us, not just around us.  

I have spent the last 9 years in a depth of spiritual and shamanic study that demands me to not only be in touch with my emotions, but to also express them.  How rebellious.  In a culture that fears emotions, labeling women who fluidly move with them as volatile, crazy, intense, or dramatic, the active cultivation of emotional expression is downright revolutionary. Goodness, only a century ago had a disease for women’s emotions named Hysteria.  

The thing about these external seasons evoking internal seasons, is there’s no escaping it.  You can either suppress it, and suffer the consequences (model for last 2000 years), or pause as the leaves turn, greeting the upwelling of memory and feeling.  I’ll tell you what this love and heart break gave me: permission.  Like many women, I have spent my life apologizing for my emotions.  I remember apologizing to this man, amidst a torrent of tear.  Sorry for crying.  “Why are you apologizing?” he said.  “It’s just an emotion.  It’s natural. Let it out.  Let it come all the way through.  It’s not going to hurt me.  If you don’t let it all the way through it will get stuck.”  

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you can spend your life giving yourself permission to be you over and over again, but sometimes, when you’re at your most vulnerable, it takes someone you love saying, yes, you are allowed to be your whole self in front of me.  If we could only remember to be that whole self every day.  Or to not try to give our whole selves to people who only want a part of us. The raven doesn’t diminish itself in order to be liked by other ravens, or foxes.  The lion doesn’t stop being fierce because the wind can’t handle it.  The bees don’t stop stinging because you praise them for their honey.  

Moral of the story, give yourself permission to be what you are, tears and all.  There is a difference between expressing emotions and dumping them on someone else as their responsibility.  No one else is responsible for your emotions, but the antidote to emotional dumping isn’t emotional suppression (hint: that leads to dumping).  The answer is expression.  Allow them to exist.  To move through your body, your art, your music, your cooking, your love affairs, your cry in the shower.  And don’t you dare let someone else’s discomfort with emotions tell you that you having emotion is some how wrong.  You, dear feeling creature with the sea in your eyes and falcons in your hair, your existence is not wrong. 

What's In A Name?

As my most witchiest of seasons arrives, I’ve been thinking a lot about titles. I do a fair amount of interviews & Podcasts and people always want to know my title/label.  In the world of bios, CVs and qualifiers, this title business is always daunting.  Hell, I don’t even know if I feel comfortable calling myself a Beekeeper, let alone all the other things I am.  Words are complicated.  Titles, moreso.  Sometimes people just give you a label.  I’ve been called a priestess, shaman, initiate, Melissae and once, someone even wanted to call me a Guru.  Thanks, but no thanks. The thing is, these are all titles that were once bestowed with great honor and after journeys that can take the better part of a lifetime.  

For instance, within the Lyceum, the European bee tradition I am a part of, we learn shamanic practices, but I would not call myself a Shaman.  Maybe shamanic healer.  Maybe.  We learn from teachings handed down by the Bee Mistress and the Melissae, but I would never call myself a Bee Mistress, because I am not one, and will probably never arrive at such a mastery of self in this lifetime. There are initiations rarely spoken of, but I am not initiated, therefore can not call myself an Initiate of The Path of Pollen.  I mean, initiation is no joke.  Initiation is always a death, a crossing the threshold and a return.  The closest I’ve come is a wilderness rite of passage.  Can you see where I’m going with this?  What a conundrum.  

We are starving.  Over the course of a number of generations, the spiritual root system of most earth-based peoples has been systematically eradicated, syphoned off, demonized, and then processed and glossily repackaged.  It’s now sold as a commodity and we consume all we can, because we are dying from the kind of thirst that can only be quenched by the kind of deep well tended by ravens and grandmothers.  How do we reclaim our ancestral heritage of priestess, shaman, wise woman, or medicine man without watering down lineage and traditions with selective consumption, appropriation, or spiritual bypass?  

It turns out it’s all about initiation.  An initiation is a right of passage.  To get to initiation takes some nose to the ground discipline and hard work.  Or it blindsides you like a hunting falcon, but that’s a different story.  As Martin Shaw writes,  “Initiation creates a boundaried opportunity to step nearer the kingdom of death and be called back to the living by the singing voices of elders.”  When a culture is lacking in sacred rites of passage and threshold locations, the youth seek it regardless: though drunken nights, death-defying acts, and engaging the wild self without any container to welcome you back upon return.

“The ground of real peril in a contemporary imitation is not the Threshold, but the Return Journey” so writes Shaw.

We know we need initiation.  We crave it.  We may not survive without it, but we also may not survive it.  That’s why initiation involves the proverbial sting.  Initiation involves crossing over a death threshold.  It’s a stripping down.  It’s 5 nights fasting in the wilderness speaking to the lost bones of your ancestors and the elusive badger in equal measure. It’s loosing your mind a little.  It’s being reshaped in the fire.  We only have a few rites of passage available to us outside of ceremony - births, deaths, and perhaps marriage.  But we don’t have strong containers or elders to sit all night by the fire keeping vigil while we wander the wilderness of our own transformation.  We have to do it for each other, with absolutely nothing in our society showing us the blueprint.

I believe, initiation is a culmination of years of moving through the trials of self growth within a container witnessed and held by spirit AND humans.  

Initiation is not something that happens in a class, a drug trip or even after a potent ceremony.  It’s unruly, serious, trickster.  It chooses you as much as you choose it.  I truly feel compassion for my younger self who grabbed that word and lusted after it because I recognized how badly I/we/society needed it.  I believe there are rites of passage in life that truly initiate us into the next level of our development and those are deeply personal and can not be judged by outside opinion.  But within a spiritual tradition that HAS initiation, it’s important to remember that to travel down the road of study is no mean trick.  No walk in the park.  No certificate to add to your CV.  You will get squeezed.  Your life will upend.  Multiple times.  It’s a death threshold, and while it is exquisitely beautiful, it is never pretty.  

How do we find our way in?  How do we follow Persephone’s footsteps? Prick our finger? Cut off our hair? Walk through the desert blinded? How do we become the elders that can sing our youth home when they climb bloodied and frostbitten from the depths of the underworld? 

By letting ourselves be squeezed now.  By loosing friends, jobs, lovers because we are willing to make the underworld journey, not just for ourselves but for the generations to come.  By choosing the all night vigil with the cold stones, as well as the euphoria of the divine.  By choosing the dark goddess and the wild god in exile, as well as the “Aha” moments when celestial geometry lines up, the sun rises, and inner peace is attained.  To feel the ecstatic divine, we have to go fully into the gritty realm of the every day fuckery of the trickster gods.  We have to die to ourselves a thousand times over, and when it’s time, turn back around and sing the song that calls each other home.  We have to be the Earth dying to be the Earth blooming.  We have to feel the sting with the honey.

They Made Me Do It

What is it about beekeeping that encourages so many dudes to mansplain and publicly shame other beekeepers? Particularly natural beekeepers.  Particularly female natural beekeepers?  In my Facebook group a female treatment free beekeeper selling honey at a local market was recently approached by a very aggressive and strongly opinionated male pro-treatment beekeeper who talked AT her while she just sat there.  What the hell dude? If this was an isolated incident, I’d say it was a guy having a bad day, but do you know how often women write me asking how to respond to the [insert shitty behavior descriptor] men at bee meetings/classes/online forums etc?  I know mansplaining and aggression is everywhere, but non-beeks, let me tell you, it’s seriously bad in the beekeeping world.  I’m also super passionate about music, food, hiking, travel, and wellness and in none of those areas have I experienced or witnessed the level of shaming from men.  

Pause to acknowledge: yes, men and non-gender binary beekeepers also experience shaming from men, women and non-gender binary folk.

Double pause to acknowledge: all the amazing men who are not like this at all and possibly suffer from same types of experiences.

Resume: I’m not here to bad mouth all men, but the question stands, what do we do as women when we are being aggressively shamed by men in our field? I wish I had it in me to tell someone to just eff the fuck off, but that’s *generally* not my nature.  So what else? Is the person lecturing me on how I’m the reason bees are dying really going to pause and thoughtfully listen to my counter argument?  What if I do say something?  Will the situation escalate? Because underneath the lack of response from women like me who have learned to be nice, and patient and not too “emotional” there is fear of violence.

Fear of violence pervades even if we know it’s highly unlikely that Angry Bee Man would be violent if we politely asked him to leave us alone.  It’s the fact that the fear it there, under the surface (or on the surface).  It’s not logical.  It’s not based on reason, but it’s there because well…look at history.  You could come from a community of the kindest, bravest, most nurturing men and history still has: the Burning Times, genital mutilation, child brides, sterilization of Native American women, women as property of men, honor killings, and of course domestic abuse and rape.  

Hey, kind, loving men, are your hackles up because none of this describes you?  Anybody wanna tell me I’m over-generalizing?  Choose love over anger?  Love over fear?  Anyone wondering how on earth do I get from Angry Bee Man to rape and murder?  Am I being too emotional?  We live in a time when the transgressions against women, the earth, people of color, and gender non-binary folx are being dragged into the light by everyone in those groups.  We’re living in a time where women are exercising their voice, which was silenced for centuries.  Is STILL being silenced.  But there’s more room.  There are walls that are crumbling to the many tiny hammers eroding the walls of Patriarchy.  

Is there a connection between Angry Bee Man and inherent violence?  There is.  Will he be violent? No. Not likely.  He’s just abusing his power.  Turns our he’s the product of a system.  He’s probably really passionate about saving bees.  You’re treatment-free way threatens him.  It’s not an excuse to warrant bad behavior, but he’s just doing what the men before him did.  The problem is, typically when a woman raises her voice and yells at a man, it doesn’t come with the potential threat of life threatening violence.  But regardless of how unlikely it is, when a man is aggressive with a woman, that fear can and often does lurk beneath the surfae.  Why? Because of frightening statistics like in the U.S. “The rate of women murdered by men in single victim/single offender incidents rose by 11 percent between 2014 and 2016.” (UNICEF)

I’m getting off topic.  Well no, it’s not.  Not really.   Violence against women. Violence against bees.  Violence against the Earth.  It all comes from the same place of gross imbalance perpetuated by over 2000 years of a world view that sees women as inferior and/or property of men.  The same view sees the Earth as inferior and in need of dominance by man.
I’m not pointing a finger at all men or saying you don’t have a right to your opinions and your anger. I’m saying women are learning not to tolerate bad behavior.  Women also have a right to their anger, especially when centuries of violence and oppression sit behind it. The ways to stop women-shaming behavior are manifold, but they include women’s anger. There is a kind of anger that arises out of fear of something you have (power) being taken away from you. This can be especially frightening if you are a man (especially a white man) who has experienced your privilege as the norm. There is another kind of anger that arises out of refusal to continually be abused by a social system that suppresses your voice, especially if you are a woman (or anything else that’s not cis gendered white male). Obviously there are degrees of extreme to what people endure at the hands of others. That being said, until women have an equal voice, equal right and are equally safe in their own bodies, men are going to have to get used to new rules.

Women are learning to use our voices to say no to dominance over us.  There’s a difference between explaining something in a conversation and patronizing a woman, talking over her, and telling her how it is without asking (and listening) to her opinion.  Until women’s voices are regarded as equal to men’s voices, men are going to have to deal with the sting of our words.

So what do you say to the Angry Bee Man who wants to know why you don’t treat your bees you naive-irresponsible-hippie-witch?  Here are a few thoughts: 

“I’d love to have an adult conversation, but since that isn’t an available option at this time, I decline further contact.”

“Did you know Saint Brigit sent a host of bees to defend against men trespassing on her land?”

“This is a great topic to bring up with someone else.”

And my personal favorite:

“Have you heard of the goddess Lilith? Persephone, per chance? They made me do it.”

Mother For President

I’ve been thinking a lot about women’s voices lately. I’ve been thinking about what would happen if more women were voted into office, or if more women were invited to speak at basically any conference that’s not for, or already about, women. I’ve been noticing the changes too: how I can casually talk about my menstrual cycle around my male friends, or how pumping milk at work is suddenly something normal to see on Netflix shows. For god’s sake, it’s starting to be okay to talk about the normal function of our bodies.

Here we are, making all this progress about what we can say and do in comparison to our grandmothers and their mother’s mothers. Sure, that’s amazing. I can talk about having two miscarriages on social media and I won’t be publicly hushed or shamed. But also, how on earth do we address the grave transgression on the body of the non-human when we are still struggling for a place of equality among genders. Not to mention atrocities done to other races and nationalities. ⠀

We see all these cries of dismay: “the lungs of the earth are burning!” Yes, I agree, this is horrifying. Meanwhile, I’m grateful my bees are still alive because California isn’t burning...this year...yet. Count my blessings or pull my hair out? Which is it to be today?⠀

So here’s today’s thought: it’s not so much that we need to learn to respect our mother (which we certainly do), but rather we need to remember the Mother. Not just the archetype, but that age-old wisdom that valued Mother as synonymous with life. That same wisdom built shrines, temples, halls, even entire religions around Mother. Because you know what a mother does? She feeds her children with food she’s made with her own superhero body. She literally gives them life and then she protects them while they grow. And do her children burn her lungs in return? Not usually.⠀

It’s not just that there’s a need for the feminine voice in science/politics/agriculture/education/theology/everything, but rather a remembering of the Mother‘s voice. And no, I don’t mean the mother issues you talk about in therapy. I mean doing away with Freud and other such bullshit and coming back into relationship to the feminine voice that includes the Mother for all that she is: the Mother who is sovereign in her queendom, who is sexy as fuck in her body, heart, and mind, who is fierce in her rage, who is still learning from her elders, who is teaching her young, who trusts her intuition, who is revered, but not for her hierarchy. She is revered because she is her own being, and also, because, consequently, she brings life. Kinda like, oh, a queen bee.

Our attention on the feminine often falls to the maiden: she who is still becoming (she who is desired by men). I love the maiden. I also love the lover (a 4 female archetype to discuss another day). But culturally, we don’t really see the mother.

She’s not on our magazine covers, unless we want to show off how sexy she is while pregnant or how quickly she lost that baby weight. And if we do see her, she is only Mother. That is her only identity. We are so one dimensional in our seeing. No wonder we can let the lungs of our mother burn, or her blood dry out. We don’t see her.

Luckily, in this bubble experiment that is social media, I see mothers. So many of you. Using your voice as a mother and besides being a mother. More please. More mothers’ voices. Your true voices, stronger than the chains of patriarchy and social expectation. Full of the brazen authenticity and vulnerability that will wake us up from our collective amnesia. Oh and to all you women out there who aren’t/can’t be mothers with your bodies, but are creating life in your own way? I’m talking to you too. I’ve spent enough years in the maiden archetype, and I’m all about the crone, but it’s time to embrace the Mother, because we all know she’s a Queen.

#mother #queen #feministbeekeeping

Apple: Fruit of the Otherworld

Apple

æppel • aball • malum

Main Pollinators: 

Honey bees, mason bees (but there are many more!)

It’s apple season here in Sebastopol.  I grew up in a land of cedars and pine, but moved to the soft, apple hills of this small town, which used to be the Gravenstein capital of the world.  Some of the old orchards have resisted the encroaching vineyards and every spring they are ablaze with white blossoms and memories of Avalon.  This time of year the apples fall faster than we can pick them.  Yesterday I saw two white-spotted fauns in the middle of an orchard enjoying the free harvest while mama looked on.  Apple harvest is always a good time of year.  It means love it in the air.  Always has, always will.

The apple we know today is originally from Central Asia, but has been cultivated in Europe and Asia for thousands of years. In Ireland and Britain, there is a smaller, native apple known as crab apple, or to the Celts, wild apple.  In Scotland, Wales and Ireland, you can still find windblown, twisted apple trees with ribbons and cloth tied to the branches . These trees are called Clootie trees and are a form of prayer tree. Two of the most common Clootie trees are Hawthorne and Apple, both associated with love and the Otherworld.

Apples are Faye food.  Forbidden fruit. Fruit of the dead.  Love fruit.  Witches fruit.  They hang heavy off the many-branched tree of folklore.  After all, wasn’t it our courageous Eve who first tasted their promise of Gnosis (although let’s be honest, her apple was most likely a pomegranate).  

It was apple, gifted by the Goddess Iðunn who gave the Norse gods eternal youth.  In Ancient Greece, apple was the fruit most beloved to Hera, Athena and above all, Aphrodite, goddess of Love.  It is not surprise that Apple was associated with youthfulness, love and fertility.  It’s health benefits are many and varied, but they are particularly known to prolong life through aiding in digestion, liver function as well being a good source for vitamin C, B6, and potassium.

My favorite apple myths spring from Celtic mythology.  In Irish folklore, the Wild Apple was a sacred chieftain tree, and to cut it down without permission engendered a hefty penalty.  It was often associated with the Otherworld and apples were commonly found buried with the dead.  The Otherworld however, is more than the place of the dead, it also represents the land of the Faye folk, who were said to live in the hollow hills, the trees and in the sacred isles beyond the ninth wave.

In one Irish myth, a Sidhe, or fey maiden falls in love with a mortal and sings her love to him.  She is chased off by his father’s men, but before she departs, she throws him an apple.  The apple is fairy food and is ever-renewing.  The fruit alone sustains the mortal for a year, until she returns on her crystal ship and they sail to the Otherworld together.  

In another Irish myth, through trickery, two lovers are kept apart and die.  On the grave of the maiden an apple tree grows.  On her lover’s grave, many miles away, a Yew tree sprouts.  The trees grow and bend longingly toward on another for seven year.  Then the trees are cut down by bards and all the stories of love and romance that ever fell from lips were carved upon wooden tablets made from the trees.  Eventually these tablets found their way to the hands of the high king of Tara.  When the love tablets were side by side, they sprang into each others arms, becoming as deeply entwined as the branches of an ancient tree.  

I wrote a song once called Apple Tree, about loving and letting go, inspired by the Celtic lore.  You can listen to it here.

Lamentation by WB Scott

In Arthurian myth, the Isle of Apples is another name for Avalon: the land lost in the mists.  When Arthur is mortally wounded, his half-Faye sister, Morgan le Fey, ushers him on her boat to the Isle of Apples, a place of eternal summer, where Arthur sleeps until it is time for him to wake and return to the world of man.  Today that isle is associated with Glastonbury Tor in England, where the veil between the world is quite thin.  This photo is from the apple orchard on the side of that famous fairy mount.

From stories such as these, and many others, a myriad of folk traditions have arisen.  In Britain and Ireland, to toss an apple to someone is a declaration of love.  Similarly, to cut an apple crosswise, revealing the star, and then share it with another, is also an act of love.  At harvest faire, around the the time of Samhain, young women would bob for apples.  Once an apple was caught, the girl would peel the apple in one long ribbon and then toss the peel over her shoulder.  The peels were then inspected to see if they made a letter, which was believed to be the first letter of the girl’s future husband.  

Beyond romance, apples were also commonly associated with divination and magical folk.  Druid’s divining rods were carved from Apple.  Merlin himself was thought to practice his arts in a sacred apple grove.  The trees were so important, that a long standing tradition of honoring them at midwinter arose.  This tradition involved heading to the orchard on midwinter eve or Christmas eve.  A tree was selected to represent the commonwealth of Apple trees and was then saluted and blessed with cider, cakes, song and poetry.  This tradition is called Wassailing and is still practiced to this day.

Some of my favorite traditions that you can incorporate into your autumn harvest are:

• Making apple cider vinegar and sprinkling it on an apple tree at midwinter

• Baking apple crisps for your loved one, infused with cinnamon and clove

• Collecting dried apple seeds in a small sachet and sleeping with them under your pillow for support in dreams of the otherworld

• Leaving apple offering to the fey folks when the veil is thin at times such as Autumn equinox and All Hallows Eve.

• Pelting your crush with apples, just to be sure they know you like them.

• Leaving apples or apple seeds on your ancestral altar to honor the spirits who have journeyed to the underworld.

Happy Harvest!

Lavender: Giddy Calm

Lavender⠀
Lavande • Lavendre• Lavandula⠀
⠀
Pollinators: ⠀
Honey bee, bumble bee, digger bee, carpenter bee, leafcutter bee⠀
⠀
Medicinal parts used: ⠀
Flowers⠀
⠀
Preparations:⠀
Teas, tinctures, essential oil, spice for cooking/baking, hydrosols, lotions and ointments, ⠀

I will never forget the way it hit me. Like a physical bath of scent. We arrived in Sainte-Croix-à-Lauze just as dusk descended. The crickets were declaring the glories of summer, while fireflies emerged to secret the sun away into the night. It was heaven. I got high. Quite literally, the scent of lavender so engulfed me, that I sort of lost it for a bit. I was a mess of giggles and wonder. A friend and I have meandered our way through Provence to the tiniest town in the Hautes-Alpes. There wasn’t even a cafe. It was just an old, stoney town with one central spring, and on all sides, Lavender. Fields and fields and fields of the heaviest, sweetest scent I had ever experienced.

My mother grows lavender. Heaps of it. It lines the apiary and turns dry and grey-violet each summer. It’s absolutely lovely. I cut bunches of it for making oils, sachets and wall hangings. This was NOT that lavender. This was otherworldly. I thought I knew lavender. This was something else. This gave me superpowers. This was a soup of scent. This was the the loosening of my hair. This was barefoot crush. This was an intravenous anti-anxiety drip, except with breath. Imagine breathing a sort of liquid, giddy calm. How can you be giddy and calm? Go to Provence in July in the evening.

Our AirBnB host was a tall, linen-wearing woman with a long sliver braid looped over her shoulder. She was celebrating a birthday in the neighbor’s yard with a weaver and a beekeeper when we arrived. They invited me down because, well…beekeeper. By the next morning my doorstep was filled with Oak honey and homemade rosewater. I knew, in that moment that I was about to fall in love. Not with the beekeeper, but someone. (I did by the way, shortly after, although it swiftly ended in heartbreak). I still eat a bit of that Oak honey every day. I still believe it will lead me to love.

I had just finished teaching Apis Sophia Exstasis, a women’s retreat in Aquitaine, and I was exhausted. My friend Nani and I drove 10 hours across France to hide away in a stone cottage and inhale lavender. She made me salmon that first night, but the kitchen was lacking basics and the nearest grocery story was a hour away. We made do with butter, salmon and red wine. It turns our a red wine butter sauce of salmon is quite tasty, and to this day, whenever either of us is in a bit of a conundrum we tell each other to just “Pour some red wine on it.” Can’t figure out how to keep your houseplant alive? Pour some red wine on it. Feeling confused about some nasty paperwork? Pour some red wine on it. You get the gist.

On our last night, we shared a glass (we are big lightweights, so one was clearly enough) and went for a midnight stroll through lavender fields, picking a stalk here and a stalk there, absolutely certain all wrath and furry were about to descend on us for our shitty tourist trespassing. Then we did the unthinkable (and by unthinkable, I mean I literally didn’t even think about it - whoops), and brought those stalks home in our suitcases. I know, we are the worst. No that lavender is infused into an oil that I use on my skin daily for nourishment and anxiety relief.

Used by Egyptians in the mummification process and cultivated for its oil in ancient Arabia, lavender has been a sacred and beloved herb in healing, cosmetic and culinary arts for millennia.⠀
⠀
It is an herb used for calming the nervous system, treating wounds, easing headaches, improve sleep and offers a general feeling of wellbeing.⠀
⠀
It was spikenard, a form of lavender, that Mary Magdalene used to anoint Jesus’ feet. ⠀

Lavender honey is very light, herbaceous, floral and pairs well with soft cheeses, figs, and my favorite: biscuits and Devonshire cream.

⠀
Here are some of my favorite ways to love lavender:⠀
⠀
* I use drops of lavender essential oil in my humidifier at night. ⠀
* I gather it every midsummer for making lavender infused oils (not EO). Oiling the skin is of a daily ritual for me, as I have every sensitive skin and live in a dry place. Lavender oil soothes mind and body.⠀
* I make lavender infused chocolate truffles which I used to take to Burning Man to feed all my friends.⠀
* I put it in sachets for dreams when I am needing lightness⠀
* I sprinkle it into almond honey cakes, which make great ritual offerings.⠀
* I hang a bundle over my bed ⠀
* As a hydrosol, it never leaves my side⠀
* I mix it in a calming tea blend, often with nettles, chamomile, and rose. ⠀
* I watch the bees dance through it.

Untangling the Narrative

Yesterday I had another rude awakening in the long journey of untangling the poisoned threads of Patriarchy. Before I go any further, let’s establish once more that Patriarchy is a well-fed idea, whose systemic markers are expressing themselves within all of us. Dismantling the Patriarchy requires and inward gaze, as well as a recognition of its expression in society, infrastructure, classism, racism, and sexism.⠀⠀

Forward ho! So, I have an Instagram bookclub (#honeyreads) where I recommend books on bees, ecology, and the feminine. This month I recommended Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner's lectures on bees. I was vaguely aware of his racism, but felt his view on bees worthy of sharing. And that alone, irks me about the inherent nature of white blindness. Yesterday I discovered the extent of his racism and white supremacy. Here’s a quote from him: “If the blonds and blue-eyed people die out, the human race will become increasingly dense ... Blond hair actually bestows intelligence.” ⠀⠀

I feel like the only thing I can do is dismiss all his work. I feel angry at all the times I’ve heard people say “he was just a product of his times.” I’m a product of my times, and I can either be supportive of concentration camps for children in the United States or I can fight against them. The times don’t justify your beliefs about superiority over another rare, gender or sexual orientation. I want to cut him out the way we cut out cancer, but is that the answer? I went digging. Wanna know who else fits the profile or either racist or sexist/misogynist?

So many (mostly white) dudes who greatly contributed to, well, everything. I mean obviously, right? But here’s a starter list anyway: Albert Einstein, James Watson, Aristotle, Friedrich Nietzsche, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Jefferson, Mohandas Gandhi, Roald Dahl, T.S. Eliot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Charles Darwin. The cut-out-the-cancer model is one way to deal, but how do we address the whole body holding the illness? How can we recognise the uncomfortable, wrong, and unjust, and face it so that we can heal them?

 How do we tease out the fibers of value within the works of people who were/are deeply flawed and downright harmful?

How do we benefit from Einstein’s Theory of Relativity while also addressing his views on the Chinese? How do we celebrate the writing of Vonnegut while also looking at his beliefs that women can’t be educated? Or appreciate Steiner’s contribution to social reform (and bees) while untangling his sickening beliefs about non-white races. Perhaps it starts with looking at it. I wanna look away so badly. But looking at it and patiently examining how someone’s belief might just play into their brilliant findings/writings/philosophies. It becomes your job not to consume such works whole, but to ask: what is valuable? What is true? What is influenced by sexism/racism? What needs to be reworked here? What did I believe out of ignorance? How can I keep looking with more discernment? How can I take this work and bring more ethics, awareness, justice, and equality to it? Where are the resources that disrupt the passing on of nearly invisible systemic disease? Look it in the eyes. Nothing set out to sabotage the sovereignty of a race/sex likes to be seen with the curtains pulled back. It prefers to function in the subconscious corridors of conditioning. Keep being willing to look at it and ask the difficult questions. Not just about the oppressors, but about yourself as well.

The Face of the Hive

⠀⠀You know how you learn to read your dog? Her expressions of love, worry, silliness and eagerness? Or how your cat does that one tail flick when he’s proud of himself?⠀⠀

⠀⠀What happens when you can’t see the face or hear the meow? Bees, as individuals, have faces, but what is the “face” of the colony? A colony, after all, is an organism. A whole that is the sum of many parts.⠀⠀

⠀⠀As beekeepers in protective suits, we can manipulate the hive without too much consequence. Guard bees will try to sting you, but you are safe behind the suit. If you squish a bee no one yelps or cries out. If you move too roughly, just to get it done, and bees get crushed under a langstroth box or between topbars, guard bees will react, but we don’t see the face of pain. We hurt individuals, but we don’t see the effect on the whole.⠀⠀

⠀⠀How can we try to befriend not just the cute individual bee but the faceless being that is a hive colony? All too often I witnessed rough handling because we can get away with it. Why? Because bees don’t exhibit the qualities of stress and grief we are used to recognising in mammals. Every time I’m in a hive I ask, how can I slow down more? How can I listen better? Who am I seeing here? It is a “they”, but also a whole (whom I call a “her”). Brining in a more feminine approach to beekeeping isn’t just about intuition and skirts, it’s about how we can work WITH a being rather than dominate over a being.⠀⠀

⠀⠀Bees are not domesticated. They never will be. We will never conquer them. We will never replace them with more efficient robots. We will never successfully tweak their genetics without harming them. The influence of the feminine is needed here. It is part of the rebalancing needed in both men and women as we attempt to knit ourselves back into the natural order.⠀⠀

⠀⠀So let us be in service to the mystery. Let us attempt to befriend the faceless being who sings the Song of Songs and builds cathedrals of gold.

Sometimes There’s Honey⠀

I spend a lot of time talking about the importance of letting bees be bees. I teach about more natural or bee-centric approaches to beekeeping. I talk about planting for pollinators. I educate on the damages of the monocrop pollination industry and conventional beekeeping. I leave the bees alone most of the time. But sometimes...there’s honey.⠀
⠀
Sometimes getting to the honey is messy. It’s sticky and unruly. If you harvest it from natural comb, it means no fancy centrifuge extractor. It’s a knife, a board, and an invitation to the ants. It’s crushing comb with bare hands. It involves destroying something beautiful that took honey and love to make. As in, comb is wax, and wax takes a lot of energy/food (honey) to produce from the body of a bee. Getting to the honey can result in sting, even with your best intentions and gentlest hands. Sometimes you fuck up and the bees tell you in their perfect, piercing language. Sometimes collecting honey is magic. And sometimes it’s a questionable endeavor full of misfortune and mistakes.⠀
All of this for a moment of gold on the tongue. A sun-warmed treasure from the beings that bring us the resplendence of flowers. ⠀
We can’t take too much. It’s part of the rules. Our society tells us take more, but the bees are quite clear: it is their gift to give, not our right to have.⠀
However, when you do find yourself in a moment of honey, between the mess, the blade and the sting, give over to it. Pleasure is sometimes seeking you.

Let the Bees Lead You

I know it’s called “beekeeping friday” and I ought to talk about beekeeping, but the thing is, nothing with bees is linear. This photo is all about beekeeping. It’s also about finding your voice, trusting the path, sisterhood, and magic. It’s also about hard work, discipline, punches to the ego, and realness. ⠀
⠀
This photo is from yesterday in France, after finishing the evening’s work with my bee sister and trusted colleague, Gina. It’s taken a lot of trust and surrender to get here. We didn’t know this was coming when we stepped onto the lemniscatic path. I didn’t know work could look like this. So here we are: this is our debrief after after a hard day’s work. This is also a moment in my actual life where bees brought me to the south of France to teach bee shamanism in an open air barn with this view. ⠀
⠀
What I’m saying is, I fell in love with bees. I fell in love with the mystery behind their ways and the history woven into women’s relationship to the hive. I started beekeeping, in part to save my heart (and life) after miscarriage. I have followed the strange and crooked path of listening to the wild one within and the wild ones without. That path has landed me in the gracious arms of a growing hive of bee women who are courageously facing their own tangled fears in order to become voices for the earth and the feminine once more. To claim sovereignty, eros, seership and the full expression of self.⠀
⠀
So this is about beekeeping, because beekeeping is about listening to the bees, and in my book, listening to the bees goes far beyond the realm of “normal” and sails straight into the land of mythic reality. The bees fly on crooked paths through liminal thresholds, and when we let them, they show us how to do the same.

What "Counts" as Feminist?

In my life, I keep bees alone. It’s usually just me out there, going from hive to hive. I don’t mind keeping bees alone except for this one thing: I’m not very strong and I don’t know how to use power tools. Furthermore, I don’t want to learn how to use power tools. You kinda need power tools for most hive styles: log, sun, lang, top bar, warre, tree, etc. I don’t want to learn how to build hives, or carve out logs with chainsaws, or climb up in trees to attach swarm boxes, or lift 100lb boxes of bees alone, or build an enclosure for a sun hive. ⠀
⠀
I’ve been getting some entertaining internet flack for what “counts” as feminist. It seems if you post feminism AND bees, WHILE wearing skirts, you are really aren’t being feminist (because how dare I also talk about sexuality and maybe take a tasteful topless photo?). ⠀
Or how about the time I got called out for talking about bees in association with feminism, (I’m clearly misguided because bees are about bees, not feminists). Besides, aren’t feminists angry, man-hating and super into power tools? ⠀
⠀
Look, I am all about boss women with power tools, or crazy boxing skills. I’m just here to say, it’s also okay to be a feminist who wears skirts, talks about female pleasure, and needs to ask people for help when it comes to the heavy lifting. Did using a woodshed to build my first hive make me feel powerful and accomplished AF, you bet. You know what also makes me feel powerful and accomplished, the ability to intentionally dream about my hive and diagnose what’s going on with them. Power doesn’t always me to dominate the gym, the office, the bedroom. Power can also be the roots of an oak tree. It can mean the ability to hold your form in the midst of indecision and turmoil. It can mean knowing what lies beneath your skirt and between your legs is a vast territory of sovereignty. It can mean a heart laid bare.⠀
⠀
I’m a feminist and sometimes I ask some really wonderful women to help me change a tire.⠀
⠀
I’m a feminist and sometimes I ask some really wonderful men to build shit for me. Get over it.⠀

Pleasure as Purpose

Feminist Beekeeping Friday⠀
⠀
:::Pleasure as Purpose:::⠀
⠀
“There is a sort of bee who moves from flower to flower, sipping nectar from each luscious blossom. Picking up pollen from this bloom, she deposits into that one, circulating pollen everywhere, fertilizing all the plants. As a result, the garden flourishes…⠀
…There is another type of bee who also moves from flower to flower, but does not sip nectar. Rather, she devours the blossom with all her senses: inhaling the fragrance, savoring the taste, absorbing the color. She imbibed the song of joy evoked by sunlight on petals. Back in the hive, she also shares her bounty with the community. As they gather in a circle, each bee dances and expression of the blessing she has gathers: dancing the joy, dancing the splendor, dancing the delight.”⠀
- The Shamanic Way of the Bee⠀
⠀
If we are going to actively choose to move away from the kind of thinking that calls the bee the worker and tends to a hive as though it were a machine, we are going to have to remember pleasure. Not just the pleasure of honey on the tongue, but the unbridled pleasure of sun on skin, hand in water, wind over grass, firelight in eyes. ⠀
⠀
To adopt a different approach to the earth and how we tend to her creatures, we have to reclaim Pleasure. Not the vapid pleasure of screen and consumerism, but true Pleasure. The kind of pleasure that turns your hand trailing in the river into something holy. ⠀
⠀
My brand of feminism sometimes requires the fires of sting, but also exhales into the liquid nature of softening. Softening to our own hearts, and to the hearts of others. Recognizing when the wind is asking to be our mistress.
Dare we give pleasure a place in how we tend to our Eden?⠀
⠀
If you had the ability to melt into a rose, wouldn’t you?⠀

Don’t Assume. Listen.

Don’t assume I’m going to sting you. Don’t assume anything about my nature. Don’t assume I’m soft and fuzzy. Don’t assume I’m making you honey. Don’t assume I am industrious. Don’t assume I’m in it for the love affair. Don’t assume I need your chemicals. Don’t assume you know better about myself than I do. Don’t assume I do not hear you because I am only a bee.⠀
⠀
....⠀
⠀
Don’t assume I’m naive. Don’t assume I don’t know about sting. Don’t assume I know less because I’m a hobbyist. Don’t assume I know less because I don’t turn a profit off their honey. Don’t assume I am going to give you answers because you demand them. Don’t assume I am going to withhold honey because I am a feminist. Don’t assume I am in it for the love affair. Don’t assume I am not. Don’t assume I know less because I’m a woman. ⠀
⠀
...⠀
⠀
Don’t assume you are the poison in my waters. Don’t assume I can not hear your prayers. Don’t assume patriarchy is the enemy. Don’t assume it’s outside yourself. Don’t assume it does not damage you, even as you benefit from it. Don’t assume it is too late for me. Don’t assume it is too late for you. Don’t assume you know what is best for me. Don’t assume you are the only species that can save me. Don’t assume you can not. Don’t assume you are somehow separate from me. Don’t assume you cant hear my voice, because I am the Earth and you are me.⠀

Honey-Tongued

Once upon a time bees made ambrosia: food and drink of the gods. ⠀
⠀
Once upon a time honey was spread on the lips of poets so that they may become honey-tongued and speak words of pleasure. ⠀
⠀
Once upon a time bees gave us their secrets of sensuous intoxication, and we spoke of another world where the rivers ran gold with honey-wine. ⠀
⠀
Once upon a time the bees were kin to the nymphs of Arcadia, beings of beauty residing somewhere between mortal and divine.⠀
⠀
Once we equated the honey bees with love, with fertility, and with divine whispering.⠀
⠀
Today we used new words to talk about a bees. Words like industrious, workers, and busy. ⠀
⠀
Language is the result of worldview, and one’s worldview is shaped by language. ⠀
⠀
When did we take the divine out of pleasure? When did we exile the Lover from the Mother? When did Eros become a distraction, while the Worker ruled? When did we stop seeing drops of nectar as Holy and start seeing them as Product? When did the Nymph, so deeply attuned to the fertile and feminine cycles of nature, become she who is “diseased” with “bide-madness” or Nymphomania. ⠀
⠀
The Queen is the Mother is the Lover is the Goddess. Change how you talk about a thing and you change the way you see it. Give yourself permission to bring pleasure back into the conversation. The bees most certainly have much to say on the matter. If we listen.⠀