Revelations from a Beek

) ( Bee Geek ) ( 

The Reveal

“You carry Mother Earth within you. 

She is not outside of you. 

Mother Earth is not just your environment. 

In that insight of inter-being, 

it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, 

which is the highest form of prayer.”

 - Thich Naht Hanh

"There is a language older by far and deeper than words. 

It is the language of bodies, of body on body, 

wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. 

It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory..."

 - derrick jensen  

"But, child of dust, the fragrant flowers,
The bright blue sky and velvet sod,
Were strange conductors to the bowers
Thy daring footsteps must have trod." 

- Emily Bronte

Purple Deadnettle growing wild at the base of two of my hives:  Ariadne and Stella.  This is a flower that Honey Bees like (it creates red pollen!), but my Honey Bees are not on it, as they tend to prefer large nectar and pollen sources and will often stick to a species; the woodland trees around here provide a much greater "patch" of pollen to collect from.  The Carpenter Bees however, are all over it.  I have, on the other hand, heard of beekeepers, whose bees live near large fields rather than forests, bringing in loads of Purple Deadnettle pollen, and I've seen this flower blanket acres of fallow field.  An enchantment either way...  (plus YOU can eat them!)

These two pictures show resiliency...  you can see where, when the flower bud was just beginning and was small (just the tip), they got burnt by the cold snap we got after the super warm spell a couple weeks ago.  The flower kept growing anyway, pushed the damage out of the way, and got on with it.  The heart of the flower was still protected and unharmed.  This is a Saucercup Magnolia; it is featured in the first image above.

"Someday, after mastering the winds, 

the waves, the tides and gravity, 

we shall harness for God the energies of love, 

and then, 

for a second time in the history of the world, 

man will have discovered fire."

 - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

 

"Once you've seen it, you can't unsee it.

 And once you've seen it, 

 keeping quiet, saying nothing, 

becomes as political as speaking out."
- Arundhati Roy

~ 

The Yang within the Yin: Hear the Music

"Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on."
 - Mary Oliver

In this dark, inner time of the year, that coincides with this dark transitional period for our society, and this dark time for the entirety of the human race and world, as we know it, itself...
I want to remind you, as I remind myself...
that it's always darkest just before the dawn...the deepest Yin turns to Yang,
Spring always follows the darkest, coldest (warmest?) Winter...

Here is a video that shows the seed of Spring that is within the Winter; revel in the exuberance of new bees taking their first flight and know that we too shall fly.




If you haven't yet, plant some seeds of the new, the next,
for now is the time to nurture them in the dark of the earth...
so they may burst forth with strongly rooted growth when the time is right... 
Within Yin is the seed of Yang and within Yang is the seed of Yin.  Extremes turn into themselves.

"You should be angry. You must not be bitter.
Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host.
It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure.
So use that anger. You write it. You paint it. You dance it.
You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it.
You talk it. Never stop talking it."   - Maya Angelou.

And as a reverse to these times, here is tomorrow's seed, the Yin within the Yang.

“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing;
there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
  - T.S. Eliot

"And those who were seen dancing 

were thought to be insane by those 

who could not hear the music.”
  - Friedrich Nietzsche

~~~

Oh to Be a Bee in the Summer Soltice Garden...

"The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul." - Alfred Austin