Thank you for following along with me through days, weeks, months, and years ~
of sunrises and sunsets, changes of seasons, while together, we witness time as it flows unimpeded…
Ask me no more where Jove bestows, When June is past, the fading rose; For in your beauty’s orient deep These flowers as in their causes, sleep. Ask me no more whither doth stray The golden atoms of the day; For in pure love heaven did prepare Those powders to enrich your hair. ~Thomas Carew from “A Song: When June is Past”
Previous collections of “Best of Barnstorming” photos:
The wise old apple tree in spring, Though split and hollow, makes a crown Of such fantastic blossoming We cannot let them cut it down. It bears no fruit, but honey bees Prefer it to other trees.
The orchard man chalks his mark And says, “This empty shell must go.” We nod and rub it off the bark As soon as he goes down the row. Each spring he looks bewildered. “Queer, I thought I marked this thing las year.”
Ten orchard men have come and gone Since first I saw my grandfather Slyly erase it. I’m the one To do it now. As I defer The showy veteran’s removal My grandson nods his approval.
Like mine, my fellow ancient’s roots Are deep in the last century From which our memories send shoots For all our grandchildren to see How spring, inviting bloom and rhyme, Defeats the orchard men of time. ~Robert Hillyer “The Pastoral”
When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder, lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety.
When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile. We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity. Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken.
Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us. Our souls, dependent upon their nurture, now shrink, wizened. Our minds, formed and informed by their radiance, fall away. We are not so much maddened as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves.
And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed. ~ Maya Angelou “When Great Trees Fall”
When our ancient Spitzenberg apple tree came down in a November windstorm years ago, there was no time to provide any sort of memorial service, or otherwise dispose of the remains.
My husband started in on the job Thanksgiving morning and I watched through the kitchen window as I cooked for the family members soon to arrive. As he made several chain saw cuts through the trunk to make pieces easily moveable, the extent of the astonishing hole in this old tree became visible. It was suffering from an extreme equivalent of human osteoporosis with a brittle skeleton that somehow had lasted through innumerable windstorms over the years, even while still bearing apples, still trying its best to be fruitful.
The brittleness extended right down into the roots, and they too gave way so easily in the wind that the tree literally broke off at ground level and leaned over, propped up by much healthier and resilient upper branches that had so recently held apples.
When it fell, the trunk oriented itself so it provided a view right through to the barnyard down the hill, telescoping what the tree had surveyed for so many years of its life. Clearly this had been a holey trunk for some years; within the cavity at the base were piles of different size rocks stashed there by the Lawrence children three generations ago, followed by our Gibson children thirty years ago.
There was also a large tarnished spoon, lost decades ago into the dark center of the apple tree and now retrieved at its death. At some point, a Gibson child playing a farm version of frisbee golf must have flung a plastic bucket lid at the hole in the tree, and it disappeared into the gap and settled at the bottom.
All this, like a treasure trove of history, was just waiting for the time when the tree would give up its secrets at its death. There were no gold or silver coins, no notes to the future like a glass bottle put out to sea. This well hidden time capsule held simply rocks and spoon and lid.
I realized as I stared into the gulf of empty trunk that I’m hollowing too, more hollow than I care to admit. Like so many of us, stuff is hidden deep inside that we’d just as soon not have discovered. Our outside scaffolding braces against the buffeting by the winds and storms of life, as we cling with mighty roots to this mortal soil.
It is clear we’d be much stronger if we were wholly solid throughout, filled with something stronger even than our outsides. Yet we tend to get filled up with a lot of nothing, or even worse than nothing, a lot of garbage. This is stuff that weakens us, furthers the rot, shortens our fruitful life, doing nothing to make us more whole and holy.
I’m looking more critically now at what fills my empty spots since staring down the barrel of that old apple tree trunk.
Even so, I realize my hollow shell has been saved and salvaged, year after year, by the grace and wisdom of our Divine Orchardist who loves us as we are, up to and after we finally topple over.
May our hollow be hallowed. Wholly hole-y holy…
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repeated the way a sunset plays every night in the fade to twilight the same scene over and over but never once lost in its sameness ~Juniper Klatt “some words need to be” from I was raised in a house of water
Out of the deep and the dark, A sparkling mystery, a shape, Something perfect, Comes like the stir of day: One whose breath is a fragrance, One whose eyes reveal the road to stars, The wind in his countenance, The glory of heaven upon his back. He steps like a vision hung in air, Diffusing the passion of eternity; His abode is the sunlight of morn, The music of eve his speech: In his sight, One shall turn from the dust of the grave, And move upward to the woodland. ~Yone Noguchi“The Poet”
Once in your life you pass Through a place so pure It becomes tainted even By your regard, a space Of trees and air where Dusk comes as perfect ripeness. Here the only sounds are Sighs of rain and snow, Small rustlings of plants As they unwrap in twilight. This is where you will go At last when coldness comes. It is something you realize When you first see it, But instantly forget. At the end of your life You remember and dwell in Its faultless light forever. ~Paul Zimmer “The Place” from Crossing to Sunlight Revisited.
I like the slants of light; I’m a collector. That’s a good one, I say… ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I won’t forget the glow on the hill as the sun drops, centering behind our sentinel tree. I won’t forget the rays coming through the branches, glistening on a tattered web and an evening primrose unwrapping. I won’t forget the way the air itself changes as the color spreads, like a fragrant scent carried on the wind.
The light is faultless but I am not. My collection of slants of light and words to describe them may fade with time.
Even so, it was – maybe just once – so perfect, so pure, so ripe. And I’ll remember I was there to witness it.
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And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear, Myself I stood in the storm of the bird–cherry tree. It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self–shattering power, And it was all aimed at me.
What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth? What is being? What is truth?
Blossoms rupture and rapture the air, All hover and hammer, Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot. It is now. It is not. ~Osip Mandelstam “And I Was Alive” (translated by Christian Wiman) from Stolen Air
Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me. One Calvinist notion deeply implanted in me is that there are two sides to your encounter with the world. You don’t simply perceive something that is statically present, but in fact there is a visionary quality to all experience. It means something because it is addressed to YOU. ~Marilynne Robinson from The Paris Review 2008
We mostly live through routine and ordinary days, unconscious of many treasures and abundance laid before us.
In fact, these are addressed to us as pure gift – postmarked to our address, fully paid, no postage due.
Daily I search the soil of my life, this farm, this faith to find what in me still yearns to grow, to blossom, to fruit, in order to be harvested to share with others.
Such sweetness undoes our inevitable decay.
I am so grateful for the tie that binds me to those who visit this page, hoping what I share makes a difference in your ordinary, but still so precious, day.
The gift of ordinary time is now. Its numinosity is aimed at each one of us.
Poem by Dana Gioia
Echo of the clocktower, footstep in the alleyway, sweep of the wind sifting the leaves. Jeweller of the spiderweb, connoisseur of autumn’s opulence, blade of lightning harvesting the sky.
Keeper of the small gate, choreographer of entrances and exits, midnight whisper traveling the wires. Seducer, healer, deity or thief, I will see you soon enough— in the shadow of the rainfall, in the brief violet darkening a sunset—
but until then I pray watch over him as a mountain guards its covert ore and the harsh falcon its flightless young.
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A hundred thousand birds salute the day:– One solitary bird salutes the night: Its mellow grieving wiles our grief away, And tunes our weary watches to delight; It seems to sing the thoughts we cannot say, To know and sing them, and to set them right; Until we feel once more that May is May, And hope some buds may bloom without a blight. This solitary bird outweighs, outvies, The hundred thousand merry-making birds Whose innocent warblings yet might make us wise Would we but follow when they bid us rise, Would we but set their notes of praise to words And launch our hearts up with them to the skies. ~Christina Rossetti “A Hundred Thousand Birds”
Every day is perfect, if when you wake, you hear birds in the garden, in the yard. Birds
up and down, ushering in one more day in all the houses on Shaker Way. Birds on telephone lines, light posts. Birds
twit, twittering on trees hailing fellow birds with a nod of beak—gray kingbird;
top-hatted, streamertail tuxedoed, doctor bird— busy-bodied hummingbird
tucking in, out, of pink, red ixoras punch-drunk in love. Birds preening for, chatting up other birds—
the oriole, the grass quit, in mid-song on the lawn, in a dance of birds an all-day-long conference of bird;
red-headed woodpecker —drummer boy, or girl bird in this daily symphony of birds
—an orchestra on Shaker Way in serenade of each perfect day with birds— from the very first mockingbird
heralding, in solo warble one more day, filled with birds— brightened, lightened, trilled by birds:
Bird, bird, bird. Hello bird. You lift me up bird. You sing the day beautiful, bird. ~Ann-Margaret Lim “Birdsong of Shaker Way”
Birds afloat in air’s current, sacred breath? No, not breath of God, it seems, but God the air enveloping the whole globe of being. It’s we who breathe, in, out, in, the sacred, leaves astir, our wings rising, ruffled—but only saints take flight… But storm or still, numb or poised in attention, we inhale, exhale, inhale, encompassed, encompassed. ~Denise Levertov from “In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being”from The Stream and the Sapphire
As if reluctant to let go the setting sun last night, one lone bird still sang a twilight song, long after the others fell asleep, their heads tucked neatly under their wings.
This lone bird had not yet finished the day, breathing in and out its plaintive melody, articulating what my own thoughts could not say.
And before a hint of light this June morning, I am swept from my dreams at 4:30 AM by a full chorus singing from the same tree, no longer a lone voice, but hundreds.
Although my day is launched early by warbling songs, I cannot forget twilight’s one reluctant bird who fought back the impending darkness using only its voice.
I too resist the darkness with what I write here, if only I can keep it at bay: inhaling, exhaling, encompassed in holy Breath.
I want to sing out light and love to Light: encompassed by no darkness here.
I hear a bird chirping, up in the sky I’d like to be free like that spread my wings so high I see the river flowing water running by I’d like to be that river, see what I might find
I feel the wind a blowin’, slowly changing time I’d like to be that wind, I’d swirl and the shape sky I smell the flowers blooming, opening for spring I’d like to be those flowers, open to everything
I feel the seasons change, the leaves, the snow and sun I’d like to be those seasons, made up and undone I taste the living earth, the seeds that grow within I’d like to be that earth, a home where life begins
I see the moon a risin’, reaching into night I’d like to be that moon, a knowing glowing light I know the silence as the world begins to wake I’d like to be that silence as the morning breaks
He doesn’t know the world at all Who stays in his nest and doesn’t go out. He doesn’t know what birds know best Nor what I sing about, Nor what I sing about, Nor what sing about: That the world is full of loveliness.
When dew-drops sparkle in the grass And earth is aflood with morning light. light A blackbird sings upon a bush To greet the dawning after night, the dawning after night, the dawning after night. Then I know how fine it is to live.
Hey, try to open your heart to beauty; Go to the woods someday And weave a wreath of memory there. Then if tears obscure your way You’ll know how wonderful it is To be alive. ~Paul Read
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The night of the Perseid shower, thick fog descended but I would not be denied. I had put the children to bed, knelt with them, and later in the quiet kitchen as tall red candles burned on the table between us, I’d listened to my wife’s sweet imprecations, her entreaties to see a physician. But at the peak hour— after she had gone to bed, and neighboring houses stood solemn and dark— I felt no human obligation and went without hope into the yard. In the white mist beneath the soaked and dripping trees, I lifted my eyes into a blind nothingness of sky and shivered in a white robe. I couldn’t see the outline of the neighbor’s willows, much less the host of streaking meteorites no bigger than grains of sand blazing across the sky. I questioned the mind, my troubled thinking, and chided myself to go in, but looking up, I thought of the earth on which I stood, my own scanty plot of ground, and as the lights passed unseen I imagined glory beyond all measure. Then I turned to the lights in the windows— the children’s nightlights, and my wife’s reading lamp, still burning. ~Richard Jones “The Manifestation”
Perhaps as a child you had the chicken pox and your mother, to soothe you in your fever or to help you fall asleep, came into your room and read to you from some favorite book, Charlotte’s Web or Little House on the Prairie, a long story that she quietly took you through until your eyes became magnets for your shuttering lids and she saw your breathing go slow. And then she read on, this time silently and to herself, not because she didn’t know the story, it seemed to her that there had never been a time when she didn’t know this story—the young girl and her benevolence, the young girl in her sod house— but because she did not yet want to leave your side though she knew there was nothing more she could do for you. And you, not asleep but simply weak, listened to her turn the pages, still feeling the lamp warm against one cheek, knowing the shape of the rocking chair’s shadow as it slid across your chest. So that now, these many years later, when you are clenched in the damp fist of a hospital bed, or signing the papers that say you won’t love him anymore, when you are bent at your son’s gravesite or haunted by a war that makes you wake with the gun cocked in your hand, you would like to believe that such generosity comes from God, too, who now, when you have the strength to ask, might begin the story again, just as your mother would, from the place where you have both left off. ~Keetje Kuipers“Prayer”
Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world. Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous, unending breath. ~Annie Dillardfrom Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
How could it be possible?
The five year old me had a sudden terrifying revelation that I would some day cease to walk this earth.
The much older me is more afraid of the faster and faster rush of the days than of their end.
The world hurtles through space and time at a pace that leaves me breathless. Throughout my seventy-plus years, I have felt flung all too frequently, bruised and weary from hurry and hubbub.
I have need of Someone to stop me for a moment, sit down and begin the Story again with me, starting right where we left off.
Now, with retirement from daily work obligations: breathing space. I’m lifted lighter, drifting where I’m blown, less weighted down by the next thing to do and the next place to be.
Instead I can just be… part of the story to be told, part of the wonder. Blown by breath that loves, fills and nurtures, a generous promise hopeful and fulfilled.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to see, even in the dark, a manifestation of glory and love just beyond my vision, praying that one day I will see and know it clearly.
The old me ~ Blown upon.
If only the five year old me could have known.
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The talkative guest has gone, and we sit in the yard saying nothing. The slender moon comes over the peak of the barn.
The air is damp, and dense with the scent of honeysuckle. . . . The last clever story has been told and answered with laughter.
With my sleeping self I met my obligations, but now I am aware of the silence, and your affection, and the delicate sadness of dusk. ~Jane Kenyon, “The Visit” from Collected Poems
From morning suns and evening dews At first thy little being came: If nothing once, you nothing lose, For when you die you are the same; The space between, is but an hour, The frail duration of a flower. ~Philip Freneau from “The Wild Honey Suckle”
It sprang up wild along the chain link fence—thick, with glorious white and yellow summer blooms, and green tips that we pinched and pulled for one perfect drop of gold honey. But Dad hated it—hated its lack of rows and containment, its disorder. Each year, he dug, bulldozed, and set fire to those determined vines. But each year, they just grew back stronger. Maybe that’s why I felt the urge to plant it that one day in May, when cancer stepped onto my front porch and rang the doorbell, loose matches spilling out of its ugly fists. ~Karla Morton “Honeysuckle” from Accidental Origami: New and Selected Works
Some things are very dear to me– Such things as flowers bathed by rain Or patterns traced upon the sea Or crocuses where snow has lain . . . The iridescence of a gem, The moon’s cool opalescent light, Azaleas and the scent of them, And honeysuckles in the night. And many sounds are also dear– Like winds that sing among the trees Or crickets calling from the weir Or Negroes humming melodies. But dearer far than all surmise Are sudden tear-drops in your eyes ~Gwendolyn Bennett— Sonnet 2
I am an easy cryer. It takes very little to tip me over the edge: a hymn, a poem, simply witnessing a child’s joy.
Suddenly my eyes fill up.
I blame this on my paternal grandmother who was in tears much of the time while visiting our family, crying happy, crying sad, crying frustrated and angry tears, crying desperate tears after being diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer. I think of her often as she was the age I am now, grateful I too have not been visited with such dire news.
My greatest trigger to weep myself is watching someone else tear up. I think my grandmother left behind some powerful empathy genes and I will honor that when I visit her grave this weekend to lay flowers.
I needed to desensitize my response to others’ tears to be effective as a physician/healer. Witnessing tears in the exam room is a normal part of the job: patients are anxious, ill, in pain or just need to decompress in safety. I learned early on to be unobtrusive and not interrupt, letting the flow of tears be part of how the patient was trying to communicate their distress. It was a struggle when my inclination was to cry right along with them.
But I needed to remain the rock in the room, solid and steady. I could understand their tears as yet another symptom of a clinical presentation, allowing me to observe without being clouded by my own emotional response.
Sometimes that worked. Sometimes not. At times overwhelmed myself, I wept at births, I wept at deaths, I wept at the sharing of bad news.
Now retired and liberated from the exam room, I freely and regularly weep at the state of the world, or when I read of disaster and tragedy, and especially when I witness intentional harm and cruelty in others. I’m no longer a stone, but more like an over-filled sponge being squeezed – everything builds up until I can hold it no more.
Reading headlines in the news is sometimes more than I can bear. I cry myself dry.
And that is okay, thanks to Grandma. Once emptied out, I can be filled again by so much that is good and precious and beautiful in this life – a sad and delicate dusk, the promising light of dawn, the persistence of the wild honeysuckles, the raindrops on colorful blooms, the resonance of a heartfelt spiritual, the love of my husband, children, grandchildren and friends.
Now those are worth weeping over.
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How swiftly the strained honey of afternoon light flows into darkness
and the closed bud shrugs off its special mystery in order to break into blossom:
as if what exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious. ~Lisel Mueller “In Passing”from Alive Together
He may become like a glass filled with a clean light for eyes to see that can. ~J.R.R. Tolkien – Gandalf speaks of Frodo after his injuries – in The Lord of the Rings
…what (does) it mean to bear Christ in the midst of a world that feels somehow even more chaotic and violent than usual. What does it mean to be saved and healed by him when we linger and ache, here in the darkened realm of the still-broken world? …in this passage I return again, again, to the astonishing recollection of God in his love, who takes what evil meant to be our destruction (pain, loneliness, loss), and makes it the place of his arrival. The man of sorrows, bearing our pain so that no sorrow may ever end the story again. Where we grieve, he arrives to heal. Where we ache, he bears our load. Where we cry aloud, he answers. So that our need becomes the very ground of our renewal. And the clear light of his love shines through the glass of our lives.
Eventually. For those who can see. I know people like that. I want to become a soul like that. ~Sarah Clarkson writing about the above Tolkien quote here
Each one of us, like a swelling bud hanging heavy, waits on the stem — already but not quite yet.
Such is the late afternoon light of a mid-spring day~ ~ an air of mystery in a honeyed moment of illumination ~ knowing something more is coming.
Not just letting go of what we cannot yet understand. Not just peering through a glass darkly. Not just giving up and dropping away.
Breaking from bud into blossom means opening fully, glowing with transparent ripeness in the glass of our lives. Becoming light itself.
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Of the two spoiled, barn-sour geldings we owned that year, it was Red— skittish and prone to explode even at fourteen years—who’d let me hold to my face his own: the massive labyrinthine caverns of the nostrils, the broad plain up the head to the eyes. He’d let me stroke his coarse chin whiskers and take his soft meaty underlip in my hands, press my man’s carnivorous kiss to his grass-nipping upper half of one, just so that I could smell the long way his breath had come from the rain and the sun, the lungs and the heart, from a world that meant no harm. ~Robert Wrigley “Kissing a Horse”
…and there was once, oh wonderful, a new horse in the pasture, a tall, slim being–a neighbor was keeping her there– and she put her face against my face, put her muzzle, her nostrils, soft as violets, against my mouth and my nose, and breathed me, to see who I was, a long quiet minute–minutes– then she stamped her feet and whisked tail and danced deliciously into the grass away, and came back. She was saying, so plainly, that I was good, or good enough. ~Mary Oliver from “The Poet Goes to Indiana”
It was dragging my hands along its belly, loosing the bit and wiping the spit from its mouth that made me a snatch of grass in the thing’s maw, a fly tasting its ear. It was touching my nose to his that made me know the clover’s bloom, my wet eye to his that made me know the long field’s secrets. But it was putting my heart to the horse’s that made me know the sorrow of horses. Made me forsake my thumbs for the sheen of unshod hooves. And in this way drop my torches. And in this way drop my knives. Feel the small song in my chest swell and my coat glisten and twitch. And my face grow long. And these words cast off, at last, for the slow honest tongue of horses. ~Ross Gay “Becoming A Horse”
Living the dream of nearly every young girl, I grew up with a horse in our back field. The first was a raw-boned old paint who allowed my older sister and toddler me to sit atop him, walk around the barnyard and on the driveway at no more than a walk. He was arthritic and sore, but patient and tolerant to the attention of little girls. When we moved away to another part of the state, he didn’t come with us and I was too young to fully understand where he had been sent.
The horse on our new farm was my sister’s 4H project who was a spiffy chestnut mare with a penchant for a choppy trot and speedy canter. My sister would go miles with friends on horseback down back-country roads. Sadly, my sister soon became allergic (hives and swelling) to any contact with horses. I was barely old enough to start riding by myself in our fields.The little mare missed her adventures with my sister but seemed to adapt to my inexperience and took care of me as best she could – I never fell off. One night, she broke through a fence and ate her fill in a field of growing oat grass. The next day she was euthanized due to terrible colic. I was inconsolable, crying for days when visiting her burial spot on our property.
These first two horses tolerated the inexperience of their handlers and tried to compensate for it. I’ve since owned a few horses who knew exactly how to take advantage of such inexperience. Horses size up people quickly as our feelings and fear can be so transparent; it takes much longer for us to understand the complexity of their equine mind. Many diverse training techniques are marketed as testimony to that mystery.
I have learned that horses appreciate a patient and quiet approach, reflecting their consistency and honesty. They like to be looked in the eye and appreciate a soft breath blown over their whiskers. They want us to find their itchy spots rather than act the part of a pseudo-predator with intent to harm.
That’s not asking too much of us.
In return, we learn how best to communicate what we need from them. They are remarkably willing to work when they understand the job and feel appreciated. In return, we are given a chance to experience the world through their eyes and ears and lips, to comprehend the remarkable sensitivity of a skin able to shiver a fly away.
I’ve spent much of my life learning with horses and hope there are a few years still left to learn more. Whatever sorrow they feel in their hearts is when I’ve failed to be who they need me to be. Their gift to me is an honest willingness to forgive, again and yet again.
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I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core. ~William Butler Yeats “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
O gentle bees, I have come to say That grandfather fell to sleep to-day. And we know by the smile on grandfather’s face. He has found his dear one’s biding place. So, bees, sing soft, and, bees, sing low. As over the honey-fields you sweep,— To the trees a-bloom and the flowers a-blow Sing of grandfather fast asleep; And ever beneath these orchard trees Find cheer and shelter, gentle bees. ~Eugene Field from “Telling the Bees”
Here is the place; right over the hill Runs the path I took; You can see the gap in the old wall still, And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook.
There is the house, with the gate red-barred, And the poplars tall; And the barn’s brown length, and the cattle-yard, And the white horns tossing above the wall.
There are the beehives ranged in the sun; And down by the brink Of the brook are her poor flowers, weed-o’errun, Pansy and daffodil, rose and pink.
A year has gone, as the tortoise goes, Heavy and slow; And the same rose blows, and the same sun glows, And the same brook sings of a year ago.
I can see it all now,—the slantwise rain Of light through the leaves, The sundown’s blaze on her window-pane, The bloom of her roses under the eaves.
Just the same as a month before,— The house and the trees, The barn’s brown gable, the vine by the door,— Nothing changed but the hives of bees.
Before them, under the garden wall, Forward and back, Went drearily singing the chore-girl small, Draping each hive with a shred of black.
Trembling, I listened: the summer sun Had the chill of snow; For I knew she was telling the bees of one Gone on the journey we all must go! ~John Greenleaf Whittier from “Telling the Bees”
If you talk to him, he will not pretend to be an ordinary man. He won’t let on he is one who isn’t afraid to hold in his outstretched hands the buzzing gold.
He won’t tell you he is the man who keeps farmers warm in their livelihood, or the man who keeps the grocery shelves full, then adds, simply for good measure, jars of his shining honey. He won’t explain that he is the one who sets his suffering neighbors free from their pain with gifts of jars that sting.
He won’t let on to be the lifegiver or a god. He will pretend he is just an old man with sand-colored hair, a blue truck heavy with breezy hives, and a comb-spinner in his cellar. ~Sidney Hall Jr., from This Understated Land
…The world was really one bee yard, and the same rules work fine in both places. Don’t be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don’t be an idiot; wear long sleeves and pants. Don’t swat. Don’t even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates while whistling melts a bee’s temper. Act like you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved. ~Sue Monk Kiddfrom The Secret Life of Bees
He calls the honeybees his girls although he tells me they’re ungendered workers who never produce offspring. Some hour drops, the bees shut off. In the long, cool slant of sun, spent flowers fold into cups. He asks me if I’ve ever seen a Solitary Bee where it sleeps. I say I’ve not. The nearest bud’s a long-throated peach hollyhock. He cradles it in his palm, holds it up so I spy the intimacy of the sleeping bee. Little life safe in a petal, little girl, your few furious buzzings as you stir stay with me all winter, remind me of my work undone. ~Heid E. Erdrich, from “Intimate Detail” from The Mother’s Tongue
It was just like I was telling the bees last night. I saw two of them asleep inside the cup of a hollyhock, covered in pollen, just holding each other’s feet, just sleeping in the flower waiting for the sun to warm them so they could fly off. To see two of them curled up like that, it was very sweet. ~Diana Gabaldon/Matt Roberts from the final episode of Outlander TV series
A beekeeper must be a loving and patient person; the bees know who loves them, and who will always be there to care for them.
An old Celtic tradition necessitates sharing any news from the household with the farm’s bee hives, whether cheery like a new birth or a wedding celebration or sad like a family death. This ensures the hives’ well-being and continued connection to home and community – the bees are kept in the loop, so to speak, so they stay at home, not swarm and move on to a more hospitable place.
Each little life safe at home, each little life with work still undone.
Good news seems always easy to share; we tend to keep bad news to ourselves so this tradition helps remind us that what affects one of us, affects us all.
These days, with instant news at our fingertips at any moment, bad news is constantly bombarding us. Like the bees in the hives of the field, we want to flee from it and find a more hospitable home.
Our Creator (the ultimate Beekeeper) says personally to each of us: “Here is what has happened. All will be well, dear one. We will navigate your life together.”
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