Bee Messengers........a Synchronicity

I've been delighted by this synchronicity.

Above is a small swarm of bees that suddenly appeared on a sagebush literally by my front gate.  A swarm can be when a hive is disrupted, or when a new queen is born and part of the hive will leave with her to found a new hive, so the bee ball above has a queen inside, which all the workers are carefully keeping warm.  This is not a good time of year to swarm, and since the bees have been here for about 4 days, and it is winter without a lot of flowers to forage as well as going below freezing tonight, I am having a beekeeper come to relocate the swarm and queen, as there is a danger they will freeze.  

What a wonderful message they delivered me.  I'm going to thank the bees for many things, among them for raising my spirits.  Because just a few days ago I began work on a (not finished yet) mask for a woman who requested a BEE PRIESTESS mask, a mask for the MELISSAE, the ancient bee priestesses of Greece.    I've also been talking a lot about being  "pollinators" for culture..........how just like bees, we are all needed for the flowering of a better, more just, more inspired culture.  Especially now, which seems to be a mantra I hear from virtually everyone I know.  But it's a mantra that has to be recited over and over - we need to rise to the best of our abilities to counter the regression, ignorance, and hatread that has arisen.

Without the bees, no nourishment, no flowering.  Without creative and generous souls, the same.  Like the bees, we have a job to do.  And there are the bees by golly............

Bees have always been magical creatures throughout many cultures. Think of how our ancestors must have perceived them, and their miraculous honey, which would have been a great luxury.  In old England honey wine, Mead, was reserved as a special celebatory drink for special occasions - that's where the term "honey moon" came from, a month's supply of magical mead was given to the new couple to encourage love and fertility.

In ancient Greece there were the Mellisae, who no doubt were also bee keepers,  and many myths of the Goddess include bees, the Queen Bee, and the creation of honey.  Also the Semitic name "Deborah" or "Devorah" means "Bee", and its origins may also go back to a time when there were women who were Bee priestesses.  

Bronze Age Bee Goddess

Reciprocity, the sense of intimacy with all the other lives and evolutions and intrinsic Spirits of Place  all around us..........I loved the movie "THE SECRET  LIFE OF BEES", where Queen Latifah explains to her young apprentice that it's important to just love the bees.  That "everyone needs love".  As the founders of  Findhorn demonstrated - there's a conversation  going on all the time, or there should be.

In New England there has long been a tradition called  "Telling the Bees", in which a death in a family farm, or among beekeepers,  is "told to the bees" so they will not be upset by the loss, or can participate, perhaps, in the remembrance, a folk custom that remembers as well that bees are "part of the family".

Well, I'm going back to work on that mask.

Pagan Humor........

 

2014: A Hymn by Ursula Leguin

Our prophets lead our people on

     Fast to the promised land,

And where we pass, the green of grass

     Turns to bare brown sand.

So high our cities' towers soar

     Above the deep-set fault,

Immense they rise into the skies,

     Pillars of cloud and salt.

Impatient with the patient day,

     We rush to gain tomorrow.

Our ships that plough the seas with nets

     Leave a long, empty furrow.

Our quick inventions spend our time

     Faster and ever faster,

While kind and unforgiving Earth

     Endures our brief disaster.

For all we do is nothing to

     Her bright eons of days.

So let my dark tune turn and end

     As all song should, in praise.

And in the hope of wisdom yet,

     I'll sing the hymn that praises

Earth's greater life that gives us life,

     the grace that still amazes.  

Ursula K. Leguin, from Late In The Day - Poems 2010 - 2014

"Not My America"....

I keep sitting down to write in my journal, but nothing seems to come.  It's just that I feel like the assumptions we felt relatively comfortable within have all fallen apart this month, and I don't know where I am any more.  

Donald Trump is in the White House, and he's loosed the darker shadows of fascism in a polarized America.   I don't know that America.  It's not the one I've been living in.  I don't want people from other countries to identify me with it.  The America I've lived in, along with millions of others,  is often idealistic, and full of generosity, diversity  and innovation we've taken for granted.  

Trump to me is the very figurehead of reactionary patriarchy in the face of a changing world. A world that includes the unprecedented global arising and empowerment of women.  He has all the earmarks of tyranny, just in a new suit.   Hello to a leader yelling bombastic threats to minorities, saying that he will "hang up" his opponent, threatening to silence journalists, with numerous lawsuits against him including tax evasion, fraud, and even rape, and disturbing ties to Russia........and an America where somehow that is suddenly ok, overlooked.    Bill Moyers was right - it will never be the same, because all the rules and values that kept some kind of  order in our system have been overthrown.   

We have a governing body that includes and now empowers greatly not only corporate interests, but also religious extremists whose agenda is to impose a dark ages theocracy on a 21st Century world.   In the face of Global Warming, which is beginning to include the displacement of refugee populations because of environmental degredation and the resource wars that accompany that displacement, we have an administration that wants to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.   And as Antarctica melts, there is  a president that not only "grabs women by the pussy", but also "doesn't believe in Climate Change", while his cronie want to teach "creationism" in the schools.  So much for science.

From the dignity and intelligence of Michelle Obama, we have a new  First Family.  You can get nude photos of the First Lady and the First Daughter simply by googling, and the darling sons can be seen in a famous photo of them holding the corpse of an endangered species they just shot "for fun" at a canned game reserve. 

 And like many  before him,  a  red-faced Trump has whipped his population up into a frenzy of scapegoating, with an impressive list of disadvantaged people to blame - Muslims, immigrants, women, gays,  blacks, even apparently Jews, since swasticas have begun to appear on walls and spray painted on cars.  Potent stuff, all that blaming emotionalism.  As Trump himself said, at a campaign rally in Iowa, he could "shoot somebody and not lose any voters."  The words of a fascist indeed.  And sadly, that force of hate and blame will do very well to divert that same population from the gutting of America by the very 1% Trump is so firmly a part of.  



And while pipelines that have burst into rivers in Pennsylvania and Alabama have caused the states to declare emergency status, and there are earthquakes in Oklahoma because of fracking, and native American protesters are being tear gassed at Standing Rock, Trump and his allies are bringing out the champagne for Exxon and colleagues, rubbing their hands at getting "a piece of the action".  

"Apres moi la Deluge" said Louis the 14th.  Did I miss anything?

I just took my bumper stickers off my car.  Yes, I can't afford to have my tires slashed, now that this is becoming a suddenly more fearful and repressive world.  Things are going to become very, very difficult.   And beyond my own small life, the great privilege I've had to live it, my real grief is for those who are yet to come.  

One of the best articles, with many links to support his statements, is by Samuel Spitale*, from the Huffington Post, "Post-Truth Nation"  by Samuel C. Spitale.  

So there it is.   I'm seeing all kinds of posts as people talk about marching and lawsuits  and then appeals to the new President (which seems naive, since the new President wouldn't be where he is if he was open to reasonable appeals)  And once in, power does not relinquish itself.  Pandora's box has been opened.  I'm also hearing many talk about how this needs to happen before things can change, people's consciousness can change.  I hope they are right, but I fear. 

So I ask myself, as so many are, what do I do?  I'm thinking of going to the March in Washington on January 21, but I don't know that I can afford it, nor will January weather there be very easy on my asthma.  There is a march in Oakland that same day, and I may go there, the weather, and cost, being easier for me to manage.  And for me, although I will resist and protest, perhaps to the relief of those who know me, I'm going to stop talking about Trump and politics for a while, and try to find my center, and what gifts I may have to offer.  Finding my center means re-evaluating so many things.

Beyond that, I think we need to make and join Circles.  And as so many are saying, in a time of hate, we have to rise to become better.  More thoughts on that later.

*Los Angeles-based journalist, storyteller, and humorist  Samuel C. Spitale is a Los Angeles-based writer. His social and political commentary on inequality, income disparity, and the struggles of the Middle Class can be found on his personal website: www.SamuelCSpitale.com. 

A Ritual of Attunement

"The shadowy springs of thought  sink down or flow, 

obeying impulses as deep and strange 

from the body's inwardness, and shaken, 

we know the imminence of mystery and change."

.....Ursula K. Leguin, from "Late in the Day"

A Ritual of Attunement to Gaia

(Performed with drum in a much darkened room.  

Three voices, at different positions in the room, speak the words, sometimes in Chorus.)

Take a deep breath,

feel your feet on the living Earth.

The rhythm of your heart like a drum, 

beating in slow time with the quiet,

distant heartbeat

of the planet:

and attune.

Let the breath of the world gather in your chest.

Close your eyes, with each slow breath

feel your hands branching, 

becoming green, leafing into the world,

gathering wind, gathering light, gathering rain -

feel your legs, your strong feet grasping the ground

becoming roots:  and send them down.

Into the darkness, our roots, seeking, sensitive,

into the Earth.

Into silent endarkened underground waters

coursing past pottery shards, and the bones of ancient deer

and the bones of ancient hunters, the bones of nameless kings.

Past the bones of cities long forgotten,

and caverns of crystals blooming in the dark

the bones of the dreaming Beloved, the Mother Earth:

go down, taste, touch:

and attune.

Feel the roots of a vast forest

holding each tree strong in times of storm,

singing under starlight, or sleeping under snow -

a woven web of roots.

Feel the links, the communion, the sparking touch

of other lives, the lives of the land.

Reach out, expand, listen:

and attune.

Somewhere in the East a woman rises to make bread for her family.

Somewhere in the South a child plays in the warm dust.

Somewhere far to the West a girl in a red sari

prepares for her wedding, gathering yellow marigolds.

Somewhere in a Northern city, a painter stands before an empty canvas,

trying to remember a dream he had.  He lifts his brush.

Follow your roots, touch their delight.

and attune

Somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere a forest is screaming as it burns.

Somewhere in the West, a homeless man is dying alone and in great pain.

Somewhere in the East war has come to the innocent.

Somewhere in the North acid rain falls, and a lake has become barren.

Open your heart, touch and taste, allow it:

and attune.

And somewhere in the South, spring is beginning,

magenta blossoms fall on a green lawn.

Somewhere in the North winter is coming,

crimson leaves fall on a dappled pavement.

Somewhere in the West the sun is going down.

Somewhere in the East, the sun is rising.

Reach,   feel the beat, the rhythm,

the circling coursing of life:   follow your roots

back, back with every beat,

back to the solitary beat of your heart.

and attune

to the beat of our common heart.

Gather hope, awe, and gratitude.

Gather your strength, sap, sorrow, your love.

With hands on the holy ground,

feel the beat, the pulse of the living Earth.

And send it down:

Into the Earth, the best of us,

into the Earth, our roots,

into the Earth, our dreams,

into the Earth, our source.

into the Earth, our love.

into the Earth, our light.

Lauren Raine

(1999, 2016)

Copyright Lauren Raine MFA. 

Artwork is copyright Lauren Raine MFA.