Yesterday I had a conversation with the bees at a nearby park. It wasn’t planned but I stumbled on an apiary in an area I hadn’t explored before and it seemed the right thing to do.
Telling the bees is a tradition in Europe where bees are informed of important events in the lives of their keepers: births, deaths, marriages, people in the household leaving and returning. If the custom wasn’t followed and the bees weren’t “put into mourning,” it was believed there would be repercussions, such as the bees not producing honey, leaving the hive, or collectively dying.
The practice continues today—the beekeeper at Buckingham Palace told the bees about the death of Queen Elizabeth. The belief is that humans and honeybees have a special relationship and also that bees in mourning help guide the dead into the afterlife and will reward their keepers with a generous honey harvest. In Celtic mythology the presence of a bee after death signified the soul leaving the body.
I had read of this practice a long time ago. Yesterday, I spent an hour near the hives, unaware they were down the slope of the hill I sat on, writing out my jumbled thoughts and allowing myself to feel and think without judgment or trying to positively spin anything. To be blank.
On the way back to my car, when I took a new path and the apiary appeared surrounded by fragrant honeysuckle vines, I felt I should stop and say something.
If bees really are that sensitive, perhaps they had picked up on my feelings. With so many people visiting the huge park every day, there would be so much emotional information coming in. I thought I should pay my respects.
I want to live in a world where you talk to bees. And I had a lot to share.
Starting with: my parents are aging.
This is not a revelation. We are all aging. Sometimes faster than we realize. Than I realize.
My parents are struggling a bit financially, having lost some retirement funds in the various recessions, during COVID, etc. Maybe they are being too conservative in how they are spending money each month—they want to stay in their house, not spend everything in less than 5 years at an overpriced facility that doesn’t really provide the level of service/care it promises. My father even went back to work to keep from dipping too much into their savings—at 80 when he should already be retired and relaxing. They didn’t really want to talk about it and kept saying they were fine.
I’ve been worrying about them and a week ago I finally found a way to help that wouldn’t be too intrusive: I took them on a massive grocery shopping trip and paid for everything.
I am the daughter (I have two sisters) who has the least amount of money, so they didn’t really want to accept the offer but eventually agreed, and it took two hours on a chaotic Sunday afternoon (note to self—wrong time to go), but I sent them home with a carload of groceries that will last 10 days. At least for that time I know they are eating well and have healthy foods, with some fun, bad-for-you things because at their age they should eat Pop Tarts and candy if they want to for heaven’s sake.
And now that I have a better sense of what they want to eat and are willing to cook, I can bring things with me on visits and give them gift cards to the grocery stores near them so they can shop on their own, which will seem less like they are being helped.
I estimate that I cost them around $240,000 in food growing up (0-22 years) so there’s a long way to go to pay that back.
Also last week my sister and my best friend both lost their dogs. Both died suddenly, and everyone was crushed, including me. Then there were two graduation ceremonies in two days (one for the college where I work and for which I have some large responsibilities, and one for my niece and nephew (E and J are twins so both graduated), which included 5 hours of driving to get there and back).
After E’s and J’s ceremony, we congregated on the football field with the sun setting, confetti and graduation caps everywhere, the neat rows of white chairs pushed in all directions after we ran to the swarm of graduates looking for their people. E and J were so excited and dazed and my family was swept up into their crowd of friends and their families, hugging everyone and ending up in each other’s pictures.
Of course I remembered my own graduation a gazillion years ago—how hot it was, how we jumped into the fountain in the courtyard of the community college where our high school held its ceremony—the same pictures with friends and their families, the same dazed feelings and thoughts: Is life starting now? What will it look like?
It was a lot of major life events all at once with many emotional highs and lows, and I was more wiped out than I expected. The kind of exhaustion that tells me I’m not making enough adjustments for my own age/time of life or taking good care of myself.
Part of it was the not writing, which I need for energy, my mental health, a sense of stability. Because of preparing for the college ceremony, I hadn’t had time to write for a long stretch and lost my already fragile momentum.
I woke up yesterday with my allergies raging, a headache, and a bone deep, mind altering fatigue. I went to the park for healing, really. The green silence, the trees, the birds, the flowers—it can be relied on. Leaned on. Poured out to. Nature knows what it is doing. Nature is real. Not the world humans have created.
The journalist Florence Williams says in her book Nature Fix: “We don’t experience natural environments enough to realize how restored they can make us feel, nor are we aware that studies also show they make us healthier, more creative, more empathetic, and more apt to engage with the world and with each other.”
Long before the lockdown I made a dose of green a daily requirement, like a vitamin. Taken by walking and/or lying in the grass. It’s both a shedding and an absorbing process. In the last few years, and definitely last week, it has become absolutely necessary for survival, mentally, emotionally, and physically. It’s usually how the writing comes.
But I didn’t lay all this on the bees like they were my personal tiny therapists. I just stood at the fence communing with the cascades of honeysuckle vines and a couple of honeybees flirting with the pairs of yellow tubular flowers. It was nearing dusk when their scent is strongest so the sweetness made my head spin.
In a whisper, I shared a few sentences about loss and being lost, family, change, celebration, caretaking, and searching.
Nothing magical happened. I didn’t feel renewed. I didn’t have an epiphany. No bees came over as a sign or blessing. The magical part was telling the bees in the first place. I am still the person who believes in these things and just need to keep remembering.
Last night I slept for twelve hours and then wrote this. In a few minutes I’ll go back out for more green silence. I am hoping for a poem today.
Be open to creating in whatever form it comes. A word or page count is not a measure of quality or succes—of the project or you as a writer. The next time someone asks you how your writing is going, share what you’ve discovered. Nothing is too small.
Happy writing,
Chris