Bee Medicine

What were they up to?


It was a fine Sunday morning. We'd just finished the Firefly Willows L*I*V*E! radio show for the week, and Deb and I were home, out in the front yard, enjoying the sunshine, and doing a little gardening. (OK, we were pulling weeds...)


We noticed that the bees in our tree were pretty active, going about their busy-bee business.


After about twenty minutes or so, a neighbor and his kids were out for a walk. They stopped and we chatted. Suddenly, Deb looks up over the big cherry tree and says, "Hey, look at that!"


A big cloud of bees!


Now, bees normally swarm when the queen decides to leave the current hive (either because she's a new queen who needs to establish herself, or there's something undesirable about the hive's current location). But this hive, this gang, already had a home - and they swarmed right back to it!


So we're not sure what was going on. I spoke to a beekeeper, and he said, "Huh. That's unusual."


I'm content to have had a beautiful experience, and to have shared it with my lovely spouse and delightful neighbors (who were, under the circumstances, remarkably calm...)


Love that Bee medicine!

The Boys Are Back In Town!

(cue Thin Lizzy music...)


I know, I just wrote a post yesterday after a hellaciously long break, and here I am posting again less than 24 hours later.


But this one is short, I promise.


Mars is back.


Mars went direct last night. After 13 weeks in retrograde, he's back from vacation, and ready to come off the bench. Back into the game. I felt it. BOOOM. Like a muscle-car in high idle dropping into gear, but without the clanky lurch. It just felt like IMPULSION brought on line. But with the emergency brake still on. A horse, bridled but aching to run.


Ahhhh....


And, my birthday is on Thursday (Thor's day...). So me, Mars, and Thor are gonna have one rip-roaring, high-energy, kick-some-ass kind of launch for -my- second half. I turn 51. 

I'll keep you...ahem...posted :-)

Success - It's all in the Physics...

I spoke to a life coach this morning, Dr. Liz Zed, recommended to me by my dear friend and colleague Ana Maria Sanchez. I had to admit it - I'm starting a new career (or, several) and it's just possible that I might need some help sorting things out and getting the traction 

I need to make my new life sustainable.

I've experienced a lot of healing and growth since I left high-tech at the end of 2009. So I'm a little more than 2 years into "whatever is next", and, frankly, I feel like a two-year old. 

Which is to say, I feel grand, healthy, and a little out of control, but very determined.

Lately, the realizations and clearing of old patterns has accelerated. I'd say since last May when I first had the opportunity to meet with Dakota elder Chief Golden Light Eagle, and then REALLY accelerated since the Winter Solstice of 2011.

So there I was this morning, talking to a life coach.

What did I learn? Well, it was a meandering conversation, as first "get to know you" conversations often are, but something subtle emerged that I wouldn't have been able to hear not that long ago. 

The nugget is this: Success is all in the physics.

Success isn't about doing a bunch of things you don't really want to do, gutting it out through pain and sweat and frustration. All that stuff feeds the ego - either the "I deserve to be punished" or the "I have to earn it through hard work" or the "I have something to prove" or any number of other mis-wired messages.

Rather, it's about discerning what one really, truly wants, and then setting up the scene so that doing what you want brings you success. All the moving parts are keyed to align with the effort that comes naturally for you, so once you engage the system, it's like the system sings along with you.

Sounds simple, right? Well, the second part is, I think, pretty simple to folks with a mind for mechanics, physics, the dynamics of power, cause and effect, and so on. That's the physics. Sure, you might need some trimming and tuning by folks with domain expertise, but generally speaking, it's a system of pulleys and ropes and levers. 

The life coach said something like, "It's the difference between doing while having uncertainty about whether you're going to succeed or fail, and having a program that you know you can follow, and if you follow it, you'll succeed."

Why wouldn't we all sign up to a program that we can follow, and follow it to success?

Ahhh, the multi-million dollar (literally) question. 

I think it's because we're afraid of really understanding the first part -- understanding what we love, and letting go of what we don't. We have tapes that say "success looks like this..."(see stressed-out working stiff at right), and we're not sure we want that. Or we have tapes that say, "You can't just do the things you love - life is hard!" Or we have tapes that say, "That's a stupid, low-value, low-esteem profession."

All those tapes block us from understanding what we really want. What we really love.  And when we build a process that includes all those tapes, the physics is not working with us at all. In fact, we're setting the physics up to work against what comes naturally to us. And then sheer force of will, willpower, determination, stubbornness, stress, and heart-attacks are required to achieve the goal.

Not very enticing, is it?

Nope. Not for me.

I want the physics to work in my favor. Not boring, or even necessarily easy (no "slacker" goals here), but certainly working with the momentum of my soul, rather than against it.

Thoughts? Comments? Have you set up your Rube-Goldberg success engine to leverage the momentum of your soul?

Sharing with the Honeybees

Timing is Everything...

I've been thinking about getting a bee hive for several years now. We have a reasonably roomy yard. We have lots of fruit trees. In particular, it's important for us to have a healthy supply of bees around when the big cherry tree out front blooms. When blooms and bees connect, we receive a beautiful harvest.

Well, so I'd been thinking about getting a hive box, and learning how to keep bees, mostly because of the fruit trees, but also because - Bees are cool! And…honey!

So imagine my delight when, sometime this summer, a queen and her hive took up residence in a hollow in our maple tree out at the front of our yard. Very discrete, by the corner of the lot.

I was grateful for their presence, doing the work among the flowers. But I also wondered - would we somehow have a chance to receive a gift of honey? (I have done nothing to "prepare" to actively harvest the honey. No bee suit. No smoker. I was content just to have them there.)

We enjoyed watching the bees all last summer and fall. Winters, being mild here, don't really deter the bees.  So I would go out occasionally and say hello.

Then, some time last week, I went out to see them... and they were gone! There were no buzzing sounds, no little bodies busily doing bee business. All quiet. A fly or two. Some crawly bugs.

No bees.

I was a little disappointed and sad. I know bee hives don't last forever, but I thought, "Geez, at least it would have been nice for them to make it through to the cherry blossoming." But they were gone.

So I bravely grabbed a ladder out of the garage and propped it up against the tree.  I clambered up and peered inside.

Definitely no bees.

I reached my hand up and into the hole, and touched the comb. It was very light feeling. I grabbed it, tentatively at first, and then more firmly. I pulled and a piece broke off into my hand.

I pulled it out of the hole and examined it. Wow. Amazingly cool to see this really miraculously precise layout of hexagons built "by hand" from "hand-made" wax. Just stunning.

So I found a large plastic container and started pulling the comb out, a piece at a time. Beautiful beeswax. We would melt it down to make candles, I thought.  Mostly, the comb was empty. Here and there I found a chamber filled with pollen.


Then, as I reached further in, the comb had real heft. And as I grabbed and pulled, it became slick and sticky!

What an amazing thing. Big chunks of comb - two-sided, back-to-back chambers - filled with honey. Woo hoo!

So I pulled it all out, and began researching how to extract honey from the comb.

By the way, the honey is marvelous. Delicious and golden and sweet and tangy and raw. It's an amazing experience.
Yesterday was a beautiful day to be outside. So I went out front to pull some weeds. I looked over to the maple tree, fondly remembering the bee-ful activity and thinking again about the wonderful gift.

Wait! What's that? I looked again.

They're back.

Feeling As Competently As I Think

Rodin's "The Kiss"

I've set for myself a worthy goal: To have as much awareness, confidence, competence, and refinement in my ability to feel as I have in my ability to think.

I will be working on this goal assiduously for however long it takes.

I've always been confident in my thinking skills and capacity. I love to think. I love to extend my knowledge, build bridges between concepts, and extrapolate into rarified cognitive air.

Thinking about thinking, too. Philosophy. Justice. Art. Compassion. Mysticism and science. Lots and lots of domains of intellectual exploration.

Detail - See the book in his
hand, not being read?

Recently, I realized that feeling - not "thinking about feeling" or "analyzing my feelings" was a treasure trove of growth. It helped me banish some encroaching depression. It helped me increase my cardiovascular capacity. It taps into an (apparently) infinite universe that I've really just begun to understand.

And there's an interesting difference, for me, between thinking and feeling. If I'm doing it right, feeling is effortless. Exertionless, even. And yet its harvest is extraordinary.

The down side is, of course, that I'm really a babe in the woods on this half of my consciousness, compared to the 50 years of intense focus on my thinking machinery. I may have a long road ahead of me.

The good news is that it's an amazingly rich and colorful, sensuous and sensory road. I can see that already.

What a cool journey.  Anybody want to join me?

(Anybody willing to help?)