walking the labyrinth

gifts from the bees

I wrote the first part of this a few months ago, right before a big change in our lives. I just found it again, several months later, and am amazed at how much more I actually learned from continuing down the path I had started.

Ok, here it is:

My beehive is dreaming. There’s a top-bar hive sitting outside my window, glowing in the sunlight. The propolis from its former colony is still inside, attracting curious insects who (hopefully) can’t get in. It’s not ready for a new colony of bees yet. I’m not either.

I still need to get my veil, my hive tool, my smoker. I still have a lot of unanswered questions about how to best take care of the bees. And, most importantly, I feel like I need to make a little more room in my life for their proper stewardship.

I know that I don’t need to wait for things to be perfect to be able to move forward. One of many gifts I received from my first daughter’s birth was the knowledge that I can do anything. And for a while I took this to mean that I didn’t need to slow down, or feel resolved about the next step. Before she was born I had a lot more fear about my abilities to do anything at all. I didn’t trust myself. After she was born I think for a time I swung a little too far in the other direction. My husband and I started a lot of projects in the time that followed; we moved to a homestead, I started a midwifery apprenticeship, we got (a lot more) chickens, we decided to have another baby. I’m grateful for the energy that propelled those decisions, but now we are in a phase of “paying the bill” for what our life is like now that we are in the thick of it. One of the many gifts I received from my second daughter’s pregnancy and birth is the knowledge that, though I can do anything, sometimes the best way is not the way my ego wants it to be. I have to listen to my body (I don’t always have to do what it’s saying, but I have to listen).

The bees have started clearing the path for me to find that middle ground. I am new to working with bee magic, but it has already been an extremely potent force in my life. After deciding that I don’t feel aligned with midwifery during this phase of my life, I was craving a new connection to the otherworld. For a time I thought the only way was through working with birth or death. I absolutely love being around those two things, and I want to be of service to people experiencing them, but right now I am really not a people person. Extreme sensory sensitivity has taken the forefront for me since becoming pregnant with my second daughter, and that is precluding me from working with people (among many other things - a topic for another post). The bees are another portal to that spirit world. Since I’ve started learning from them I’ve already felt that immediate connection to land, spirit, the dead. They have their own magic. The bees need the same things we do. They pave the way for me to see where to go. And they help me trust to just keeping walking the labyrinth. Keep moving forward. Taking the next step. Slowly and surely.

Since I’ve started working with them they’ve shown me that paying attention to their needs can sometimes show me the next steps for our whole family. Things have unfolded in a magical way. For example, we’ve had a wasp infestation under our roof panels. I have wanted them gone for a long time, and we’ve tried lots of different things, but we have gotten to the point that the next steps are very labor intensive. I can tell myself that we’ll somehow get through the summer even if the wasps aren’t gone, but I know the bees may not. An infestation of this size could definitely harm a new colony. So I feel like, even though I need to do this no matter what, trusting the bees helps me understand this need on a spiritual level. Sometimes our to do list is so overwhelming that I don’t know what to do next. Of course fixing the wasp infestation is important, but there are a million things that seem like they could all be the top priority. I fall into a morass of potential branches off the path. If I decide that the bees are the labyrinth, I see that dealing with the wasps is the next step, and everything falls into place. Once I’ve made that decision, all the other things on the to do list seem to naturally fall into order. If we take the roof panels up for dealing with the wasps we can also deal with the leaks.

I am not ready for the bees today. But I am ready to take the next steps. I trust where I am going. I am dreaming with my hive.

***

That was written February 5th. At the end I mention “roof leaks.” We had been thinking that our roof might be leaking. Our house is old, in need of many many repairs, and we were tackling things as fast as we could, but felt very overwhelmed. Everything takes longer with two little kids.

As I mentioned before, the roof had started to feel like a priority because of the wasps, so I thought we could also get to the bottom of whether or not our roof was leaking. Around the same time it was raining a lot, and I started noticing a musty smell. When Henry took up the roof panels, we didn’t see any mold or water damage, but now I was anxious to get to the bottom of the musty smell. I became convinced there must be mold somewhere. We kept tracking the smell and realized that it was actually worse near the floor. Henry went in the crawlspace and found a huge mold spot underneath our HVAC. The HVAC had a leak when we moved in but we just fixed it and went on our way with our huge list of repairs. The inspector hadn’t said anything about mold so it didn’t even occur to us.

February 11th we moved all essentials to a big room at the other end of the house. Now that I knew the smell was from mold - which was colored black, I didn’t know the species yet, but I was scared - I didn’t not want anyone to be near it. We spent a few days researching and trying to come up with a plan, then realized that remediation was going to be a huge project. We couldn’t live with all four of us in one room for much longer, and I also realized that since the mold was literally in the exact same place as the air intake for the ducts that went all over the whole house, we had better get out of there.

February 13th we moved to my parents’ house an hour away. I packed everything I thought we might need for a month, hoping that we would magically be able to come back in a few days. Today is April 12th and we are still at their house.

I’ll write more about what has unfolded since then, it’s been a transformational time for me. I’m healing from the mold, feeling more and more myself every day, feeling all sorts of new possibilities and doors opening.

Doors have also closed. Being away from our house means that my top bar hive, which I hoped would be housing a colony by now, is indefinitely empty and dreaming of its bees. I’ll have to wait longer, but as one of my mentors said, the bees will eventually find me. I am eternally grateful for their part in getting us out of that house that was keeping us unwell.