Happy Friday the 13th, a day long associated with women’s bodies and women’s cycles. Did you know that a woman has her moon cycle about 13 times a year?
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🧡 To all the women out there who do and do and do. Who are the mistresses of the hive, tending to the young, the honey chambers, the fields of plenty and the fields of lack, thank you.⠀
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I don’t speak on Halloween. I don't write. I honour my ancestors. It’s an exercise in liminality. I’ve been doing this since I was 15. Last night, a group of female friends and I decided to dress up all in white, paint our faces white, and pass candy out to kids.
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Ever notice how love, loss and longing get stored in your body the same way seasons do for every other temperate animal on earth? There’s a kind of body knowing that arrives. There’s a kind of body knowing that arrives. It sneaks in and gives you emotional responses to things that feel out of context, until you examine the seasons of your life.
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What is it about beekeeping that encourages so many dudes to mansplain and publicly shame other beekeepers? Particularly natural beekeepers. Particularly female natural beekeepers? In my Facebook group a female treatment free beekeeper selling honey at a local market was recently approached by a very aggressive and strongly opinionated male pro-treatment beekeeper who talked AT her while she just sat there.
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You know how you learn to read your dog? Her expressions of love, worry, silliness and eagerness? Or how your cat does that one tail flick when he’s proud of himself?
What happens when you can’t see the face or hear the meow? Bees, as individuals, have faces, but what is the “face” of the colony? A colony, after all, is an organism. A whole that is the sum of many parts.⠀⠀
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I’m about to board another flight to London. I seriously can not wait for scones and tea at No. 9 on the Green in Wimborne. I am visualizing pouring cream into a saucer as I write. Heaven.
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It’s going to be hot out there. No-option-but-naked kind of hot. Snake weather.
The bees will be gathering water from the banks of the Eel. The water ouzel will be dancing her grey-winged hop up and down the river. The bears wont come near. There are too many of us.
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We women of the bee work in cycles of six. Six-sided, six threads, six sisters, six revolutions. Six years. On this day, six year ago, I found out I was pregnant. It’s a old story really, one that’s been told before, in different words by different women, but it’s also my story with the bees, and therefore, it has a place here. I found out I was pregnant because of a dream. Not my own; that of a friend.
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Melissa bends low and plucks a small herb growing out of the cobble stones in front of her house. She holds it up to the light and shows me the tiny perforated holes in the leaves.
“That’s how you can tell it’s the medicinal St. John’s Wort.”
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England is full of natural springs. Every time I come here, I seek them out. There is nothing like drinking pure water, straight from the depths of hte earth. Almost all of the springs and wells in England are dedicated in one for or another to the sacred.
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California is burning right now. When I left my home state the air quality of my town was registering at the most hazardous level it can go. Can’t even leave the house, they say. Strange then, to come to a place with so much water.
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