In February, I had the tremendously rich experience of teaching Apis Sophia Exstasis in my home state, after 3 years of teaching the same body of work in France. Under a constant deluge of wet weather, a group of us gathered in the Mendocino oak savannah to experience what I now regard as six days of ceremony. It was utter magic.
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“Find your purpose” is a phrase I’ve never been too fond of. It’s used to market to people’s pain points. I would know. I spent most of my early adulthood feeling like a an unmoored misfit, trying to make it in a music career, but feeling like (gasp) music wasn’t quite enough. Don’t get me wrong, I breathe music. I adored it as still do. But, I didn’t know how to reconcile my love of music and performing, with the feelings of “what am I supposed to do with my life?”
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What follows is an account of bee shamanism and what it was, what it is, and what it is not. It is an account of the current controversy with Simon Buxton and the Sacred Trust, and the revelations recently reveals regarding the myth of an ancient lineage.
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What calls you to a place? A path? A sacred text? What is the source of that invisible bell tolling a tone only you can hear? We speak of callings. Being called to a profession, a city, a tree. People come to my work more often than not, because I speak within the textured landscape of honeybees. They share a feeling of being called by the bees. I too had a similar call, but it didn’t start with bees. I’m not exactly sure where or when it started, but a I recall a similar bell tolling through my being on a school trip to England at the age of 17. I was part of a high school band visiting and performing in Cornwall. We were on a bus with the usual chaos of a bunch of kids who couldn’t care less about the landscape we were passing through. But I knew. I was aware of just how many sacred sites piled atop one another.
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There is old memory in all of us. Or perhaps what I mean, is there is human animal memory in all of us. Call it ancestral, call it instinctual, call it past life. It comes from the same place. Bone memory.
Grief hides in strange places. This weekend I decided to assess my business month to month, starting in January 2022. As a creative person, getting into the nuts and bolts of business can feel foreign and clinical. However, honey bees are impeccable mistresses of their homes; always cleaning, always tending. As the only income stream in my wee family, this impeccability both necessary and empowering.
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There was once a temple built of beeswax and feathers. It sat in a mountainous region near a cave where bees, or was it souls, came and went.
On looms of spirit, nymphs wove the purple threads of form, while honey pots filled, and the the divinatory bees in their maiden nature, swarmed in and out.
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When the bees rained down on me, I had two choices. To panic, or to merge. It was 2010 and I had never been around a bee hive before. I was visiting a honey bee sanctuary, but having a clump of bees fall on top of me wasn’t exactly how I thought the day would go.
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There is magic right outside your door. It surround your home. It's pulses beneath you, above you, within you. It is a part of your inheritance as a human on this whirling planet. This magic is the power of nature and the spirits that exist within the natural world. This magic can help heal the world.
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What is your relationship to the stars? The actual stars in the sky, not the metaphor, although that's lovely too.
Can you see them at night where you live? A few? Many? I grew up in a place where I could count shooting stars before bed and make up my own constellations.
California has always been hot and dry, but not this dry. There have always been fires, but not this many, not this big.
When I look at the land I feel parched. I feel an aversion to this field where my bees reside. I don’t want to be in it.
I was asked today, what is my dream for my child? Two things come to mind:
First, I want my daughter to fall in love with the Earth. And second I want to help teach my daughter to like people. To love humanity. Risky I know. That first goal seems natural and tangible.
Do you remember the first time you felt claimed by the Earth? By a place? A particular seaside cove? Grove of aspens? An entire land?
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I remember when I first read the Holy Thorn tree had been cut down in an act of vandalism. I cried out and burst into tears. I was at my parents home and was crying too inconsolably to tell them what was wrong. I was acting like someone had died. In many ways, someone had.
In Ancient Greece, one of the (many) reasons bees were associated with the Underworld was because they could often be found inhabiting cracks and crevices in rocks. T
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How do you marry the sacred and the scientific? I could say this so many ways: the sacred and the mundane, the spiritual and the pragmatic, the ineffable and the physical. What I’m asking, is how do we allow ourselves to source from more than one pool of wisdom?
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I’ve been in a big renegotiation about my relationship to work. I took this December off from classes and clients because I didn’t really get a maternity leave when my daughter was born. I worked all days and all hours throughout my entire pregnancy.
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Dawn light on the hives. Mid January is when I start gearing up for bee season in Northern California. The magnolias are in bloom and we are only a few weeks away from the plum tree blossoms. It’s a good time for making lists.
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