When a colony dies, it’s important to investigate the cause so that, perhaps, you can improve in your stewardship the following year. This is a photograph of a colony that lost their queen. What you see are a number of emergency queen cells. There were more on the other side of the comb.
Read MoreThere is poetry in all things if you look for it. Language, and how we speak about a thing, carries incredible power. Language shapes our world view. It shapes our understanding and our relating.
Read MoreWhen we seek to communicate with another species, we have to open up our centers of knowing. We have to move beyond language and sight, while still softening into our senses and our sounds.
Read MoreI was having a book discussion with women from my beekeeping apprenticeship last week and we got onto the topic of sovereignty and body autonomy. I teach about asking the bees for permission each time you enter a hive or manipulate them in some way.
Read Moreo far, parenthood hasn’t been the hard chore so much of the internet (and people I know) implied. Every day is a joy of discovery. Granted, I have amazing help, but not always. It’s often just little Cricket and I trying to find a way eat breakfast before 11, composing work emails while breastfeeding, and circling the neighborhood wearing an ergo.
My daughter is one month old today. I am still landing in the steady belief that she’s really here, she’s really my daughter, and I get to keep her. Becoming a mother has been a lifelong dream of mine. I walked into it with no illusions. I knew it would be hard. I knew I’d need a lot of support. I knew I wouldn’t sleep much. But there really are no words to prepare you for what happens to your heart when your make a whole human, and they look up at you and smile in the early dawn light.
Sitting at the edge of spring, and the edge of motherhood, I am becoming aware that these years of “singleness” (whatever THAT means), have also afforded me the opportunity to cultivate something precious. A deep, wildly sensuous affair with the living earth. Do you ever pick a single rose petal from a flower just to caress your lips with it until the petal becomes translucent?
Read MoreI wanted to be held by a man. Someone who loved me so much that he wanted to create life with me. I wanted to share the moment of that positive pregnancy test with him, in joy and disbelief. I wanted him to bring me hot cocoa and soup and marvel and my shapeshifting. It was a fantasy, but not entirely unrealistic, after all, couples experience this all the time.
Read MoreLast winter I wrote a series of twelve posts on Yuletide. Each post honored a theme or tradition associated with the pre-Christian winter holidays in old Europe. I have complied them here in one long post for you to browse through. Enjoy!
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I see harvest feast season as the time between the Celtic New Year and the Gregorian New Year. This means, form Halloween through Christmas, food suddenly becomes much more interesting for me because I’m thinking about fall bounty: fruits, nuts, squash and all the other seasonal flavors that bring thoughts of warm nourishment and cozy times.
Rendering comb down to golden disks of beeswax is one of the ways I process the loss of a hive. By giving my attention over to extracting the pure, golden, divinely scented wax from the skeleton of a hive, I feel connected to the life-death-life cycle of that hive.
Once, I drove through the narrow country roads of west Cornwall to find a sacred well. It was autumn and the sea looked Caribbean turquoise. The map wasn’t very good, but my friend and I found the well, partially overgrown with ivy, but not forgotten. One of the old places, where women’s water wisdom once offered healing and insight. A nearly obscured heritage. ⠀
Read MoreWe’ve given her many names: Callieach, Persephone, Nepthys, Kali. But her original name was Earth. Mother. Crone. Womb and Tomb. There is no death goddess who is not also tied to, or herself a goddess of rebirth. They are not separate, because life is not, and never can be separate from death. This is why the Kelts built passage tombs or long barrows. We are born of the Mother and return to the Mother, her dark and earthly embrace.
Read MoreI have often struggled with what it means to be a third generation Californian living on stolen land. I love California dearly, but I am also someone who has always longed for a deeper sense of roots.
I found the siren song of ancestral roots early on in Celtic myths and European herbcraft. This drew me to England and Scotland by the age of 17, and I have spent the rest of my life feeling as though I were of two places.
Read MoreI am at a real crossroads this week. I’ve got some unpleasant thoughts moving through my brain. I’ve tried sorting through them with friends and colleagues. I’d like to have a strong argument or stance before writing about it, but I don’t. I have a Scorpio full moon cocktail of compassion and raised hackles. What I’m going to talk about may put you off. The subject is women stealing from women.
Read MoreYou may think you know her. You may have read about her behavior. You may have studied her. You may have experienced her habits. She may be nearly predictable. But, she may not behave like you expect. She is a Queen, after all.⠀
Read MoreWe humans love labels. We like neat little categories and stacks. One of the definitions beekeepers like to make is between professional beekeepers and hobbyist or backyard beekeepers. This is often used in ways to dismiss backyard beekeepers as uneducated, annoying, or quite possible the problem (re: why bees are dying). The thing is, people have been living with bees for far longer than commercial operations have been keeping bees. It’s not a hobby.
Read MoreEvery good story has a rite of passage. A dark night of the soul. Uncharted waters. The descent into the Underworld. The fall. The path that disappears into the woods. Persephone knows all about it. So does Eve. Isis. Princess Leia. Atreyu. Durga. Frodo. Rapunzel. And Aphrodite, but she’ll never tell. ⠀
If you’ve stumbled into a good one, there’s often a guide. A trickster. An old woman. A star. A raven. A ragged dog. A swarm of bees.
Read MoreLast night I dreamt I was in the arms of an Ash tree. Above me in the high, bare branches was a king snake. Below me, was another king snake. I remember thinking, as long as there are king snakes around, I won’t be in danger of rattlesnakes.
To understand this thinking, you must know I have a lifelong phobia of rattlesnakes after a traumatic childhood experience which invariably connected rattlesnakes with childhood abuse. I have spent my adult life repairing my relationship with the serpent.Back to the ash tree. In Norse mythology, the Yggdrasil, or World Tree, is an Ash tree.
Read MoreStaring out the window, my mind is ricocheting off various topics. The Coronavirus and systemic racism. Varroa mites and treating the symptoms. Climate change and the denial of human abuse to the planet. How you can be a feminist, and still really enjoy when a date foots the bill. How great it can be to foot the bill. The silencing of a women’s voice and the inevitability of two white men vying for power.
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