Love in the time of Covid19, part VI

It's early in the morning on the tail end of a full moon. The beehives are ready to receive their bees; much activity at this time of year centers around preparations for that, and the thought of bringing these new creatures onto the property as a home always makes me feel hopeful about the world and life in general. A sacred action is at work.

Bees play a very ancient symbolic role in the human heart. The earliest graphic representation of bees is found in the Paleolithic cave art of Spain. This image is several tens of thousands of years old. A good deal later, we find them cropping up in Egyptian hieroglyphs designating the pharaoh, where the bee and the reed are combined. A funerary hymn to the pharaoh Senusret III (1839 BC) says, "you have married the bee to the reed.” In this symbolic analogy, the reed represents a thread connecting the higher to the lower; the bee represents the effort, the intelligent and conscious labor, which collects the honey that flows through this connection.

There are many folk traditions about bees, including the idea that they embody the spiritual intelligence of the property they live on, and that one must talk to them about what takes place in the household.

It may seem odd to encounter beliefs that suggest we could have any spiritual connection with something as tiny or apparently alien to us as an insect; yet ponder the midges I mentioned yesterday. We’re not separated: and we're related not just through genes (we share homeobox gene structures with insects which produce the structural relationships of both their segmented bodies and the segmented structures of our brain and central nervous system) but also through Being.

We are—

here—

together.

Part of one world which is far more interrelated than it looks to our eyes or even sounds to our ears.

Inside us, billions of symbiotic creatures are helping us to stay alive: bacteria, fungi, even viruses. The relationships of life, even in one tiny organism, are impossibly complex and immeasurably dependent upon one another. They make no sound and ask no recompense; they just go about their business.

Bees equally do almost all their communicating between one another in the dark, using vibration. For this, they need to be extraordinarily intimate with one another, and very sensitive. This is their way of life. There’s no more light inside our own bodies—the kind that we see with, I mean—than there is inside a beehive, and the creatures – the cells and bacteria — that make us up conduct their affairs in consonant intimacy and darkness. So we’re much more similar than we think, in so many ways.

It's often spoke of in esoteric spiritual texts that there’s a darkness to spiritual life. This is a mystery, and a koan. This great darkness that emerges from the silence of the unknown is said to be the expression of a light much greater than the light of the natural world. It’s a light not of the eyes, which are material things that simply see matter, but a light of the soul, a light of consciousness and intelligence, that sees and understands in ways that the eyes aren’t capable of. It is that light of understanding that feeds the soul in the same way that the bees collect honey.

All of the objects, events, circumstances, and conditions of creation are flowers that bloom from the benefit of creation’s fecundity and from God’s grace, which are eternal — which means that they take place outside of time. They’re the fruit of the vineyard, the vines of divine intelligence, which produce these grapes — impressions – which our life takes in.

We collect this nectar and it feeds our being.

This may seem philosophical or lofty, but it reaches a practical foundation in the very action of my sensation of Being. I sit here early in the morning and ponder these things, against remarkable (supposedly ordinary, but not) contrasts: the hardness of my stone desktop, the soft flowers of spring which rise up from a small Chinese dish I bought in Shanghai several years ago. The forces that created and put these various things here on the planet are too vast to comprehend—and yet I’m with them almost effortlessly, through Being. Each one is an impression of something sacred. One could extend thought into the qualities they express in so many directions, and for so long, that it would fill many volumes. Yet perhaps the most important thing about them is that they exist at all, and that they are with me and with us.

It’s their beauty that matters.

The feeling of beauty is irreducible as an algorithm: math may rule the physical world, but the world of feeling is a glorious rebel that will forever deny its hegemony.

It's worthwhile to stop for a moment at any moment during the day and appreciate what is around us: to take in the impressions, to gather them into our cells and our souls with a feeling, a vibration, that brings them into relationship with our awareness. In this way we join the reed and the bee; the upper and lower kingdom of our own inner Egypt, which has the Nile of our awareness flowing through it like a great river.

Explanations are wonderful things; and I think we all love them in one way or another. Yet the mystery of life is in the end always too great to explain; and in the face of the unknown, the best option is always to live it on its on terms. The food that feeds us in this action is love, which joins our inner and our outer world.

It is sweet; and no matter what happens, it continues to flow like honey.

Take good care in this moment,

Lee