Finding and Sharing Sweetness
Creation is shared
In these past weeks I have been able to sit on my back porch and hear the buzzing of the bees in the Hawthorne trees. This song of growth steady and welcome. I find myself wanting to invite my friends over to sit here quietly together and just listen to the bees.
In early Spring, as flowers are opening up into a sunlight infused morning, honeybees venture out in search of nectar and pollen. She dips her way into flowers and if one is rich in pollen, the tiny pollen particles lift from the flower, drawn to tiny hairs on her body and at the same time she is leaving her scent on the flower, marking it for her sisters to find later. Visiting different flowers she scatters pollen into new configurations and partnerships, possibly unaware she is also bringing new life to the plants.
Adorned in life-giving pollen she flies back to her hive to share the good fortune. Back with her colony, her sisters gather round and she shares some of the nectar while beginning to dance. Through this dance she shares with them how to find this flower so they may visit too. If the flower is especially far away, she performs a special figure-eight dance that conveys complex information about how to find the way to the source of this nourishment. As she dances her sisters’ antennae reach toward her to smell the unique perfume of the flower and the dancer’s scent so they can be drawn to just the right spot.
More than 80% of the Earth’s plants rely on pollinators to physically redistribute pollen between reproductive parts of the plants, mostly traveling by flight. Bees, moths, butterflies, houseflies, bats, all play a role in pollination. Migrations of interconnection and exchange go on every day.
Wind itself plays a key role in pollination, carrying pollen and seeds from plants and trees that have less scent to attract winged-ones to visit. Think of a gust blowing perfect floating kites of dandelion seed across the grass! Everywhere in our air there is co-creation happening.
I sat down to write today thinking about the people I love who are nourished and excited by the things that also excite me. This community of friends whose emails and blog posts and new adventures light me up and keep me putting myself out there. I think about the teachers and writers and artists through time who have left a map of inspiration for me to follow. Many of these people will never know that I followed their dance with my own body’s rhythms, creating something that blends us both, an ode to the nourishment we both sought out.
The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
Audre Lorde
How incredible that we are drawn to share. Through art, words, conversation, and yes, social media posts, we give expression to what we have experienced. The richness of life seems ingested through our expression. Thousands upon thousands of exchanges of beauty, horror, sorrow, awe, affection - we share! We survive by sharing.
What if we opened our eyes to the constant interchange of enriching sweetness going on around us all the time? Through the air what we need is reaching us, invisible maps are unfolded, footprints seeding new life.
So much happens through generosity.
The natural world is constantly sharing her abundance with us, feeding us, giving us breath, shelter and a place to nest, and the life sustaining resource of wonder. Walking overly bright grocery store aisles, lining up to pay with our plastic card, it is easy to forget that we are gifted constantly. We survive because of the offerings of other beings, human and more than human.
As an introvert, there are times when I very much need to retreat and find quiet and (a mostly imagined) solitude. But in the Spring, with so much life rubbing up against life, I am reminded to be grateful for the cross-pollination of my days. I celebrate how much we need one another and the energy that happens when hearts and bodies and minds come together.
I sit on my back porch and revel in the community I make with the bees and the birds settling briefly on the tall stalks of orange blossoming Crocosmia. My neighbors’ black cat walks by giving me the side eye, his belly thick from Winter by the fireplace and I think about how my neighbors love him like I loved my Lucy. A squirrel lashes her tail as she digs in just the right place to recover a peanut carried over from another yard. The fog will likely come in soon, but for now the sun is warm and I want to stay awhile; there is a poem developing somewhere in my mind. Just by watching their gentle and necessary collecting, I am nourished too.
Invitations for your week:
NATURE COMMUNION
As you enter into sacred time with nature this week, enter with a sense that you bring with you something necessary to the whole.
