Meeting the Bees Eye to Eye – A World Bee Day Reflection from the Heart of Empire

For me, re-enchantment begins simply:

stopping all my antics of disappearing and learning
(again and again)
how to pay attention.

On a mad meander through the forest the other day, amid a tangle of fir, ceonothos, huckleberry and salal bushes, my friends and I suddenly stopped.

What’s that?

shh, listen.

Then the wild whirring from the canopy.

The sound was emerging from a hive high up a tree. We could barely make out the occasional flitting movement of a bee against the bright sky, but we could hear—we could feel—the buzzing activity of the community of small ones.

Today is World Bee Day and I lean into it as an invitation into reciprocity and relationality, rather than only awareness-posting.

An invitation to bend down close enough to hear the world humming beneath the machinery of modern life.

Last month, while researching pollinators for the Pollination edition of Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Day, I kept falling deeper into wonder—from flowers communicating with bumblebees through tiny fields of static electricity, to bees navigating by the angle of the sun through sacred waggle dances, to exhausted bumblebees falling asleep inside flowers and sometimes even holding each other’s feet while they rest.

I can’t help but feel a huge part of the crisis of our time is that we have become too committed to shiny solutions while losing contact with the living hum underneath things.

The poem below emerged from that tension and from an encounter with a single bee.

I was in the southwest corner of South Dakota in the Black Hills—Paha Sapa—reflecting on the ways that landscape had been so utterly reshaped by settler culture. Like my home state of Iowa.

And like the lands and waters of Minnesota, where I was en route to join Anishinaabe water protectors resisting a thousand-mile tar sands pipeline crossing the body of the world.

My mom had just died. The world felt feverish and fraying. I was uncertain of my next steps and in need of some small dose of fortitude. I was hungry for small proof that beauty and participation still mattered

Then there was this bee.

Pilgriming from bright lavender wild bergamot flower to black-eye Susan coneflower, my mom’s favorite bloom.

It made me stop. A small interruption.

A whispered instruction.

My humble attempt to listen to the bergamot bees.

What if the small buzzing ones are carrying instructions for how to survive the century?

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I find myself continually enchanted and humbled by the Small Ones.

The future may belong to those still capable of being interrupted by a bee.

‘Bending to the Bergamot Bee’ is part of Becoming Beautiful Barbarians, a forthcoming chrysalis of poems for those dreaming beyond Empire and practicing how to stay imaginative and alive during the strange unraveling.

That collection is part of Thrum—a 6-morph living literary organism from the Wild Nature Heart field exploring grief, imagination, ecological re-enchantment, and re-membering deep belonging in a more-than-human world.

If this piece stirred something in you, you might also enjoy the Pollination edition of Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Day—a free small monthly field guide of poems, reflections, and practices devoted to re-inhabiting the animate web of life.

(This month’s theme is Soil and next month’s is Sun.)

Perhaps becoming beautiful barbarians in this Great Turning means rejoining the pollination party of the world.

Or perhaps simply remembering that we were never separate from it.

The phrase “Welcome to the Pollination Party” has been following me around as both blessing and instruction ever since I first encountered it on a sign (see above) in a tallgrass prairie restoration site five years ago.

Welcome to the Pollination Party: An Ecospiritual Decolonial Journey—another morph emerging from the Thrum ecosystem—is slowly finding its way into the world, too.