(stream of consciousness freerighting)

Where once we danced,
only fallen leaves lie so beautiful in sullen hue shaded,
a gift of farewell to the season.

All heralds now the unbracing windshorn everafter,
crookedly shaken to river embers,
fleece betwixt boulderthorns and wide sandseething everly...
stone droplets to the green moss deep,
remembering rippleblossoms across your serene mirrorface,
show me.

     *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *           

I once tumbled greygrassy hillock rolls,
thwarting pincerpoints of stagnant breached granite shores
which shrugged free their dusty toils
to trip my flapping newtoed wanderings, innocent.

Rather would I fly full armed through turquoise,
enveloped by tomorrow morning's mist, and, shuddering,
stretch my full array into sunblazoned white nothingness,
and release all into crashing silence,
and be sung to, the song of my birth, the song of when I first came to this place.

     *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *         *          

Swift toed shiftstepping over chords of crystal resonance, I seek the chosen stairs
where each lifted lilting morrow unfurls fresh fern tendrils of evergreen awakening:
this must be done to match that frequency echoed by every stirring ancestral circledance,
which carried here to now and again for the planting is time,
the young ones shall never be harmed,
and even should Her heavenly pure pale orb vanish below black ink seas
do not despair,
my greenly tinyfisted tremblings.

Every strand of moss will cushion you,
every jagged leaf will shade you,
and the many warbling twitterflits perch above,
so that your dreams may be bright and freewheeling,
that the Great Winds will bring you Knowings
until you are ready to rise,
dig your heels into firm dark earthsoil
and leap with your starsiblings,
in sweet songs of a new dawn.

Queen of the Sun

Last night we went to the Naro and saw the documentary 'Queen of the Sun: What are the bees telling us?'. It is good to be suddenly inspired and moved again by a greater narrative than my own day to day life. Queen of the Sun deals with Colony Collapse Disorder, a phenomenon where honeybees vanish from their hives in massive numbers. The problem with this is that bees essentially pollinate all of our food! A recent UN scientific study found that “Of the 100 crop species that provide 90 percent of the world’s food, over 70 are pollinated by bees.” As one beekeeper put it, without bees, we would have little to eat but wheat and oats.

The implications of the bees vanishing are alarming. If we want our future generations to have crops we need to help the bees. We need to renew a balanced relationship with nature where we work as stewards of the land and nourish that which sustains us. Our approach of manipulating nature to suit our ends is proving to be quite destructive.

In 1923 Rudolph Steiner, the great scientist, philospher, mystic and social innovator predicted that in 80 to 100 years the honeybees would collapse. He blamed this on the mechanization of natural processes that had previously happened organically in the beehive. The film spoke of the unique  relationship humans have had with bees for 10,000 years and how it has been all but lost in these large scale and highly unnatural practices. 

In the film, we saw how billions of honeybees are shipped from all over the country to pollinate the almond crop in California each year. This massive crop, which is hundreds of thousands of acres, only contains almond trees. This single food source severely limits the diets of the bees which normally include many different types of pollen. To make up for this, bees are fed high fructose corn syrup. Artificial breeding of queen bees is another problem. In the wild, a queen bee mates with up to a dozen different drones, thus receiving a good variety of genes. In commercial production, Queen bees are artificially inseminated, like breeding a single stock, and as as result have much shorter lifespans. The spraying of pesticides is another issue... overall, it makes sense that the bees are vanishing if this is how we are treating them.


I don't feel well informed enough to write an in depth article about this subject. But as with any important story well told, I am moved in such a way that it has become a little part of my dreams. I want to create a life where I am in close contact with nature. Along with owning a house on land someday, and having a big vegetable garden with fruit trees and chickens, I now want to keep bees. Inspired by the urban beekeepers interviewed in New York and England, who appeared to be mostly self taught, Skye and I started to fantasize about beekeeping NOW... but this isn't possible on our little balcony.

However, we learned in the discussion afterward that Norfolk is close to making beekeeping legal (it isn't yet for some reason), and that there are local beekeeping groups who are quite happy to help you get started. Everyone who talked about the beehives in their backyard was enthusiastic and spoke of the magic of working with these creatures. Finally -  one of the central figures of the film, Gunther Hauk, a biodynamic beekeeper and farmer, is now located in Floyd, VA. He has built a honeybee sanctuary where people can experience " the healing of the land, the honeybees, and, ultimately, the human being." I think we'll have to visit...

awake

I got up early this morning for the light. Usually I am sleeping or baking at dawn, so to just be awake and sit, with the breeze, the piercing soft morning rays, the speech of birds all around, is a tranquil and precious thing. Artemis sits nearby, utterly fixated on a patch of sunlight on the wall, watching for the shadows of birds to flicker across it again.

I am here. This morning it, is not enough to watch the day pass. Strangely, it has been difficult to gather momentum these last few days. The internal pressure of half born ideas and unrealized dreams builds enough to propel me out of the house on a walk, or into the studio to shuffle things around on my desk. But sometimes there is no clear course of action. Sometimes, the best I can do is listen. Not just to my monologue of hopes and fears about the future, the continuous planning and reforming of plans and the measurements of how well I'm leveling up the game of life. It is beneath all of that that the deeper voice is calling, singing a song of who I am and why I am here.

Part of me longs for simpler things. Walking barefoot on cool moss beneath a silent forest canopy. Finding patches of snow on a hike up a mountain. The green tea I tasted at a small Zen monastery in the Northwest. Turning over rock after barnacled rock on an island shore, to glimpse what creatures hid beneath before they slipped out of sight again. The thunderheart pulse of a drum, pounded by a circle of drummers singing fullthroated, soulpiercing melodies strange yet all familiar, sage and sweetgrass and tobacco in the air.

Even as i dream of things which seem out of reach today, I consider myself fortunate to be exactly where I am. Here, I dream and make paintings to remind myself where I've been. Or to wonder aloud through paint and pen to stumble across some new image which inspires me and raises new questions. The play between mystery and revelation never grows old.

Which is also why I've begun writing here. I've kept blogs on and off, sometimes revealing myself in poems and sometimes sticking to cryptic musings. Usually I posted nothing at all. Its a bit strange, like revealing your "best of internal monologues", carefully arranged and edited... but why not? If this can be a way to share what we dream of and share more than passing conversations may allow, so be it!