Bees in the Lake

Sunday scaries, Sunday saves.

The philosopher, having finally deciphered the root cause of human suffering, runs out from his office-cave. Out into the passing crowd, the city stream of humans, he cries in exhalation: “I’ve discovered it!” and—yet—nobody cares. They are en route to family, to work, to the restaurant around the corner which has started serving $3 french fries during happy hour. The cause can wait. For, as one of the passers-by thinks, glancing quickly toward and then away from the sweating, panicked philosopher on his cobblestone stoop, is there even a cure?

Today, there was a successful insect save.

At the pool in my apartment complex, I always find flailing, drowning bees, and rescue them with leaves. Today, out in Lake Michigan, far from home, I saw one. Another animal-advocating family member suggested we scoop it up with our hands and try to deposit it onto a nearby buoy. The bee roused itself and began to clean its little antennae, left one first, but the buoy rolled with the curvature of a morning wave, and back into the water the creature went. So I scooped it up again, but this time the water leaked from cracks between my fingers and the bee was on my hand, on my skin, crawling around. I tried not to worry that it would sting me in panic. Together we walked through the eternal sandbar and towards the beach, and I sought someplace to drop the bee, but then literally dropped it onto the sand. It froze. I thought I killed it. Memories of the hallway beetle hissing at me, one leg unfixably bent, one missing. But I picked the bee back up, carefully, gently—they are so small, so delicate—and I tried to squeeze a little water off my swimsuit top to clear away the sand. Surprisingly, that worked. And we journeyed into a nearby wooded area where a sand-drop happened twice more, but I was quicker to scoop-save. And finally, finally, led by another bee, by two white butterflies, I found a tree with lengthily above-ground roots and let the bee stand on its own, then walk. For a moment I watched. Both antennae were up now. Tiny hands (?) having cleaned them. Wings almost dried. And they began to vibrate, which was my cue to leave, to return to the lake and let it all go. Never once did it sting me, and never once following that first thought was I afraid.

For the next few hours, I felt sad and strange. I pinned it on anything and everything else—personal problems, a lack of solid sleep this past week, past/present/future frustrations and fears. But I think what unsettled me was the live witness to my own ability to choose: to help and act, or do nothing and harm. To let it be. To let it die. To not retrieve the drowning bee in the first place. To shrug off the buoy fail and swim back toward the other humans. To give in to the sand droppage, after the first of which the bee seemed dead, paralyzed, tiny grains covering it entirely. What—? How—? I am grappling with the fear of the sight of my ability to stand back and let a life perish. Watching action unfold because of what I did or didn’t do. And on the micro level of the bee, I am near tears with panic when it almost happens. The bee. What of the human beings starving in the world right now? What of the unhoused person in the Trader Joe’s parking lot to whom I want to give a few dollars of cash, but I don’t have any in my wallet, and the store doesn’t offer cash back, and I’m running late for something important? How important is it, really? What’s essential here?

I must move beyond this. For the sake of this page, for there are many more things to explore. For my own sake, so this confusion of responsibility may not freeze me in vital moments. But the question remains. How can we choose to act and want to save, to love, to continue life, to encourage peace, and also settle with knowing 1) it will not always work and 2) we cannot save everything? My therapist, certain friends, and the dozens of pseudo-philosophers I’ve read books or even just quotes from encourage me to find peace in the grey area, to accept that everything flows, up, down, on and on and on and on. There are many directions. We must go with the flow. If the bee had perished in the sand, I wouldn’t be a killer. Or would I?

This week, I wanted to post on Instagram for the first time in months. Didn’t get around to it. That’s alright. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then Friday passed, each day holding an intent of mine to share photos from the past few months, then share this page, share some other work. But I felt that I also had to return with some kind of statement of intent in regards to the world. A carefully curated virtue signal that I was “on the right side,” but I didn’t want to virtue signal, I wanted it to be from the heart, and I couldn’t just post pictures of flowers or the moon or my face, there had to be something else first, the groundwork and affirmation of resistance.

Can my public acts of service to the small creatures around us be my act of rebellion, my indication that I choose light in our invisible war? “Darkness falls across the land.” And yet I see the beasts carry on. Gentle, vicious, moving in tune with each other as best they can. I fear this is all redundant from earlier works on here. I am still trying to figure it out.

The second post of this week (third, I guess, if you count the short film promotion) was originally going to be an exploration of bangs both culturally and personally. I’ll still share that; it’ll come next week. The bee thing prompted me to share something deeper, but unpolished. I know I am not alone in this. We are in the midst of several humanitarian crises and deeply fractured within our communities. When something buzzes nearby, we pick up the fly swatter and proclaim we’ll try to kill it, and then we advocate for peace in the same breath.

Love is the answer. But it is not perhaps so simple. Is it? Maybe it’s simpler than we think. Do we disconnect ourselves more from the natural world by trying to philosophize everything we do? Is our natural state goodness, grace, community? I read that sunflowers growing around radiation sites will draw out the poison from the soil and into their bodies, sacrificing themselves to save the lives around them. How would we act towards the world if we could know for a fact that all living things have intention behind their actions? What if the flight of the bird each morning following their sunrise song wasn’t “instinct,” but rather decision?

On the walk back from the lake, alone for a few minutes, I looked up at the trees. The blue sky. Back to the ground, where robins hopscotched over sidewalk cracks and the lawns sprawled with flowers. Some dead, some alive. Some just beginning to sprout.

A family member shared last night during dinner that apparently there are wasps with facial recognition, so if you do them dirty and try to kill them, then they get away, they could come back and enact revenge. Or communicate in some way with other members of their colony, “this guy sucks.”

Embracing the cycle of life, death, ascension and rebirth is at the root of my spirituality. It’s inherent in me as a person with a womb. Micro cycles of this unspool each month. Hard for me to embrace when I come upon it in the tangible world, though. A skill to hone. The other day, I saw a dead baby possum on a grass patch. Pain. Is it less painful if I knew the creature’s spirit would return, perhaps as a human child? Pain. I give my pain to the earth in prayer that she will ground me amongst it, hand on the tree trunk, eyes squeezed shut. Even in the polluted cities, small green things grow up from concrete cracks. The vines tumble over the freeway walls. Earth does not freeze or fall in grace when the creatures she stewards may die. Other possums come to play in the yards at night. New bees hatch in the hive.

As I finish off this entry, I look at the three dogs and one human sitting on the couch adjacent to me and inhale, exhale. Release. I think of Mary Oliver’s encouragement that “you do not have to be good,” and then of the geese in the poem, of the sweet lives right in front of me, of the bee, of the rippling lake, of the soft tree song beyond the windows, of the fly behind me, bumping up against the window, looking for an exit, and maybe I’ll help him, I’ll certainly try, but maybe out in the world beyond the house, he’ll find his way into a spider web. And for the spider, therein begins the perfect afternoon.

Thank you for reading.

Much love for you all, happy Sunday, and wishing you a wonderful week ahead. More posts to come. ☆