Third Person Post--Bee Story HAWMC

She wakes from a dream of falling, organ failure. The correspondences between numbers and foods are warping and winding, and the "or else" doctor visit is drawing closer. "Should I stay or should I go" insistent, through her head. Poems, growing things, intimate glances, are bringing tears to her eyes far more often than wontedly. Loved ones are leaving town and she's running out of manic, even boosted by contraband caffeine. She can't crash yet!


Whoa! Wake up! It's a beautiful, sunny day! The sun is shining, the ground, tired from its long snowload, greener every day.


Today's prompt: write about a memory from the third person perspective. Don't use "I" unless you include dialogue.


Ela got back to the farm community late Sunday afternoon, after visiting with friends, helping out on their farm. The "lead woman" on the farm, with whom she had an uneasy relationship, came to meet her, somewhat friendly, and told her there had been a lot of bees around that day.


Next morning after the rain, she was out on her walk around the farm with wheelbarrow and fruit-picking equipment, harvesting fruit, seeing which trees' crops were maturing, checking up on that ripening jackfruit. When she came back to the homestead area, barrow loaded with avocados and two racks of bananas, the woman ran to meet her. Many bees were buzzing around, heading toward the office and packing shed which doubled as her bedroom.


The two women stood, looking up into the air, gradually joined by several other community members. There was a throaty hum, like voices in an auditorium before a grand entrance. The whole sky darkened briefly--an airborne life form composed of thousands of four-winged beings, one mind, one intention. The colony landed on the wall of the office, her bedroom, and milled around, quieting, gentle.

She ran over to the next-door farm, where a self-styled "bee rustler" and carpenter was staying, and invited him to join the party. A small crowd had gathered at a respectful distance from the colony on the wall. There were "wows," oohs and aahs. One skeptical voice worrying about stings and allergic reactions. One puzzled voice, obstreperous from the break in routine, "Why are they here?" A confident response, "I guess Ela called them in." Ela and the bee rustler showed the crowd how calm and docile the colony was, how you could put your hand into their midst and have their velvet legs crawl over you. Some community members hung back, others were delighted to join in. The property owner noticed scout bees checking out some cracked timbers, working their way into the building; expressed concern. Bee rustler got up on the ladder with a Sawzall--a surprisingly common beekeeping tool--and opened up the timbers so that there was no hidden spot for them to build into.


Ela brought a hive box and set it beside the colony, filled with frames redolent of old honey. After clearing a spot for the hive to rest, out by the farm pond, she spent most of the day hanging out with the colony, singing to them, playing her flute to them.

this was in AZ, but a similar image

When the sun began to set, still in shorts and flip flops, she took a soft brush and dustpan, and gently brushed the bees down toward the prepared box. She aimed for the center of the clump, where the queen would be, and when that part of the colony had dropped into the box, the rest followed, like a silk scarf. As darkness fell, she gently covered the box and, with the help of a strong man with some bee experience, carried the hive out to their new location. Next morning, she woke to the sound of some bees straggling outside on her wall. But out by the pond, the hive was full of bees, entering and exiting, getting to know their new territory.


Over the months that followed, Ela visited with her bees often, but didn't make huge efforts to increase their colony, although theirs was a small group and she had heard that despite the area being full of fruit farms, there wasn't enough nectar and pollen at any given time to sustain a large colony. She felt some guilt. Just as people suffered from deficiencies in this hugely abundant climate and didn't address them because of their dogma about eating only from the land, so she was hesitant to interfere with the bees' needs. It was "natural" to them to forage from the surrounding trees and vines, not to be fed white sugar. She never took any of their honey. Still, the guilt persisted. But were they really "her" bees? She hadn't even been home when they first scouted the place out. Yes, they came to her bedroom in swarm, but again, she was out harvesting fruit when they first started to arrive. And of course, it wasn't "her" bedroom at all--just a bed in the corner of an office where she shook down at nights, a person with very few needs or demands. Was "letting nature take its course" a form of cruelty, both to the bees and to her own body?

Reflections on Self-Love: Perseverance and Climbing Coconut Trees

Hi everyone!

Did you see who won my Amazing Grass giveaway? Congrats to the winners and thanks to all. I hope to do another giveaway soon.

Crazy-busy here in Ela-la-land today, so I'm just looking in quickly to share my thoughts on today's reflection on self-love: Perseverance. Tina points out that most things that are worthwhile are worth making an effort for: that we might not even value them as much if we didn't have to work for them. What do you think? I'm not entirely convinced, but there's surely some truth to it. Tina asks, "What ways have you seen the benefit of perseverance in your life?"A good thing to ponder on, to find some tools with which to remind ourselves how to endure and see things through.

I feel like I have a very important addition to the notion of perseverance, though. By the usual serendipity, it's something that Tina has been talking about too. My refinement is that it is important to persevere, so long as the thing in which you are persisting is a true part of your self-expression: that continuing in it is being true to yourself.  If you persist in things that are not part of that, you can end up changing in ways that you don't wish to, or else feeling like a failure when you have to let it go.

I feel that this is an important caveat, because I have personal experience of having persevered with things that would have been better let go of, because they were not really serving my truest expression and fulfillment. I could list several examples, but I'll offer an amusing one.

When I lived in Hawaii, I very much wanted to be able to freeclimb coconut trees. This is something that only a couple of women were known to have done, and even among the climber men, most preferred to use equipment, although those who freeclimbed took great pride in their ability. When I started in this desire, I was so scrawny, it was just a joke - I could barely hold the position, squatting, legs wrapped round the tree. Perhaps it was a good thing that I had that goal: it encouraged me to work on building my strength, to be willing to eat more. I progressed to some competence in climbing coconut trees using equipment (a tree-stand like hunters use, consisting of two platforms - you pull yourself up by the feet, standing on one platform and pulling up on the other, raising it progressively). I got up some really tall trees, and had a few scary moments like losing the platform and having to shimmy down to it, or getting the saw on my belt caught in the platform and having to hang from one arm to free myself up. I even got quite a bit of paid work as a tree trimmer, which ironically took away from my time practicing my freeclimbing.

Well, I only ever got up one very short tree by freeclimbing, and that was a fluke, because I couldn't do it the next time I tried. And now I live in Alaska and am still working through the health problems that were getting exacerbated as I spent energy I didn't have and got more deficient in existing deficiencies...and sometimes I think about freeclimbing coconut trees and I feel like a failure. But then I have to ask myself, was it an appropriate goal in which to persevere for so long? It was generally understood to be something that is exceptionally hard for female bodies to do at all, and my particular female body has never been a very athletic specimen. That was part of the attraction at one point - to transform that, to do something that was acknowledged to be very hard. But it's also so dangerous! Everyone in that community knew someone who had been paralyzed or worse falling out of a coconut tree. There are rats and centipedes and other biting critters up there that can throw you off your stride. Several people have cut themselves severely whilst sawing down fronds - I have a couple scars of my own like that!

Additionally, I was starting not to recognize myself as I focused on that, and I was also never able to give it exclusive focus, because it wasn't truly central to me. If I had continued, I would probably have had to continue to change my diet to try to build the required muscles - but really no matter what, my back would probably have gone out as badly as it did and prevent me from doing more.

Nowadays, it feels good to persevere in my writing practice, in inventing the best ever raw goodies with no sugar at all, in striving to become a better person, the best I possibly can be. Perseverance tells me that every time I slip up, I have another chance! But it feels so much better to choose my areas of perseverance more truly.