U-N-I-T-Y
I recently sensed that I was missing some nourishment in my life – and that was connection with honeybees. Since leaving Santa Cruz for Brooklyn, I've not yet begun to steward a new hive, and the temperatures here are still too cool to spot many bees out foraging. Absent the physical connection, I pored over my notes on honeybee physiology and began reading a book called Song of Increase. The author, Jacqueline Freeman, is a biodynamic beekeeper who mystically communes with honeybees and interprets their messages about who they are, how they live, and the wisdom they long to share with the world.
I'm particularly open to hearing about this kind of insect-human communication because I have a similar relationship with the Great Bee – her wisdom arrives when I request it, and she frequently appears in my dreams (ask your beekeeper friends: strange stuff can happen when you open yourself to the honeybees). I feel at home in the world when I'm sitting near a hive, listening with all of my senses, receiving quiet whispers through my intuition/ inner knowing about the nature of love, generosity, and collectivism.
By the end of the last sentence of the first paragraph in Chapter 1, I was weeping, or something that's like crying and melting at the same time. The sentence that took me down at the knees was about the word the honeybees use to refer to their home colony, their hive: the Unity. Freeman received this message from the bees:
“A hive is a wholeness. One bee experiences all that every bee experiences. There is no separation. Whereas you have separation, we are born into a world beyond the borders of singularity. Our first thought is always of the hive, to bear increase in the world as we sing the world into aliveness. [...] We are not soloists, though we each make our own sound.”
These passages opened a floodgate of grief in me as I realized that I'd been blocking out my longing for the honeybee hive I left behind with a trustworthy friend in California. Not only that, but I'd been bracing against a deep, existential yearning for a felt sense of unity. Thoughts, questions, and feelings poured forth from my mind and heart:
What if all of humanity acknowledged ourselves as a Unity?
If we fully embraced and sensed our Unity, would we be able to bear the heartbreak of injustice?
There is so much possibility contained within that last question that I have yet to set aside the time to plumb its depths. My bodymind's self-protective impulses are reluctant to let me go there, likely because there's so much pain and so much promise to let in. Those questions feel like a threat to my ego whose survival relies on believing itself to be its own self-contained world, rather than a loosely patched together mental and cultural construct.
I'll keep getting closer to the question, and I'll likely dive in head-first without knowing how I'll emerge. I've lived long enough now to have built up a body of evidence that suggests that the more I let my heart break, the more resilient, vital, and effective I become.
In the meantime, I've been dreaming up embodied ways to experiment with the notions of unity, interdependence, and the possibilities for collective healing through the weaving of Me and We. One such experiment is Rest & Renew: A Community Bodywork Experience.
Though I don't work a particular program to live as a non-drinker, I do recite the Serenity Prayer daily as a reminder of my choice to continue living alcohol-free. I appreciate the passage's wisdom to flow with what we can't control and courageously embrace choice whenever and wherever we can. Claiming this agency reminds me of the permaculture concept of Zone 0, which represents the Self, the body, the place in which we have the greatest amount of influence and personal power. What we do in the internal Zone 0 has tremendous potential to influence the external zones that radiate out into the wider world.
If diversity and unity are simultaneous, and if macrocosm and microcosm reflect one another, as in the Hermetic wisdom of “as above, so below/ as within, so without,” then it lands within me as an unshakeable truth that your healing matters. Your healing matters unto itself and as an inextricable, necessary part of collective healing.
When we offer healing to the individual body, we offer healing to the collective body, and – to take it a step further – what if we could anchor into this intention and amplify its effects by participating our healing together?
These are the questions I'm excited to explore in this upcoming in-person offering.
Rest & Renew is a multi-sensory experience of resting, receiving, and restoring – together. I am partnering with healing artist Beth Ricciardone for this immersive 75-minute session. While Beth guides a somatic deep rest meditation, I will move around the circle offering each participant at least 5 minutes of gentle, powerful craniosacral bodywork. This is a chance to come home to yourself, renew your energy, and experience the magic of communal healing.
