Rather unplanned, as life often is, I end up in the “bee house” of a long-time friend and her Goldmund Apiary [Imkerei Goldmund] shortly before Easter. After three days on the site, I realize that I have stumbled into a free “bee cure.”
Something inside me awakened like Spring to a new life, but a regenerative life which I constantly participate in without being aware of it. My dreams change when I spend an hour or two a day with the bees and observe these creatures. My nervous system calms down. As I walk along the edge of the horse paddock, between the calls of cranes and cherry blossoms, I pass the beehives and am enveloped in their buzzing and their scent. I’m filled with a tremendous gratitude that moves me to tears. But it’s not sentimentality; the feeling comes from below my “Hollywood boundary”—below everything I can form as an image of my life. The feeling is true for me because all my impressions, feelings, and thoughts are stimulated by the sphere of nature. After three weeks, without having learned anything specific, I feel that I’ve never found a more fitting sensual expression in the world for what love is than the scent of bees.
Human Honey
In November 1925, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a letter to his Polish translator Witold Hulewicz about the Duinesian Elegies. It reads: “So it is a matter of not regarding everything earthly with disfavor or disparaging it, but precisely because of its fragility which it shares with us, these phenomena and things should be comprehended and transformed by us in most intense understanding. Transformed? Yes, for it is our task to imprint this frail and unenduring Earth so passionately and ardently in us that its essence is resurrected ‘invisibly’ within us. We are the bees of the invisible world.”1 What a beautiful thought, and how wonderful that this world and the next resonate so harmoniously in their visibility and invisibility.
So, in what way do we do something similar to bees? They collect the finest substance that’s manifest in the world, pollen, and use it to produce their food—living gold. Do we humans perform a similar digestive process? Do we digest spirit into the world? When I allow spirit to work through my individuality in my life and in my actions, is that also a kind of honey? Do we create invisible substance in the world through our deeds, a substance that can be nourishment for the whole “organism of humanity and Earth”? Do I nourish my fellow beings with the way I live my life here? Do they nourish me? (Sometimes less than wholesomely.) Bees make me feel calm and gentle, more loving, softer, more grateful, and, simply, they give us the miracle of honey. When I’m in this mood, does everything I produce (my “human honey”) have an effect on the world similar to the honey of the bees? Does the digestive product, honey, come from the same “substance” in spirit, manifested by bees on the physical plane, that humans manifest through being human? Does the spirit create experiences through us and our conscious processes?
Rilke’s statement could actually be turned around. The divide between this world and the next would then be nearly eliminated. Paul Klee’s epitaph reads: “On this side, I cannot be wholly grasped / For I dwell just as much with the dead / As with the unborn . . . .” And I’d add: “but I also cannot be known only from the other side.” The real presence of the spiritual “on this side” is something entirely invisible, but I can only experience and shape it as a being on this side of the world.
Feeling Bright
Our lives hold secrets as inexplicable as the buzzing of the bees. Sometimes something tender sounds. These revelations find expression in a knowing smile. And I’m certain that, even when I’m eighty, I’ll still be on the lookout for these kinds of revelations. It’s another way of beholding: always looking slightly beyond the immediate.
My beekeeper works with her bees in exactly this state when I’m not interrupting her with all my questions. She says she makes decisions intuitively and is not able to explain them logically. Daydreaming in action—is there such a thing? The bees have something to do with it. Their “magical substance” seems to reinforce this effect. I quickly reach the limits of language. Something is more open, as if we were standing on a threshold, perceiving a constant flow from here to there and there to here. Is this the language of life itself? My beekeeper tells me that she doesn’t feel a hive as an individuality, the way one may perceive the individuality of a Demeter farm. She only has bees, about fifty colonies, which she can distinguish quite well. She says, rather, that it’s more like she is working with the individuality of a landscape. Her “animals” breathe themselves into this landscape of the Oderbruch [in eastern Germany].
In their flights, they weave through this specific locality and bring together what has been formed as nature and culture. They weave through the air in their flights, carrying into their dark hives what they bring from outside. Light that has only just materialized is communally transformed into a healing and nourishing substance in the invisibility of an inner world. A perpetual movement, a perpetual ebb and flow between within and without. The bees also fly around in my inner landscape. Or is it I who flies with them? This is how we let ourselves live in our inner landscapes. (And thank you for letting me live in yours.)
When we understand what bees do, does this enhance their effectiveness? Does our understanding of bees enhance our own human effectiveness? What do the bees help me to understand about my own being in the world? The will to love is always gentle. The nature of Being is infinitely unconditional. As if trees ever lacked trust in human beings. . . . I want to live in friendship with the world and know about the work of bees. That is what stays with me as I leave the “house of bees” after three weeks. “Being in love” works because love is never abstract. It has a scent.
More Imkerei Goldmund
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Photo Gilda Bartel
