Last month we had a conference on Jungian psychology at Glenstal Abbey. I spoke to the fifty strong group and was surprised to get a question on bees at the end of my talk, which was about Projection in Jungian psychology. The person asking the question confessed to being a beekeeper, and she wanted to know what I had learned from my fifty years working with the bees at Glenstal.
I was surprised by her question. My response surprised me. I said I no longer thought of myself a beekeeper – that this was somehow a misnomer. Yes, I have bees but ‘no’ I am not ‘beekeeping’. This term suggests a kind of ownership or possession of the bees with which I no longer feel comfortable.
The term belies the wider issue of how we live and relate to the world of creation, of which we are a part. We speak of ‘nature’ and the ‘environment’ and of ‘going out into nature’ as if it were object ‘out there’, at a distance – as if we could live outside creation. This is not only wrong, but crazy thinking and leads to all sorts of abuse of the very world of which we are an integral part. If it is ‘out there’ we can do what we like with it, spend our lives tormenting it into doing whatever we want. ‘Nature’ is hitting back. Bees are in peril.
I told my questioner that I am searching for a new term to describe my relationship with bees – ‘tending them,’ ‘minding them’ but above all getting away from the idea that I own them or am keeping them or even managing them. I told her the most appropriate gesture for me in the apiary is to take a step back and see the mystery before me. I need to recover my ‘right size’, my appropriate stance before the bees in my hives.
I admitted that it had taken me until I was almost fifty to ‘see’ a bee. Until that moment, I viewed bees functionally – bee colonies were for production. I wasn’t quite as crass as that but I didn’t see them. I never marvelled at their magnificence. My aggressive, utilitarian approach dulled my perception and allowed me free reign to interfere, manipulate, and disrupt the bees. I was managing them using every management technique, every new beekeeping tip I could glean from magazines, journals and books.
Then one day everything changed. I ‘saw’ a bee. It landed at one of my hives, its pollen basket packed with golden, yellow pollen. It had only just made the alighting board weighed down as it was with its heavy load of life giving protein. There it was – a bee. Astonished at my discovery, I stared while the bee recovered enough strength to go inside the hive and hand over its load. The bee was too exhausted to mind my intrusive gawking. It was as if scales fell from my eyes. That moment taught me about the ‘tyranny of our conceptual frameworks’ – taught me that I needed to shatter the perceptual framework through which I viewed the world and start again and begin looking at the bees with loving rather than greedy eyes.
As I look back now on that, ‘moment of innocence’, seeing a bee for the first time, I recognise it as a ‘moment of reverence’ before the mystery. Living on this planet for 50 million years longer than we have, how can we be threatening their very existence? It woke me up to the destructive power of an irreverent mind-set and how it infects my relationship with the world in which I live.
We need to recover our organ of reverence before the wonders of creation – take a step back and look with astonishment at what is happening in and around us. This is not asking people to be naive but to recognise that our relationship with creation is dangerously out of joint – it threatens our very existence and that of the bees. We need to recover a stance that will allow us and the bees to survive on this beautiful and mysterious planet.
James Freeman Clark, an Easterner who traveled to the Western United States of America in the nineteenth century, wrote in his book on Self-Culture, ‘when I lived in the West, there came a phrenologist to the town, and examining the heads of all the clergymen in the place, found us all deficient in the organ of reverence. More than that, we all admitted that the fact was so, that we were not, any of us, especially gifted, with natural piety or love of worship. Then he said, ‘You have all mistaken your calling. You ought not to be ministers.’[1]
I might add, ought not to be ‘beekeepers’ either.
Simon Sleeman OSB
[1] James Freeman Clark in Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England (New York: Modern Library, 1936), 268.