in the dark with you

I woke up ready to write. But Scotland is in my ear, assuring me he has the answers.

That's fine for Scotland, but I don't respect a people with bad food. Blame it all on the bracken fern, sir. Frankly, I don't give a damn.

But on to the the sweeter drama. Dreams. And separately, aspirations.

I had a dream a while ago, about a race to enlightenment. It wasn't really a race, but there were many of us and were we in separate lanes as if it were.

Some ageless blond goddess shot me in the solar plexus with an arrow. Everyone else was being shot in the heart, but my issues were one level down apparently.

I would not die. But, that bit of information would fade from my consciousness as I felt the ego's favorite emotion rise up in me until it took over.

I would forget the stages I would have to pass through after being shot, as the fear of death dominated.

And, the prophesy has come true.

But these things lie buried within and I have not yet been able to draw out the truth.

Upon waking, I was impressed with the sense of how difficult it would be to take this path.

If there is actually free will at all. If I even have a choice of paths.

So, here I am, about to destroy many of the things I know.

I embody Kali against my better judgement and dance on the skulls of my own sensibilities. And attachments.

But I hear my inner voice assure me that Kali is a dark Goddess like the fertile earth is and that all I have ever needed (food, shelter, beauty) have all come from this darkness.

The hidden, the repressed, the barely known drives me like the shifty fault lines drive the earth. I was never running away, coming to the island underbelly. It was the familiar that hampered experience, distracted self knowledge, rocked my senses to sleep.

Here on the flipside the only familiar voices are of taraxacum officinale, hypericum perforatum, mellissa officinalis, achillea millifolium.

And they cannot say anything but truth.

See, I was always running toward.

I warn those close. I cannot tell how far Kali will reach, how wild her dance may get. Run far away, or stay very close.

truth in beekeeping

It would be funny if it weren't so tragic. No, that isn't right.

The tragedy is precisely why it is funny.

There am I, in a wide open paddock at night, full moon rising wearing a bee suit. I am not, however, sensitively listening to the hum of the hives, wrapped up in pleasure and love.

No, I am wearing yellow rubber gloves and my conscience is bleeding and my cheeks wet.

There is the stink of diesel and the dull grumble of a truck and a hi/low arm swinging a homemade metal fork through the air. I am standing in the darkness, far enough away to be safe from the unpredictable path of the dumb object, waiting for it to land near a pallet of 4 hives. I have put tin covers over the opening of the hives on all the 14 pallets to keep them contained within, although it only partially works, and bees spill out over the boxes.

This homemade metal fork is attached to the hi/low by a dirty old part of a ratchet strap that specifically says on it's tag 'not for lifting'. There is a hook closure on the strap, but it doesn't stay closed. "She'll be right" is a popular saying in this country. It's meaning is somewhere near "close enough".

That's the prevailing attitude in this honeybee transporting operation.

The Kiwis josh about the Germans and their sense of doing things by the book.

Must be that German heritage whispering in my ear that this is a fucking accident waiting to happen.

When the loud, robotic hi/low arm crashes it's ratchet strapped, homemade metal fork onto the grass, perhaps knocking into a hive and pushing a box askew, I walk over to man-handle it's prongs under a pallet of hives. I pull the strap tight to the end of the fork's arm until the hi/low lifts it tight, then I quickly get out of the way. The arm lifts the pallet up, groaning under the weight, and the pallet haphazardly swings the hives through the air, sometimes bumping against hives still on the ground, sometimes not. Chris is waiting on the back of the truck as the swinging pallet of hives makes it's way to him. I don't take the time to estimate the weight of this pallet. But there are 4 hives on it, each with 2 or three boxes probably weighing 60 pounds per box.

Chris catches the swaying pallet and steadies it into place on the truck bed and when the fork drops, he wrestles the prongs out from the pallet and the arm swings back my way again.

This whole process takes about 10 or 15 minutes. Loading 14 pallets then means I am standing there smelling diesel and ducking and then waiting for a couple hours.

When everything is loaded, we ratchet strap down the whole load, and when the straps tighten, they pull hive boxes apart from each other so all the hives on top of the load now have a couple inches of gap between boxes where the bees come pouring out of.
The young man running this operation for the owner, wants me to come help tighten straps. But I am too short to get my arms up that high and the boys have to come by and re-tighten after me. So, I then become the one who rolls up the straps after the boys tighten them down.

Thing is, boys easily forget that they are not the only living things in the world and are rough and quick with the straps so that when I come by to roll them up, the bees are upset and stinging.

I do the only thing I can do in that moment which is to walk away and let the boys do their thing. They get a little frustrated with me, but I am working hard protecting them from my wrath and cannot respond.

There I am, in a bee suit, sitting on a log watching them struggle out of their suits in front of the truck headlights.

When the boy sits next to me, smoking his cigarette wanting to know why something is wrong with this method, I tell him. Just a little.

And no, he cannot take it.

The boys flank me on the log.

I have to leave them.

The worst part is, after all this, the job has just begun.

We have to squeeze into an old truck w plastic seats and drive for 8 hours on bumpy, windy mountain roads until morning, when we unload the pallets in the same terrible fashion in a field of cows or sheep.

If this were what I believed to be beekeeping, I would have quit a long time ago. There is no love, no sensitivity, no grace.

This is the truth.

There are some who do things for love, but many more who do them for other reasons.

I love the bees. I love to hear their hum change with their mood, I love the furry bodies. I love the iridescent wings and the names 'hymenoptera' and 'melissa'. I love the propolis and the pollen and the honey. I love the drones' big eyes and the queens' big abdomen. I love the massacre and the mating drama. I love the fidgety virgins and the emerging babies. I love the queen piping and deep drone hum.

I love to see a perfect pattern of brood, not just for what it will profit me, but for the beauty itself.

I love sucking the royal jelly from queen cell. I love a row of queen cells. I love the breeze from a thousand fanning wings.

I even love the sting.

My motives are not always pure. Especially when it comes to my own species. I am usually seeking to manipulate them for my own pleasure or gain. I often feel terrible about it.

But for the honeybees it's all love.

I have been around beekeepers who feel the same. They'll go without honey so their bees will not starve over winter, they'll take their time in the hive and worry about them when it's cold or dry or hot.

They are forever trying to make things better for the bees, easier, trying to mimic nature.

It's not always roses, and I'll be careful not to romanticize.
But while I may not always agree with all the methods, there is a comradery among us and it's the love of these creatures.

But here, in this operation, I have not gotten this sense. I have assumed it, and acted as though it were the truth. But I have been confronted with it's lack.

The visual of a swinging pallet of hives crashing into a tree epitomizes the carelessness.

I have learned much here these first two months of kiwi beekeeping. I won't stereotype.

I have a new appreciation for things I took for granted.

And I can see opportunity here.

I open my eyes in the morning for love.

My eyelashes are paintbrushes dipped in love and blinking, I color you.

kiwi brand

One of the best things about this country, other than the fact that people walk everywhere barefoot......I went into the Pak N Sav in Papamoa today and a little girl and her dad were in front of me, she in shoes and he barefoot......is this spirit the place has.

It's this really little big country. They have a strong sense of national pride, but it's so much less obvious than my own country's obnoxious patriotism.

They embrace their freedom without bragging. Listening to some Kiwis talk about their country, I heard one say the only other place with this kind of freedom lifestyle was Australia.

I smiled to myself. I thought about all the bumper stickers and yard signs in the U.S. about how freedom wasn't free and god, guns and guts and founding fathers bullshit.

If it's so great, why do we need to keep reassuring each other?

Kiwis talk about everything as though they aren't sure. They may know exactly what they're talking about, but they'll say it in a way that at first sounded to me like they needed reassurance.

No one seems to ever be in a rush. I went shopping on christmas eve. I was warned that it's crazy that day and I should avoid stores. What I found were reasonably full stores with strolling shoppers wishing each other happy holidays. There were parking spaces, there were short lines, there were jovial security guards at the door.

I would love to someday consider that crazy. Like the weather. I hear people making a fuss about the heat on a perfect sunny day not yet 90 with only enough humidity to be comfortable. They don't put furnaces in their houses! I know what it's like to feel it's warm and beautiful on a 50 degree day in march and to not need a jacket.

But, I'd like to acclimate to paradise temperatures.

I love driving through rolling hills or next to the sea and see a sign about some sort of strange bird crossing.

People have horses here like dogs. They put ropes around their necks and tie them in the front yard. They also let them roam wild like their sheep and cows.

Everything goes feral here.

I am going feral myself.

As soon as I get that car (hopefully monday if the subaru checks out) I'll let the kiwi feral take over.

About cars......for some reason, there is an abundance of inexpensive used cars in good condition. I've never seen so many station wagons!!! The kiwis also love vans. Converted into apartments.

Love is in the air. It always is of course, but I'm linked in right now.

If you were near me, I'd be beaming it straight at you. At you. Love.

i am not my own

I spent the blur between xmas and new year, plus a few extra days on the east cape of New Zealand, a place not unlike the deep south of the US in flavor. I saw some Maori kids slaughtering a horse on a dirt track, they were cutting it's neck and head off. Not exactly what I expected of Maori culture, but I suppose I should assume to be under impressed by my own species no matter what dance skills they may have.

I saw sheets of rain wave in the air for an entire day which made the river muddy and fast. I spent some time among giant gum trees, peeling their strips of papery bark in long rolled up sheets. Magical trees, they make an area they grow in utterly peaceful and fairylike.

I saw a couple dead possums, nothing like north american possums, they are adorable furry animals something like a cat crossed with a raccoon. They are also called "coons" The possums were dead because I was staying with a gun happy bunch of men who shot anything they could as often as possible. In hunting, they blurred the edge between necessity and pleasure like I do with food. So I can relate, in a way.

The food was another matter. My sensibilities surrounding cleanliness and quality had to be put on hold, I turned a blind eye to rat droppings and dish washing/drying methods and ingredient lists so as not to appear like a princess.

I am often able to thrive in conditions which many women would find beyond tolerable, but I found this experience required extra effort on my part.

I was told this dwelling is typical in the east cape and around the country as well in rural areas.

If this is the case, this country is stretching it's 1st world status. I spent as much time outdoors as possible, including sleeping as I felt cleaner out there.

On to the spectacular.

The herd of "wild" horses had this spring birthed a new crop of foals, gorgeous and galloping next to their mothers in the open green rolling hills. I spent part of a few of my runs sprinting after them for the sheer joy of running with them and seeing them run.

On the day after the big storm, the Scot drove the big flat bed truck while I and several others climbed on the back to ride up logging tracks in the misty weather to see what we could see. We were jostled along, hanging on for dear life and laughing while we bounced over water, past clear cuts, and up the side of a mountainy green bump to watch the sun break through the mist and bring on a brilliant rainbow like I've never seen. It arched over the mares with their foals and ended in the soft green pasture. I couldn't get over seeing a rainbow's end. Chris and I had never seen a thing like it before.

That evening, we all were out in the pasture watching one of the most spectacular sunsets I've ever seen. The entire sky was breathtaking, from every direction. The west, east, north, south. The colors, the patterns of clouds were awesome. Everyone kept pointing and saying "there" but it was everywhere, and it kept changing. In the east, there was a rainbow...a rainbow in the midst of an orange sunset!

The evenings consisted of candles, as there wasn't electricity, (not regrettable as it made me feel less dirty being inside) room temperature beer and some great jokes involving the sexual uses of sheep, and hunting.

Chris and I slept next to the river, heard it rushing all night long, and met a large hedgehog our first night out.

We spent our last night there, packing up bees with loud, stinky machinery and driving them all night long through the mountains back to the Bay of Plenty.

We have done this twice now in half a week, and I was quite cranky this last trip. Princesses are not subjected to this kind of work.

This morning, however, as we unloaded bees in a spectacular setting as the sun rose through more misty rain, there was a double rainbow to greet the day.

It made the experience worth it, sort of.

The beekeeping is sloppy, the work feels worthless and I alternate between wanting to really make a difference in this bee operation and washing my hands of the whole thing.

No matter, as we will very soon be buying a vehicle and heading out to travel and have our own adventure.

I am deeply in love. I can palpate it in moments when I am not obsessing about some thing.

To completely sink into that sense of euphoria is a goal.

I am acutely aware of the complications of being who I am at the age I am coupled with my impulsive decision making style. And I am hoping that swimming in love will help my perspective. It does make me float when I let it.

Music. Wine. Love.

If I could take your face in my hands now and kiss you full and slow on the lips we could float together in bliss. If we had known ahead of time how spread out those kisses would be and how much work there would be in between kisses, we'd never have agreed to continue living.

But let's agree to forget those ugly facts and continue on for one another, that there may be an other to kiss when the moment comes.

wet and slippery

temporal and infinite

I am not my own, it's not my choice...

immersion experience

I have been simultaneously searching for and avoiding an immersion experience with a "guru" for my entire adult life.

I have friends who submitted themselves to the Susan Weed experience, and I wanted to but feared it as well and so only waded in shallowly, and now appreciate her as an author to my favorite reference books.

There was the Teaching Drum experience, which I immersed in as well as I could without giving up my personal freedom as was required for the complete training. I replaced my mental illusion of safety with their illusion of impending doom until I decided it was suffering without purpose and now consider the thing a necessary evil like prescription anti-depressants. That is, not really good for people, but helpful for some who just can't make it any other way due to the severely fucked up chain of events in their lives.

There have been others along the way, like Simon Buxton and Layne Redmond, but these did not require such personal sacrifice or mind bending for me personally as to be a sort of trap to free myself from.

Now, I am confronting this immersion again. This time, I am tangled up in a web of the heart and mind, but have freed myself of the physical responsibilities that always gave me an out before.

Yoga.

It has been the perfect teacher for me so far as it uses the body as doorway instead of the intellect. Or, my perception has made it so.

And I need to make my body busy.

If by bending my spine backwards the self becomes more flexible, if by learning to hold a difficult warrior pose without giving up at the first signs of suffering I am able to better withstand all sorts of discomfort more easily, if by calming the body and breathing intentionally I am able to approach stress while remaining collected, then this is the perfect study.

Using intellect to alter belief and action has always seemed house of cards-ish to me.

It's so easy to think oneself into and out of beliefs and religions and such that the whole process seems more like a game than a way to integrate reality.

Using the body feels like play to start and seems less pretentious.

Phew! I'm climbing out of this rabbit hole before I get lost.

So, I searched for a Iyengar trained yoga instructor in NZ to continue my education, and then looked for a wwoofing opportunity that included yoga and found them to be one and the same. And it just happens to be in the same town that I am already living in. Serendipitous!

I received an email today letting me know I was welcome there at the wwoof farm and yoga studio for this intensive immersion experience.

May this trap I am about to put myself into eventually lead to greater freedom.

On a separate note, I have been having big adventures here recently, which I'd like to soon share as soon as I grok them more completely.