With Solstice behind us, the light is circling back, yet we are still enfolded by the dark moons. I’ve always loved the cold months and the dim light. I’m a woman who likes cocooning and snuggling and pondering, and winter is a perfect season for such things. Gardening chores and bee chores are done for…
Hi Friends. While there are many, many places to put a few extra dollars these days (Irma, Harvey, Maria, Mexico…and the list goes on) I have a dream that is very big and that I would like to ask your help with. My bee mentor, Jacqueline Freeman, and I have been invited to attend and…
This past weekend, I remembered that I had a kitchen. It is a fact that escapes me for most of the summer months. Entranced by my garden and all of the precious tiny creatures who visit me in surprising fashion each day, food and cooking is the last thing on my mind from April to…
It’s been a year and a half since my Sun Hive workshop, where I first learned how to start weaving straw hives. I love my Sun Hive, but honestly, I love the little skeps more, so that’s where I’ve put my efforts. I’ve been working on these little hives pretty much in isolation, so to…
July is late for a swarm around here. I’ve been watching with interest the swarm preparations my Sun Hive has been making for weeks. I knew they would swarm again (second time), so I was weaving furiously on a new skep I was weaving out of pasture grasses gathered just this past month. Meanwhile, at…
The swarm began like any other swarm. Just a big, roaring, exaltation of bees, 20,000 strong and taking to the sky in a glittering amber cloud. I couldn’t possibly know in those first exhilarating moments that by days end, the bees from RainTree hive would change my relationship with bees forever. The morning started out…
“Oh m’god, what is THAT?!” This is the reaction of most folks who meet The Duck of Earl for the first time. One friend mistook him for a large, concrete garden sculpture, until he moved. A few have been surprised to find him standing suddenly behind them, making a noise like those raptors in Jurassic…
Years ago, when I was reading about the meditation technique of Centering Prayer, Abbott Thomas Keating wrote that the great contemplatives either meditated or spent a great deal of time in nature. I never forgot that: That I could exchange hours on a meditation bench for hours in deep nature and somehow achieve similar benefits….