Since having a garden, my eyes slowly opened to a new world that I didn’t think much about before. For instance, this morning I was out watering my squash plants. Their bright yellow flowers have been beckoning to be crawled into, eaten, and pollinated but I rarely see a bee. With my unsuccessful attempt at growing squash in the past, this was troubling me. I suddenly spied a bee and bent down to look closer. She was so heavy with pollen on her head and all her legs that she couldn’t fly straight and appeared to be shaking a small excess off of her hind legs to enable her to fly home.
Observation of this made my eyes well up. There was this bee, with all her troubles, afflictions of our modern world, and her simple life, and the thing that drives her very being is to find pollen and return home. But she does more than that inadvertently. She feeds us. Something right there, standing in the squash patch, took hold of my thoughts and said, “That bee is the noblest creature on this earth.”
She pollinates, she makes honey, and that is all she has want to do.
It humbled me. I am just a person, I go to work, I drive my car, I throw away my garbage. I think my actions are big because they are seen; they are large and loud. But in the bees small ways, she creates life, and as if that weren’t enough, she makes a sweet sticky honey, with all its magical properties.
I began to realize how much of my life is dependent on tiny creatures who I barely notice.
Since starting this garden, my eyes have opened up to things going on unseen: The successes, the battles, the joy and the sex that happens at a miniature level is revealed and feels larger than my own life. It’s like nature saying, “I’ve got an eye on the whole dang thing, you’re in it, but you’re not IT.” Whoa. That’s a lesson that hit me right between the eyes.
image source: oprah.com