Religious

Consider the Bees of the Air

Drunk on nectar until we die and life goes onto the next.

Duo Dickinson / 3.23.22

We — Bee and I — live by the quaffing —
‘Tisn’t all Hock — with us —
Life has its Ale —
But it’s many a lay of the Dim Burgundy —
We chant — for cheer — when the Wines — fail —
Do we “get drunk”?
Ask the jolly Clovers!
Do we “beat” our “Wife”?
I — never wed —
Bee — pledges his — in minute flagons —
Dainty — as the trees — on our deft Head —
While runs the Rhine —
He and I — revel —
First — at the vat — and latest at the Vine —
Noon — our last Cup —
“Found dead” — “of Nectar” —
By a humming Coroner —
In a By-Thyme!
-Emily Dickinson

We see no bees today. They live in us in winter. And last Sunday was the start of Spring.

The world is given to us and, though it holds us, we hold it either in awe or the contempt of ignorance. We know we are not the world, but we want to be, so we see ourselves in it.

We define it by observation, then by association, then by extrapolation — without knowing how gravity works. Or what makes any of this. Forget about why any of this exists, we are clueless about how all of this simply works. And if our ignorance is fundamental, then the question of why all this is remains simply unfathomable,

So the bee becomes us (in observation).

If we humans appropriate an unknowable world to excuse or explain us to ourselves, then nothing said by us, to us, means much. The meaning is the miracle of all of this — the dawn, the finger on the iPad screen, the words, the bee. It is all fully, completely unnecessary in an endless void of nothing everywhere about us.

Somehow, on the tiniest of perches in the unfathomable size of everything, we, the tiny, have declared that 95% of everything (stuff and force) is “dark”. The bees are not “dark,” nor are we, so can can write poems about that.

But God is “dark” to us, or at least me. The vastest conspiracy of impossible happenstance render any design, cause, reason, “dark” — except for its undeniable power. That power is harder to see the more we know, but merely knowing anything cannot be explained except by extrapolation of what we know — and we do not even know (beyond measuring) what gravity is, why it is. It just is.

So we are bees. Drunk on nectar until we die and life goes onto the next.

But we are not bees. We are not (always) drunk. We can see beyond ourselves to know we are fully limited by ourselves. For me, this sucks. I will row in the black void of the galleon of humanity’s ship, but I would like a clue of where this is going, beyond that moment when I can no longer row. Just a clue. Please.

Good luck with that. So, in the dark of Lent, another galleon created to direct our attention, a dead poet is alive several hundred generations of bees after she knew that she was a part of. Sober as a judge (literally if not legally). Fully beautiful in the living death of words.

It is dark, it is quiet unto silence, and we are left with ourselves. And Jesus.