The Cathedral of the Bees

Pollinators. Life affirmers. The orchard is humming in sound-surround, and it feels like the song of the universe. I step onto a narrow path and walk among the trees: dangles of macadamia blossoms, heady fragrance, sunlight and shadow. I am wholly alive in a holy place.

It has been a strange week for all of us, but only in the ways that life among humans is always strange. So many jarring juxtapositions, inconsolable losses,  irreconcilable contradictions.

Yesterday I walked with a friend in the  backcountry, along a trail lined with morning glories, blue-eyed grass, white lupines.  The wind had finally abated, and it was hot, but it felt good to be outdoors and in motion. We ascended hills still bright with yellow mustard flowers, and we sat for awhile in the cool shade of an oak tree eating an orange and Brazil nuts and peppery potato chips. We  climbed up a steep, sandy section of trail to a rocky place with a fine view of the Gaviota coast.

When I got home I lay down on the couch and succumbed to the sweetness of an afternoon nap, then awoke and grabbed my iPad and gulped steadily from the Twitter stream, learning in real time about events unfolding in Boston and Watertown, information sources redefined, geography re-conceptualized, a myth of unity briefly glinting, old alone-ness  in its wake. Are we seeking sense? There is none, really. We behold and hold the exquisite and the terrible.

I suppose there's no need to recap the events of the week here in the U.S.A., but a marathon abruptly turned to mayhem and tragedy, our lawmakers voted down gun sale background checks despite overwhelming support by the American people, the city and suburbs of Boston were shut down for a manhunt, an explosion at a plant in Texas previously cited for its safety violations left many dead and a town in rubble, and we saw heroism and terrorism, celebration and grief, decency and folly...all unwinding before our eyes in a dizzying procession. It has always been so. Perhaps what is unique to our age is the capability of watching it all so fast and from all directions coming at us, defying us if not to act, to process and contain it.

Meanwhile, in the month or so since my mother's accident and accumulating issues, I have been staring straight-on at mortality and aging, the inevitable decline and disappearance that awaits us all.  There have been days when everything speaks of loss, days when everything makes me cry.

And yet.

Here's something I wrote many years ago about growing up, a process that seems to continue even as I grow old:

"And so I stepped into the rowdy chaos of life. It wasn't exactly a free for all: there were many rules already in place, plenty of myths had been crafted to illuminate, and conscience had its own robust voice. Within these parameters I would make my share of blunders, dancing and crying and stumbling around; bewildered and flawed, but present. I occasionally glimpsed angels but I mostly believed in books and bicycles, in the way the sky looked in the mornings, in the triumphs of music and the mysteries of the human heart. I was callow and untrue and I sometimes hurt others but I tried and I loved and I grew. Again and again I saw that many things were simply senseless or unknowable but I submitted to the compelling wonder of now. I began to understand that larger forces shaped me and I was part of an endless cycle that moved me along as powerfully as the tides. I learned to live with ambiguity just as I would learn to live with sorrow and loss, and these things made me human."

These things make us human. Being human is not easy, especially when conscious.

May you find your cathedral and your solace.