Taking the time it takes

It's Week One, Day Three of my six-week disability leave and I'm standing here at the kitchen counter, eating toast, drinking coffee and thinking and enjoying.  I could sleep all day if I wanted, but instead I'm trying to keep to a schedule, getting up at around 6, later than Joe but while the coffee is still hot.

Standing and typing is a habit I developed when I was too uncomfortable to sit.  The kitchen counter is just the right height, and honestly it offers everything I could ask for.  Enough room for all my tools, not least of which are coffee in my favorite mug, toasted Dave's Killer Bread (also favorite), space for phone, notebook, calculator, books, pencil, etc.  And the light's just right.

I was just reviewing a list I made yesterday, a shopping list for our bees, and realized suddenly how much things have changed.  We started keeping bees in 2009, so now we're starting our fourth season as beekeepers.  It's the fulfillment of a long-time dream and I love it, but that's not to say it's been without challenges.  Or without expense. Or that I almost quit.

Probably sometime last year I entertained the thought:

Why are we even doing this?

Probably sometime last year I said out loud:

This is kind of a money-pit, and we're not even getting much honey out of it.

Last year I was super-close to bailing, even though, like I said, it was a long-time dream to have bees, a dream we had made come true.

See, that's the thing, right?  There's a gap, most times, between the dream of something and its reality.  With bees that gap can be a scary place -- a place inside that high hum of the not-so happy colony, barely or not tolerating your intrusion, your "adjustments" to their deliberately-organized world, standing inside a cloud of bees, pissed off, zinging around your veil, bitches stinging you through your gloves.  Last year I had plenty of Saturdays, days when we'd suit up to check the hives, when I had an ember of dread in my belly, fear pure and simple.  I seized on an instruction I read or heard somewhere that it wasn't necessary to check every week -- every other week was plenty -- and so persuaded Joe to reduce the number of times we went in there.

I had what I wanted and it, they, scared the shit out of me.

That's a serious bummer.  I thought a lot about the idea of beekeeping vs the reality of beekeeping.  Was it important to me to do it just so I could say I was doing it, because of the idea, or was it something else?  At the end of last season, we had three hives: one an ornery swarm from Reba's house, the other two were packages purchased from Beekind in Sebastopol.  When it came October, I was relieved that our active participation in their lives was over for the cold months.  I wasn't attached at all to their survival over the winter.  I let go.

One of the packages died.  The other, with a local queen, lived.  The swarm made it, tough as nails, and thrived.  

Spring happened.  Actually, this year Spring roared into being: big and bold and super-colorful, more gorgeous than ever.  And, quietly, something in me shifted.  Is it the new white painter's pants I bought to complete my kit (inside of which I feel super-safe) or because of the time spent tending Reba's bees with her, chatting and laughing the whole time, or because Joe and I had the chance to work with two sets of super-excited enthusiastic brand-new beekeepers or all of the above, but my fear is gone.  Gone is the nugget of dread.

And man, is the honey ever flowing now!

I think what's true -- at least for me -- is that some things, like beekeeping, take time. I needed enough time in the activity, enough practice, and enough of the right gear, which is also practice, to get good and comfortable, to feel easy in the activity, to breathe freely and deeply.

Just because something is a long-time dream doesn't mean you'll take to it instantly.  At least that's what happened to me with the beekeeping.  And it's funny how quickly I forgot -- I with a devoted yoga practice -- that many things, most things, require coming back over and over, lather rinse repeat, tell two friends and so on and so on and so on.  Somehow I thought because it had been a dream, that like a dream, like magic, it would come easy.  But it took patience.  It took work.  Mostly

It took time.

I might've bailed last year, but I was holding on to the dream, wanting it to be real so badly that I couldn't quit.  At the same time, I totally let go of the outcome -- would they live or die without me, fuck them either way since they hated me so much.  I had so much invested, too much probably, so I let it all slide and came back, with a springtime bounce in my step and an attitude and a calm that only time could give me.

In our busy busy world, it's so hard to take the time it takes with a lot of things, to give them a chance to really soak into us, to really learn them deeply. It's so funny for me that I forgot to approach beekeeping like a yoga -- and isn't everything yoga, really? -- forgot that I needed to keep coming back to the mat or the hive, keep coming back with a beginners mind, keep breathing and learning and letting time do its trick.

What's so great is how right now we have so much honey.  The harvests we've had in the past were mostly because something catastrophic happened -- the Queen died, the colony died out, we grabbed the honey before the robbers could take it all.  But now, it's a deliberate taking-off of their excess, almost as though they were waiting for me to come around, for me to get it finally, before giving up all this golden treasure.

When you have a dream and you make it come true, that's not the end of it.  Still, you have to take the time it takes to learn to live inside that dream.  It's not magic.  It's just time.  

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