Country Mouse Monday: the honey of everyday life

Are you ever so happy, so totally content, that it almost feels like an altered state, suspended outside of time, golden?

I used to have that feeling periodically, mostly on the weekends really, when I was parked firmly inside my own life, on our farmlet, at play in the dirt. Doing what I wanted, not looking at the clock, on my own time.

Lately, I'm eating that honey of everyday life by the spoonful. 

Sometimes it feels a little loony to be so happy all the time, like it's not normal somehow. But I think I've made my way back to my natural state. 

I'd forgotten, but it's true: happy is where I live. It's where I belong.

We had company for lunch yesterday, a cousin whom I hadn't seen in probably thirty years and his wife, plus my parents. I love having new people over here -- ok, I love having anyone over at all, not just the new -- since it allows me to see things fresh for a moment, to take it in the way our guests are taking it in for the first time. That's such a treat.

Don't get me wrong, every morning when we open the blinds in our room and take that first look out into the garden, every morning I am thrilled by what I see, delighted by all the shades of green, the roses by the fence, the hive boxes standing quiet in the early light, the trees climbing to the ridge across the road. All of it.

Honey by the spoonful and not all of it figurative...

Our bees are doing great this year. The home-hive is going strong, and it looks like we'll have a harvest, yay! We picked up a big, strong swarm last week, too, so have now doubled the colonies at Blissbug Farm. And a check of the shop-hive and some burr-comb clean-up yielded some tasty early honey, whetting our appetite for what is to come.

In the meantime, I'm savoring this other honey, this delight all the time in what is happening all around us, the simple amazingness of putting seeds into the ground and growing food that will sustain us or the gorgeous perfection of the paddles of comb the industrious swarm of bees built in just 24 hours inside their temporary cardboard box-home.

That's the honey I'm swallowing daily.

Maybe it's the very best, the sweetest kind of all, imparting all kinds of magical qualities just like the real thing, strengthening my immune system, setting me down to deep sleep at night.

It's so good for me, so right, to be home more, to have quit my stupid job and started my own business which allows me to set my own hours, work from here, take breaks during which I wander around outside, pick a weed here, pick a flower there, hear the all-day ruckus of the quail and squirrels who own this land.

In our own industrious little bee-way, we each have gorgeous comb to build if we set ourselves free to do so, comb to pack with the nectar of the everyday, to transform into the honey that truly sustains us.

Life's too short, too amazing, to spend in even a moment of unnecessary, avoidable misery. Get free, go build.

Eat the honey you make by the spoonful.

XX