Monthly Archives: May 2013

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Bee Diary: May 2013

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Beltane                                                                      Planting Moon

On a cold, snowy day not long ago I hived a 2 pound package of Italian hygienics.  My back hurt, I was clumsy.  The queen squeezed out of her cage, around the marshmallow, requiring me to shut the hive box up more quickly than I would have liked.  A few bees remained in the package and I couldn’t get them into the hive.

The cork went into the hole, the cover back on the hive box and I went back inside convinced I had failed in the hiving.  This last three weeks or so has not been a happy time for me with the severe back pain, Kona’s medical issues and Kate’s absence during that time, so I was predisposed to doubt myself.

Yet.  Today I went out, on a sunny day, bright with the hope peculiar to spring, clothed in my bee suit, smoker and hive tool to hand, and lifted the cover.  Checking for brood.  Brood means the colony is queenright, the queen accepted by the colony and laying eggs.  Brood means honey once the blossoms begin to multiply and the nectar flow becomes substantial.

And there they were.  Hexagonal cells capped with the distinctive brown covering the bees use to incubate their future allies in the maintenance of the colony.  The buzzing of the hive when I lifted the lid made me sure I would find brood.  This was a living thing, vital and strong.  The noise alone made that clear.  Still, I had to find the brood cells and I did.

I’m glad, too.  There were days over the last couple of weeks when I hoped that the queen had flown and the whole mess of beekeeping would recede into the past.  Now though with the weather and my mood lifting I wanted the brood to be there, to continue this ancient practice.  And it was and I will.

Woolly Mammoths

Silly

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Beltane                                                                                Planting Moon

This Woolly Mammoth group sounds silly.  I mean, Woolly Mammoth?  After all are we not men?

Then 26 years of meeting twice a month and an annual retreat.  Not so silly.  Now like the Velveteen Mammoth, rubbed so often that it’s become real.  We have grown old together and that seems like the prize in the Cracker Jacks box, one we didn’t even know was there.

Companions.  Friends.  A place to be who we are, even when it hurts.  And now a place to follow that last ancientrail together, with witnesses.

Warren the fly-fisherman.  Charlie the poet.  Stefan the painter and poet.  Mark the artist. Bill the connector.  Tom the child waiting to go outside and play.  Scott the musician.  Frank the shaman.  Paul the woodsman.  And myself, the gardener.

We are no longer our professions or our jobs, rather we are defined by our passions and our mutual affection.  Woolly Mammoths.  The herd moves along the trail, picking buttercups.

Woolly Mammoths

The 26th Annual Movement of the Herd: Woolly Mammoths on Retreat 2013

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Beltane                                                                                     Planting Moon

Back home from the northshore, the 26th annual Woolly retreat.  Tom Crane rented a large house on Cascade Beach Road, its backyard sloped down to the gray waters of Lake Superior.  A knotty pine interior, very nice, but almost a cliche, held several bedrooms a large open kitchen and an enormous living room with cathedral windows, a floor to ceiling stone fireplace and a loft.

This retreat was different.  It was slower, less structured, far less structured and easier.  We spent time together as friends, heard each other in small groups and made treks into Grand Marais, Tofte and Lutsen lodge for meals.

On Saturday afternoon we met with a friend of Mark Odegard’s, Tom Peterson, a former DNR official in charge of the Northshore from Two Harbors to the Canadian border and inland several miles.  After we talked with him for a a bit, we folded ourselves into three vehicles and drove up the Caribou Trail, to Honeymoon Trail.  After a mile or two on the Honeymoon trail, basically a dirt road through unoccupied forest at the top of one of the Sawtooth Mountains, we found Wild Mountain Syrup.

Formerly a maple sugarer in the Taylors Falls area, this guy heard of a plot of a land, 320 acres, filled with sugar and red maples.  He drove up, saw it and bought it.  He now taps     19,000 trees each year and boils 40 gallons of sap for every one gallon of maple syrup.  He houses his operation in buildings which he dismantled from Almelund, Minnesota and moved piece by piece for reassembly.  They are square log and plaster constructions from Swedish farms.

Contemporary maple sugaring technology bypasses the iconic pails on the trees in favor of linked runs of blue plastic tubing, possibly as much as 100 miles of it at Wild Mountain Syrup.  A vacuum draws the sap out of the trees, down through the tubing where it flows into collecting drums and is then disbursed among concentrating tanks, large, open stainless steel vats.

This day the sap flowed through the tubing and out into the collecting drum like water with a tap turned on high.  It gushed out.

Later in the evening we stood around a fire on the shore of Lake Superior and gave to the fire matters we wanted to disperse from our lives.  I threw in a piece of birch bark on which I had written, my second phase man.  I marked a change on this retreat, a clear and final movement into this new time, this phase whose end  only death itself can bring.

Later yet we gathered around a poker table, six of us Scott, Bill, Stefan, Charlie, Mark and myself and played poker.  We laughed, bet and had that easy friendship men can have around a card table.  An important moment for the Woollies.

We drove back out of the gray and cold of the Northshore, no sun the whole time, to a sunny warm day.  Seemed right.

 

Third Phase

Coming of Old Novels

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Beltane                                                                                          Planting Moon

As I fed the dogs this morning, the upcoming Woolly retreat came into focus and I thought about the third phase.  For some reason coming of age novels popped into mind.  These novels, ever since the novel’s appearance, have been perennial favorites:  Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird.

And why?  Because the transition from the (relative) innocence of childhood to young adult is fraught with emotionally difficult moments, surprising new insights and ushers out into a time with the landscape renewed and the horizon pleasingly far away.

Tying it loosely to the first phase, second phase, third phase notion, coming of age novels are about the transition from learner to doer, from the first phase of education to the second phase of adult life and career.

Working life novels also abound.  Arrowsmith.  Pale King by David Wallace.  Any of the many novels of academia.  Most mysteries and thrillers are set in the world of work.  Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities.  These novels are not as universal in their appeal and I imagine the fragmentation of life’s paths after coming of age accounts for that.  We’re not all interested in doctors, or masters of the universe, or professors, but; we are all interested in what it feels like to grow up because it’s a common experience.

So.  What of novels about the third phase?  Novels about living life with neither the end of education nor the end of work as the terminus, but about living life with The Terminus as the end.  Scrolling through some lists I did find some interesting works cited:  King Lear, Job, Doctor Faustus, A Christmas Carol.  All fine pieces.

But.  If we’re right about the third phase as a new phase of life equivalent to the other two, then simply growing old and dying is not enough as a plot line.  No, what I would like to see are coming of old novels.  Novels about making the startling transition from the adulthood of the second phase to the adulthood of the third phase.  We need these novels, poems, movies, music to help us navigate new, uncharted waters.

 

Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

A Beltane Snow

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Beltane                                                                               Planting Moon

So.  If the goddess goes out to meet the horned god for a little whoopy in Minnesota tonight, the pair will freeze.  And possibly end up under a snow drift.  Since their ritual seals the beginning of the growing season, it may not look good for the crops.

Although in our instance the cold weather crops will enjoy this continued blast of chilly air and I imagine the air and the soil will warm up around the usual time for the warm weather crops like tomatoes and green peppers.

Tomorrow we’ll wade into the snow and take off for the North Shore where if the weather maps are right, we might run into a lot of snow near our destination, the Cascade Beach Road area north of Lutsen.  The Woolly’s will gather again, diminished in numbers a bit by the absence of gentlemen Jim Johnson who is in Hawai’i, Charlie Haislet who is enroute to the Twin Cities as I write this from Shanghai, I believe and Mark Odegard, who will come up later like Charlie.

These gatherings have moved from heavily structured to loosely structured to almost no structure, the years and the bonds taking care of the programmatic aspects of our time together.  Mostly we go to catch up, take each other in in those small ways, off to the side, in casual moments that don’t happen during our twice a month meetings during the rest of the year.

This particular retreat finds two of us fairly new to the third phase and retirement, two of us still on the cusp.  It means in some fashion the Woollies will change.  How is not clear.  Perhaps something will become obvious during the retreat, perhaps not.  Part of this third phase journey is the slower pace, the more deliberate decision making, the luxury of time to consider matters with care.

Not sure whether there is wi-fi at the house on Lake Superior, so I don’t know if I’ll be posting over the next few days or not.  If not.  Till Sunday evening.

Great Wheel

Beltane, 2013

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Beltane                                                                         Planting Moon

Yes, the Great Wheel has turned again, according to the calendar.  But.  Not according to my window.  For some inexplicable reason this Beltane finds snow falling on the somewhat greened grass.  Snow.  Since 1891 there have been 6 instances of 2 inches or more of snow in May.  Today, tonight and tomorrow we may get as much as 5 inches.  So, that’s the first thing to say about Beltane 2013.

Beltane celebrates the marriage of the lady and the horned god, the introduction of fertility among the cattle and the fields of ancient rural Celtic lands.  Labor contracts for the year got made.  Hand-fast marriages through a hole in a fence were for a year and a day.  As with all the Celtic holidays, there was a week-long market and festivities that included huge bonfires (sympathetic magic to heat the earth), couples jumping over bonfires in hopes of children, cattle driven between bonfires to cure them of disease.  And, on Beltane eve and night, couples in the fields, coupling.  Like the sympathetic magic of the bonfires human lovemaking transferred to the fields the fertile passions of all the couples.

We got seeds in the ground and bees in the orchard over the last couple of weeks.  The
magnolia wants to bloom but has a hard time imagining blooming during a snow.  The garlic has emerged, as have the daffodils though they have not bloomed.  The scylla and the grape anemones out front are blooming.  They don’t mind the cold.

It is this combination of the practical and earthy with the mythic that has kept the Great Wheel present in my life for over 20 years now.  As Kate and I work with the soil, with the plants and trees, the bees, we follow in our labor the movement of the sun and the seasons, long observed closely out of dire need, now out of wonder.

John Desteian has challenged me to probe the essence of the numinous.  That is on my mind.  Here is part of that essence.  The seed in the ground, beltane’s fiery embrace of the seed, the seed emerging, flourishing, producing its fruit, harvest.  Then, the true transubstantiation, the transformation of the bodies of these plants into the body and blood ourselves.  A unity, a circle, rhythm.  Plant, grow, harvest, feed, be.

There is some kind of resurgence of these deep feelings, these always have been connections and the resurgence gets expressed in what might seem extreme ways, but I find them encouraging.  Hopeful.  Google Edinburgh Fire Festival 2013.