Hum

What is this dark hum among the roses?
The bees have gone simple, sipping,
that's all. What did you expect? Sophistication?
They're small creatures and they are
filling their bodies with sweetness, how could they not
moan in happiness? The little
worker bee lives, I have read, about three weeks.
Is that long? Long enough, I suppose, to understand
that life is a blessing. I have found them — haven't you? —
stopped in the very cups of the flowers, their wings
a little tattered — so much flying about, to the hive,
then out into the world, then back, and perhaps dancing,
should the task be to be a scout-sweet, dancing bee.
I think there isn't anything in this world I don't
admire. If there is, I don't know what it is. I
haven't met it yet. Nor expect to. The bee is small,
and since I wear glasses, so I can see the traffic and
read books, I have to
take them off and bend close to study and
understand what is happening. It's not hard, it's in fact
as instructive as anything I have ever studied. Plus, too,
it's love almost too fierce to endure, the bee
nuzzling like that into the blouse
of the rose. And the fragrance, and the honey, and of course
the sun, the purely pure sun, shining, all the while, over
all of us.

~Mary Oliver
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I love Oliver's paean to bees and find it especially poignant now that the bees appear to be leaving us, disappearing, abandoning their hives in a horror called Colony Collapse Syndrome. It's as if all this time they paid the world the honor of being reluctant to leave it, but now they've just had all that they can take.

There's a Blue Moon on Thursday, May 31st, a powerful time to do magic. Several Pagan groups that I know of (including my own amazing circle of wonderful women)are planning to do magic for the bees around this upcoming Blue Moon. Join your magic to ours, will you? Join us because, as Oliver points out, "[I]t's love almost too fierce to endure, the bee/nuzzling like that into the blouse /of the rose."


Photo found here.