We welcome your thoughts and reflections on how we may together find a new way of living in relationship with wildlife and nature. We publish selected contributions from Earthfire community members as Notes from the Earthfire Community. Send your submissions to submissions@earthfireinstitut
—by Miriam Trahan—
May I speak to you for a moment of nourishment? Of the nature of deep energetic patterns? Of food of a different nature than that to which you are accustomed?
Think of the bee. The sweet, small, busy bee, going about her work with diligence and stamina. What is the work of the bee? To gather the pollen and the nectar, to return to the hive, to make the honey and tend the baby bees. It goes on around us in our hurried, large lives quite beneath our notice. Yet so integral to our very survival, the work of the bee creates much of the food upon which we rely—apples, almonds, pears, this list is long.
Left Hawaiian Native Ohia blossoms, a bee favorite. Right Bee Balm | Photos by Miriam Trahan
What else does the bee do? The bee dances. As we have observed, the way the bee shares her knowing of how and where to find food is a dance. Through her dancing, she also creates a pattern around each flower she visits. These patterns have meaning and substance. They resonate deeply through time and connect this harvest to all that has come before and will come in the future. The patterns resound, not only within this reality in which we live. These patterns resound across time dimensions, across and through realities, like a sacred secret of delicate light-threads, weaving filaments of poetic songs. These sacred secret songs are her gift of beauty to each flower, to the nascent fruit, to the emergent love that is the basis of all creation. This is her gift to humanity.
Lichi fruit, courtesy of many happy bees | Photos by Miriam Trahan
With the fading of the flower and the budding of the fruit, the patterns resound and resolve into this reality, this being, this time-space reality. The delicate filaments become firmament. Food. Energetic nourishment. This sacred pattern is the nourishment that fills us and finds resonance within each human or animal body.
Energetic nourishment takes many, many forms. Beauty is a pervasive, readily accessible form of this nourishment. It finds us, sometimes takes us unaware, as it presents a pattern of sound, or color, or birdsong, or sunset, or beach sand. Or faces of loved ones, or faces of strangers. Pervasive beauty inhabits all the corners, secret and known, of our environment. It is and always will be.
From this pattern of beauty, we derive a nectar of loveliness, an essential pattern that interweaves into our fibers, our cells. Into our secret quantum deepness flows a pattern of food that is so primal that we cannot thrive without it.
Left Golden Rain Shower Tree with Moon. Right Banyan Tree with Blue Jade Vine flowers and ornamentals. Sometimes when the Blue Jade is blooming and the wind is still, you can clearly hear the bees’ song in the glade. | Photos by Miriam Trahan
So back to our friend the bee. With her patterns of dance and secret bee-song, she plants the very nourishment our bodies and spirits require for our highest and deepest well-being. This is the reason some food feels better to eat than other food. Food grown in well-tended soil, food from loving care, food from nature that is in harmony and balance has more of these deep patterns, from bees but also from other insects and tiny lives which are seen and unseen. The deeper and more intact nature’s patterns, the more of these patterns are infused into our food and the more energetic nourishment it contains.
This is true with beauty as well. The more beauty, the deeper and more resonant the patterns. This is our truest food, our wellspring of well-being.
Eat deeply and be nourished.
MT
9-5-17
Haiku, HI
Miriam Trahan is a writer, photographer and nature lover. She describes herself as a translator of information and ideas borne of deep listening. Originally from south Louisiana, Miriam lives on the island of Maui with her husband, some cats and a couple of clever dogs. You can find her work at www.beautycards.us or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/BeNourishedCards/. Miriam is a regular participant at our Conservation Conversations.
