The Sound of Bees
Listen Here- Podcast Style Voice by Author
Imagination is not, as it is sometimes thought, the ability to invent, it is the capacity to disclose that which exists.
John Berger
What if creativity is always possible, never to search for, only to find? What if creativity is waiting just behind - plain sight? Hidden under the folded layers of space hooded in the cosmic flesh of place. Maybe creativity is just another way of seeing?
Place is a thin veil of space. Welcoming in the absent and allowing the present. What if creativity is the surrender of what already exists? The surrender of space to place. The sound of bees.
Canadian indigenous writer and storyteller Richard Wagamese wrote in Embers, “When I allow myself to feel my body, when I can inhabit it and allow myself to close off the world beyond my flesh, I become who I am- energy and spirit. I am not my mind. I am not my brain. I am stardust, comets, nebulae, and galaxies. I am trees and wind and stone. I am space. I am emptiness and wholeness at the same time.” Wagamese also wrote that “our soul contains our body”. We are a body in a soul. We are ensouled. The fingerprints of the cosmos draw their lines into the palms of soul. The sound of bees.
Space is everything and nothing. Space exists in that in-between of body and soul. In the awareness that inhabits this space in which the cosmos already exists within us. This is the unconscious space where creativity resides and is already connecting themes gathering information from all of our senses. Pollen giving birth to nectar. Rilke writing that “we are the bees of the invisible”.
Life is a struggle of space. The struggle between the eternity of the cosmos and the emptiness in our search for meaning. Looking for existence and missing the expression. Essence that’s always been right behind our eyes. Intimacy. Into-me-I-see. Maybe we are looking for a dance not to realize that we are already being danced. Not needing to seek. Creativity seeks us. Finds us. Waits inside of us. Creativity speaks through us.
These rhythms are not set by us. We are all participating in a larger creative act we are not conducting. We are being conducted. The artist is on a cosmic timetable, just like all of nature.
Rick Rubin (The Creative Act: A Way of Being)
Is the noise and chaos of how we live maybe taking away this space? When we allow more silence and stillness into our life we open up more of this space. A practice of solitude opens up the doors to awareness and we can feel into creativity allowing it to speak through us. Ripples of harmonic resonance. Flowing. Widening into the full circle of what already existed. Rivering into what is yet to come. Giving birth to what already exists. Never a product of. All ways a collaboration with. Cosmos and soul. Shaping and rounding mountains to sand. The ineffable and the eternal. Creativity is a collaboration between body and soul.
What is place but the breaking open of space? An emptying of self to reveal that the eternal is now. Place only hiding under the hood of space. Waiting to reveal the fullness of colours that have always been there. Intimacy. Into-me-I-see. Creativity moves beyond translation. Awareness being set free into consciousness. The transcendence of space in-to place. The nectar of awareness alchemizing into the honey of being. Transformation. The sound of bees.
The eternal is now. Not something yet to come. Not some thing arriving. The eternal is the now of the here. The brief glimpses into the place where everything is already breathing inside the spiral of everything. Presence has always existed in the past, the present, and the future. Somehow they all are one.
Timelessness. A moment. A becoming. An expression. The extension of space. Place.
This-ness? Connection beyond a knowing. Beyond a form. Maybe we get here by allowing. Receiving. Being. The ineffable beauty of the unknown. The confluence of celestial and terrestrial. Invisible and visible. Flesh and soul. The sacred convergence of space and place. The sound of bees.
The Sound of Bees
The first sound - is no sound.
I invite her in.
A naked indentation.
Awakened in the womb of soul.
The moist tip of tongue
reaching for the skin
of something invisible.
Lips moving to trace
the swollen edges of air.
Rounding to hold
an affirmation of stillness.
Giving birth to the shape
of sound.
A word does not yet exist.
It is alive - as silence.
To arrive as a single syllable.
Followed by fluctuating waves
rising and falling
into the surging tides
of expression.
Words.
Where silence and sound meet.
Words.
Always more and less.
Becoming language.
Pausing
to look back inside of me.
An absence of form.
A matter of presence.
An essence between the worlds.
Between the words.
Looking into something
that I cannot see.
Speaking through me.
The sound of bees.
An awareness.
Being - two places at once.
A hand guiding mine own.
Daring me to follow.
Calling me into
the gestured lips of the next sound.
Guiding me into
the guttural tongue of the next word.
I surrender to her.
The ink moving me.
Always knowing.
What I was about
to say.
© Jamie Millard
Thank You for Being - Here - on this journey of awareness made manifest.
We live into the hammer of our own story through the pillars of our own creation.
May you step into the intimacy of your own sacred expression. May you dance into the sound of bees. Happy June! The moon is waxing into a close encounter with the earth as we lean towards the longest day. Stay well. Happy exploring!
Lots of Love,
Jamie
the humming of a swarm of bees ~ we had the privilege of hearing it once when a swarm arrived in our courtyard. We went outside to watch and listen in awe (while our neighbours closed their windows and doors, staring out in fear from behind double panes of glass)
Once heard never to forget.
Your words hum, in my ears, like a buzz of akenning... 🙏 🐝
Ahhhh, Jamie….. I have just recovered the time that set me in my current course. The words find us….. all we have to do is let them out