In Serving, Can We BE the BEE?
Growing up in Chicago, the term “numbingly cold” was something not only expressed verbally, but forcefully felt, deep down into the bone. Transplanted now for 40 years to a latitude a mere and barely 300 miles south, that deep cold of Chicago winters is not something I miss, but I still cheer winter cloud-laden skies for a good layer of snow rather than a transient dusting.
If temperatures are something that truly can be registered bone-deep, it could explain the discomfort I feel at the other end of the thermometer when it has passed the 85-degree mark. Many friends who are native to this area seem invigorated with temperatures in the 90’s and motivated at that point for an intense game of tennis. “I just LOVE sweating,” enthuses one of my friends.
Somehow, “numbingly hot” seems like an impossible concept, but maybe it IS that phase just beyond incinerated. Nevertheless, right now seems numbingly hot.
Mornings are comfortable and pleasant for being outdoors, while a breeze consents to linger until midday heat really leans in. It calls for tending to the garden needs. These early summer mornings are also ideal for sitting down to read daily meditations with a good cup of coffee, iced or hot, both appealing options this time of day.
It seemed coincidental that on this morning, when the meditation placed before me was “Serve”, the garden offered up the gift of flower and bee, each serving each other. The meditation, “served” up by Daily Word, reminds me that service is giving and that in giving, we also receive.
In my garden, this flower is a true gift. It is a blossom on a butterfly bush, one planted long ago that for many, many seasons has given itself in service to insatiable deer. This year, the deer seem to be providing service with curious absence. Their gift is enabling the bush to blossom gloriously. And so, this summer, the butterfly bush serves the bees. And the bees serve right back, through the simple process of eating pollen.
The bee’s simple, humble self-sustaining act of eating serves this flower and others through what is essentially a side-effect of bees foraging for their food: pollination. And how that serves us all by helping plants produce the food we eat!
This brings me back full circle to some questions. One is, in the effort to serve, is it possible as a human being to do something as selfishly as a bee does collecting its food, and as a by-product, create so much good? Have we evolved so far to become so reliant on nature that the only thing we can give back through our normal physiological processes is CO2 for plants? I feel a greater obligation!
And another question: is perhaps the heat mind-numbing rather than bone-numbing? Simply watching a bee enjoy a pretty flower, coupled with the notion of service, has become a portal to the overwhelming interconnectedness that is simultaneously simple and complex.
