I am lucky enough to walk to work in a little outbuilding where I live, so my commute is short and car-free.

It is not always, weirdly, for all of that, carefree.

I am in my head too often and too fast, and I imagine I probably walk with my head down and my posture bent forward, as if I’m already carrying a big pack of obligations, powering everything from my hips, instead of my heart.

But sometimes I manage to be more present with the moment and less burdened with the past and future and I meander via the raspberry patch or around the perimeter of the land or detour via the saskatoonbush and the wild apple tree that’s been all ravaged by hungry bears over the years and is a mess of snapped limbs and scar tissue and suckers of new life springing improbably in all directions and that has become a place I connect with my friend who took her own life 10 years ago. The apple tree has a wild rose clambering up and over it, and sometimes (although not often enough and now that I’m writing it I think I’ll have to make this happen in the next few days) I will crawl underneath it’s bent and ragged limbs and get snagged by rose thorns and low branches, and leave some small offering at its base for Ange.

This morning, instead of beating the direct path with my head bent low, I meandered via the garden beds that have been sadly unproductive after these hot, unwatered days, despite all the hope I poured into their soil 2 weeks ago, along with seeds, and I wondered if anything was alive out there, and there it was, the tiniest two leaves, a cucumber! The first! So I greeted it with the same tender effusion I try to wake my son up with – whispering “good morning, it’s morning, i hope you had a good sleep, we’ve got five minutes to get to the bus, Dad is making you pancakes…” trying to urge him into the day with our sheer happiness to see him, not our almost overwhelming stress at getting another morning rolling and all the ways this could go sideways.

“Hello little cucumber, you are the first! I am so happy to see you. You made it all the way to the surface. Oh, I hope you enjoy the feeling of the sun on your leaves. And tell the others how wonderful it is up here. Look how beautiful you are.”

greeting to the first cucumber sprout

I’m a desperate and unskilled gardener. Honestly. I’ll try anything, including sweet-talking the plants into life.

I skinnied my way between the cucumber bed and the raspberry patch, a pathway narrowing as the raspberries explode out of their confines and I could hear the incredibly loud buzz of bumble-bees.

Like airplanes. Their humming is so loud I can almost feel it in my chest cavity, and I resist the urge to duck as I sense one flying around my head, like a drone.

The bumblebees are massive and fuzzy and I love them. I love them for their devotion to these raspberry buds. And so I acknowledge them too. “Hello bumblebees. You are so beautiful. I love the song you’re singing. Thank you for pollinating all these flowers into raspberry fruits. What important work you’re doing. I hope you are enjoying yourselves…” but actually, I’m pretty sure they are, because I listened to a podcast the other day, (it should definitely come with a woo warning, but there were some real gems), and in answer to the question about what is the lineage of your gifts, and your way of being in the world, singer Abigal Bengson, after naming her ancestors and her mother, named the creatures that teach her, and then gave acknowledgement to:

the bumblebee, that goes out, ostensibly looking for food, but then gets so drunk in lust and love and the beauty of the world that it can’t help but make love to everything it sees, and in so doing, makes the whole world grow

Abigail Bengson

So, acknowledgement to the bumble-bee. A humble bee. Utterly essential. Doing its magical thing. Following its heart’s desire and leaving an entire world of blooming and flourishing in its wake.