Nolan Wells. Fires in the north. Mistrust and Facebook rumors and redirections. Corey Ruiz in Wisconsin, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine, genocides, climate catastrophe, detention centers and global instability and and and and and…

So much more.

How do I keep going?

How do I possibly pause and rest; play with my family, pretend all is well…. when everything is on fire?

Each day is too much and I feel it all. I want to change the world; I believe that’s the work, but I’m overwhelmed and tired and I don’t know what to do. I see it all.

So I retreat into escapism: weed, books, drink, TV, scroll hole, games, couch rot. I’m here on my phone instead of being present.

Help me.

Feel it all

Dear Feel it All,

In my family, we’ve read Margaret Wise Brown’s The Golden Egg Book (1947) on repeat. As a refresher, the story is about a wee bunny who finds an egg, wonders what’s in there, falls asleep, and a Duck hatches out. Then they are friends. There’s this line in the middle uncertainty of hatching, though, “He went to sleep because he was so sleepy.”

You’re feeling overwhelmed, because it is overwhelming.

And, dear Feel-It-All… You’re feeling like it is too much because it IS too much. This is too much. This is not normal. It is not right that so much injustice and pain and human evil is on display, and seems so damn unchecked.

People handle it in all sorts of ways; some of which you’ve named here as coping strategies. What strikes me in your letter, though, is the “I” of it all. Dear one, you cannot hold this alone. It will destroy you. It strikes me that this is one of the ways in which the systems of power have fully failed us: separating us from our neighbors, from shared grief, from the intimate knowledge of people working beside us in the co-creation of a new world.

Bees know they need each other. They are different entities of the organism of the hive. As individuals, they are in motion with each other, yet there ARE moments of pause. One such phenomenon is observed in the festooning, the bridging of tiny bee bodies holding onto each other so tightly that even as a frame is removed the bridge of their belonging hovers on the edges.

Festooning bees are like living links in a chain of connection. They aren’t moving. They are holding each other together, inside the hive. There’s a whole bunch of theories as to WHY they are doing this. My favorite thought is about how their rest and clinging to each other builds the temporary scaffolding for creation of the wax combs.

They use their linked rest as a way to build foundation for what is coming.

They do not do this alone, they are in community… and the rest is part of the pause point of building. Worker bees clinging to each other in measurement, scaffolding, or working their wax in anticipation.

This image comes to me in prayer about your letter because it demonstrates the pause point of rest, even in service to the ongoing care. I want to be clear; I’m not just saying that rest is for more work… though I do think that’s a part of it, depending on your role and capacity.

Let me try this on for a moment, even as I am on vacation with my family right now delighting in pause point from work. Do I feel the weight of the world here, now, as I play? Absolutely. And. I breathe in the wind off the lake, delight in a game with my small child, and the sparkle in the eye from my wife. I imagine these moments as honey, for this ongoing world we live in. A small taste of wonder, joy, delight, and something that I recall in moments of pain to carry forward. Each Honey memory to hold me for what is to come. This is but one point of connection, where there are varied opportunities for each one of us.

The other part of this, Feel-It-All, is the critical turn from Feeling to Doing. That’s the prayer I have for you, as you accurately point to the Too Much of the World, the Overwhelming Trauma inflicted on so many of our communities. You want to change the world… and you can.

It starts small, reaching towards your network, like bees in a chain.

Reaching towards those with whom you have trusting relationships, and asking for help.

Reaching towards the places of organizing already set up and stepping into one meeting about their onboarding process of learning and following.

Reaching towards the deep honey within yourself, or that which has been built by a community of support, and using that faith held beside you to act. I pray that your overwhelm, your rage, your mourning… all of that fuels the rigorous call to help bring about the world as it can be.

The final thing I’ll name is something I learned from my friend Tracy Howe; regarding recovery and rest. Recovery is the necessary stop time that enables us to re-set, gather back that which we have expended, and let our bodies heal. This is probably closer to the list of escapes that you may have named. Rest is the joyful, intentional, recognition of pause and not working, to play and delight and just bee.

I think of Tricia Hersey’s clarion call (especially for Black Women) that Rest is Resistance. When the world extracts labor from you, and when that labor is oft unacknowledged, rest itself becomes resistance. Or Black Disabled poet activist Audre Lorde, saying: Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare. The critical piece about learning from these leaders, though, is that rest is not equally distributed. How political your rest is, how much we call it “resistance,” is also related to how the systems of this world treat you.

Here, Feel-It-All, is where your knowing of your own circumstance will help you determine what comes next. Do you need more community? How do the feelings in response to the world guide what comes next? Or is the collapse at the point of opportunity to pause offer an insight to the necessary recovery? Or, beloved, do you just actually need more, real, rest?

Perhaps your next right step is right before you in your family and friends. With your family, consider 15 mins of “yes.” Whatever it is that those near and dear to you are asking— Yes. Whatever game the wee one wants to play—Yes. Whatever is reasonable and actionable and present, just—Yes.

With your friends, consider a textual check in. “Im thinking about you” can go a long, long way in a world that teaches us that we are isolated from each other. And “you matter to me,” can be a festooned lifeline to the connections we care for each other.

I carry Nolan, Corey, Johan Sebastián… and so many more… with me as one of the WHY’S for this work. NO ONE should have to see their family suffer like theirs, or lose their life because of the color of their skin or place of origin. NO ONE. And so it drives the steps of building the world, necessary for the long life work. It’s slow and ongoing, and the commitment of a lifetime. And lifetimes deserve joy and rest, too.

Whatever that is for you, I hope that you find honey in the moments of joy. Gather it, cherish it, notice it. And, beloved… try to do so on purpose.

Love,
Beekeeper

P.S. This blog is an ongoing conversation with readers. Please, write in with something you’re holding in awareness, thinking deeply about, or wonder, along with the bees! I’d love to love on you.

Write in, Here

I have a tough relationship with work, and sometimes I conflate what I can accomplish with self worth. I forget that I am more that what I can do for other people. I blame capitalism for this. I don’t hate what I do for work- I actually quite enjoy it. I know a lot of people can’t say the same.

Yet, I often wonder if this is what I am meant to do, and sometimes day dream about paths not taken, you know?

I am doing something that was a goal of mine for a long time, and sometimes it doesn’t quite feel right. I get a little existential about it in a quarter life crisis way.

So, I’m writing in to ask what does it mean to feel called to something? Can your calling be different from your work? And how can you tell if you have been called?

Best,

A little burnt out

Dear Burnt Out,

I was just talking with a colleague about the painful nature of potential, and call. I think there’s a myth out there, perpetuated by the very nature of the capitalistic system you name, of One True Calling.

I think that’s part of this binary system of right/wrong, good/bad, work worth doing/ work perpetuating the problem, pure/dirty, heaven/hell…. and all that. These binaries are seductive because they allude to something being relatively easy.

And as we know by living; rarely is something just easy, no strings attached.

You mention that this feels like a quarter-life crisis; and I want to affirm that noticing. I might hazard a guess that the mourning of existential dread is that of potential: If I go all in on THIS… then I can’t do the rest of THAT (whatever your THAT is.) Each “yes” towards something is a “no” towards something else: a different job, or life, or relationship. Similarly, each “no” spoken or chosen through inaction is making room for the potential of “yes.” And there’s so much liminal space in between.

I turn towards the bees to think about the roles held in conversation with Call.

Honeybees, in their wee lives, hold a lot of jobs. The average lifespan of a honeybee in foraging season is about six weeks; egg to death.

She’ll emerge from her cell and begin her first call for the hive: cleaning up the cells she and her sisterworkers have emerged from. This will hold her for just a few days, but then she’ll move towards nursing: caring for the young larvae and feeding each of the baybees, with royal jelly, and then a mix of pollen and honey called bee bread.

Her body will change a few weeks in, activating wax glands to help build the honeycomb in preparation for the expansion of the hive. They’ll also tend to the cleaning and tidying; gluing and adapting the wax around with the exact space needed for passage.

From there, the bee inches closer to the exit of the hive, becoming a guard at the entrance. As the workers come inside, she greets them, smells them for consistency, and allows them in. And if other entities try to get in, they are chased away and/or stung.

Finally, all things stable, after a few weeks at the entrance, the honeybee will shift to forager. She’ll leave the hive going to collect pollen, nectar, and water. She’ll brave the elements, following the directions of her sisters, and she’ll experience wear and tear on her body. She’ll be in this role until she dies.

…Or, until the hive calls for something different. They can change roles, you see, depending on the needs of the whole. The colony can inspire them to mature faster through the roles, or revert, if that’s necessary.

All this honeybee role clarity is called “temporal polyethism.” Their bodies, and their brains change mostly through age, and sometimes the chemical signals of the others. In short, the jobs are different, depending on the age and the needs of the hive. But, the roles were never the point.

Their Job does not equal call.
Job is a means to the end, and it is what the colony needs.
Job is the methodology of contribution.
Job is flexible, sometimes enjoyable, and sometimes perfunctory.

Call is about the survival of the hive.
Call is about the collective: how are the children (and they are ALL our children as per James Baldwin, and echoed by Ms. Rachel.)
Call is about the sweetness made in micro incidents of joy, and collecting and sharing.

Perhaps it’s similar for you? Where the work you hold can be more expansive than the Job that ascribes financial worth.

For me, Call is something which shows up in an accumulation of micro choices, the ethical “yes” to the next right step— whatever that is. Part of it is a Yes into this work, but Lord knows Pastorin’ isn’t always fun, easy, or even enjoyable.

More than that, it’s a Yes into the questions of how do I show up today in alignment with my faith and values?

Faced with an important choice, I take a moment to measure what is important through equity primes:
How does this impact my family?
Have I prayed about this?
What is the “yes” here, and what am I saying “no” to?

When I want to get right with my faith and a call towards the future:
How does this help bring about a collective liberation? Who am I bringing along? (Who am I leaving behind?)
Am I making this decision on comfort? And if so, what’s the cost, to whom?
As a Christian pastor, I add: is this towards the direction that Jesus teaches me to organize?

All of my Call is a culmination of those micro choices that point to the world I want to help be a part of building. It’s one centered in a reproductive justice articulated by the Black Mothers of the Movement in Sistersong: the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. All of us. And I want to be clear: in the future I am part of co-creating… it’s a world with a garden of genders, a tapestry of race and ethnic expression and culture, an accessibility of Creation. A hum of hallelujah.

Each “yes” towards the world we imagine for our great, great, great, great, granddaughters is one that carries a spark of hope within it, a foundation offered towards that which is to follow.

My job is a way to help bring that about. And my job will change, like the bees, in age and in wisdom, and the needs of our hive.

So, too, Burnt Out, may yours. I encourage you to think of some questions that help you align your micro-decisions to your values. What is important to you about how you show up in the world? Is it family, rest, stability? Is it communal care, connection, and collaboration? Whatever those values are, you can begin to notice how they show up in your job, and in your life.

They can help in discernment with which “yes” becomes important, and how. And how holy “no” can be; making space for what is critical in the ongoing labor of alignment, and world-building towards the future that you want for yourself, and your community.

Finally, Burnt Out Bee-loved… I would offer that your very thoughtfulness about this tells me that you are doing the work. Your longing of thoughtful contribution IS a recognition of call. Breathe, bee, and be intentional in the ways in which you become closer to the version of yourself supporting values, community, and commitments.

So much love with you, dear one.

P.S. This blog is an ongoing conversation with readers. You’re invited! Please, write in with something you’re holding in awareness, thinking deeply about, or wonder, along with the bees! I’d love to love on YOU.

💗🍯🐝

Write in, Here

Dear Everything-Everywhere,

This whole conversation is one we could write out, isn’t it? I am also of this generation where I witnessed women connect over this issue more than nearly anything else in acquaintanceship.

I’m really sad about it, when I think of it. I mourn the brilliance of women funneled into bodily shame. The negative focus put upon our bodies is a persistent little parasite wiggling its way into our internal narratives.

Wait.

Let me pause.

Before attending to the tactics of those who are constantly trying to shape narratives of distraction, I must first witness to the wonder and brilliance of women, and our bodies.

Oh, beloved sister(s), you are created exactly as you were called to be. Your beautiful body in curves and stretch marks, strong thighs and hips for movement, bold voices and gentle belongings— aren’t you a wonder of nature!

God delights in you, dear one.

(And to be honest, I get it. Women are amazing in so many ways.)

There’s the other side of this conversation, too, where we’re becoming more attentive to the tactics; and wise to them….

…but the brain pathways of this tired script are very, very easy to fall back into.
then there’s more shame when we didn’t “do it right.”

It’s a parasite. A mite sneaking in to the beginnings of our understandings of the world and ourselves.

Mites are persistent.

In a honeybee hive, Varroa Mites are potentially one of the greatest threats to domestic beekeeping. They feed on the bodies of the bees and can cause hive collapse quite quickly. And like the tactics of Those Seeking To Make Us Smaller, those little jerks keep adapting to mitigation treatments.

Longtime beekeepers remember a time when working with the hive didn’t include a regular intervention to prevent excessive mites. I’ve heard some of the old timers scoff at the interventions that are available today. And I’ve heard others that embrace each new technology of moderation.

I’ve tried a few, personally:

• The dribble method— where oxalic acid is dribbled on the honeybee cluster, ideally killing the adult mites riding on their backs.

• Formic Pro— a formic acid soaked patty that is placed directly on the frames, and the vapor penetrates through the capped brood, killing the mites hiding there.

  

• Oxalic Vapor— Some packages (10,000 bees, plus queen, used to start a hive) are hit with the vapor even before installation into the hive, and the vapor crystalizes all over them. For packages, this is particularly effective as it kills nearly all the mites.

There’s more. Even recently, I’ve heard of two different treatments I’m curious about:

• Norroa — an RNA- based treatment that stops mite reproduction, and,

• I saw a reel where a beekeeper experimented with using Nettle as a natural intervention for mites. That intrigues me…

(Aside, I’d love to hear what other beekeepers are doing!)

All to say: Varroa mites aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. They are getting more voracious and beekeepers are adapting methods of management in response to the parasite.

Beekeepers aren’t failing at mite management... we’re adapting. Just like women seeking to live fully in the world; we, too, must adapt to the methods that continue to attempt to control us.

Like you, I don’t blame the women. I blame these damn parasitic systems.

I also acknowledge that there are different standards of what is acceptable in fatness for white women, brown women, young women, old women, black women, trans women, disabled women, rich women and poor women, and that these struggles are compounding in so many ways.

I also want to be clear that there are different pathways of healthiness that are right for different people. While fatphobia is a real thing, well documented and significant to health impacts… (I think of the good ground work that Anastasia Kidd did in “Fat Church” for the Christian context I am in…) Some folks have also found their own liberation for other compounding health issues through interventions that also impact their body mass.

Your question of how do we trust this is a hard one, because I can’t always tell, from inside the moment, whether I’m holding a treatment or a new shape adapted to by the same old threat. Also, if bee club teaches me anything, it’s that 3 beekeepers will have 5 opinions of what’s right! I won’t know what’s really happening in the hive until I test it: count the mites, check the brood, see what’s actually living and what’s actually dying. Trust, here, isn’t a feeling. It’s an ongoing practice of testing. And faith.

Here’s where I think the communal hive as a whole comes in.

Decisions about whether to have intervention through medication is a conversation that faithful and community minded people are having in their doctors offices… and also in their homes and communities of care. They are weighing (no pun intended) the ethics and impacts clearly and carefully. I’ve heard stories of complete chronic pain turnaround, as well as critique on the ways in which these new tactics have supported or challenged the people we are and the ideals we hold.

The communities of care that hold us accountable to our values, our health, our bodies, and our wellness— these communities are our hive. There are different communities for each of us, weighing different risks, in different rooms. It’s not a decision in a vacuum, it’s a decision of intervention in a context of care. The labor of staying attentive, aware, and aligned wiht collective liberation is ongoing. And, Everything-Everywhere, I do believe change is possible in community. It’s the hive work. It takes us all.

Just like the labor of staying on top of those damn pesky Varroa. It takes work to survive. And, surviving in bodies that are different from the norm presented by whiteness, ability, and wealth is revolutionary, and communal.

All to say, Everything-Everywhere, you are wonderful, Created, and held in a community of care as you discern what is your own thriving wellness, challenge what is tactics of control, and delight in your body.

As it is. Not as they say it needs to be.

GIRL. You are created GOOD. Very, Very good.

Yes, you.

I’ve been thinking about you. It’s been aching; the cognitive dissonance.

-A 250th anniversary of something many have been brainwashed for a long time to think was pure celebration, nationalism, and love of country…

…yet joining together as we watch it fall apart from the ideals that were always aspirational…

-Bring all your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free… yet borders and walls and get out now; and excessive reactions to those who step in as helpers…

-A country claiming to be Christian but dismantling the systems that attend the clarion call of the Gospel to care for those who are forced into poverty without a way to access basic human needs like home, food, family, love, healthcare, belonging…

It leaves me looking around at these little apocalypses wondering for change, grasping for hope, and stretching towards possibility. These multiple realities are one of the reasons why I started this column; with love letters and honeybees and sprinkles of hope and meaning making.

Honey for the Apocalypse is a response to the pain we carry and the connection we seek. This world sure can toss a sting, swelling and itching into the discomfort of how humans can collectively fail each other. Yet, when we gather together, hum and sing and work tiny revolutions of collective care, we make sweet, sweet honey.

Honey for the Apocalypse… and it’s always an apocalypse somewhere, for someone.

It’s so easy to feel alone in this world. And, dear reader, you are not alone. There are so many of us seeking our roles, doing our best, and stretching just a bit further. I’m so glad to be in this work with you.

I’m in this work beside you because I believe that there is a role for us all, and that Christianity is ONE OF the methodologies of hope and persistence through turmoil. Not the only one, but certainly one that we are uniquely equipped to use, together. For me, it is the meaning-making in the long work ahead, and it’s a tool that connects me to those that have come before.

So using all the tools of meaning-making I have available to me, I’ll be here praying, tending to the honeybees, writing love letters, and building communities.

And, I need help! I want to invite you to help shape the places in our lives that need some love. Truly, I invite you to write in. Whether anonymously or with a name only you’ll know, I’m the only one who sees the letters; I always pray on them, and I respond publicly to most with love and grace and the patterns of the honeybees.

Write In Here

…about anything that matters to you: the doubt you haven’t said out loud, the grief you’re still carrying, the question you don’t know who else to ask, the relational challenge in family or circumstance…

Subscribe now

…for weekly love letters and a touch of Honey for the Apocalypse.

I want to note that the letters I’m responding to are submitted by real people. And the responses are my own, with pictures I’ve taken of (mostly) my hives. This project is a slow launch, and an imperfect one. You see, one of the goals that I’ve held for myself this year is that I’ll just do The Thing, whatever it is; and fail in public, and own it.

Tending honeybees certainly comes with the stings. While I can wear protective equipment, they are still responding with instinct and guardianship of their hive. Stepping out to try and do This Thing weekly… I know there will be stings. And, for me... I’d rather attend to the places of pain while tentatively putting something out there than sit back safely.

What I have to offer is my words, and clarity of my work in this ongoing movement of co-creating a new world. I have honey, dear reader, and I want to share it. Not for personal gain, but for the joy of amplification of hope in a world echoing despair.

Will you join me?

Hope, even still. 💗🍯🐝
PS: Write In Here, and see you soon.

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I’m someone who could be identified as “severely mentally ill.” The new diagnoses keep piling up (and, for our purpose here, it doesn’t really matter what they are but they’re “big ones/ scary ones”).I’ve lived most of my life knowing/ suspecting this but I’ve finally found the right combination of doctors and therapists to help figure out “my complex case.”

For the most part, being undiagnosed the majority of my life, I’ve had periods of doing well and periods of limping along (that were actually periods of major crisis but I’ve been who I’ve been for my whole life so I’ve always minimized them). But, the past 5 years or so, I’ve had major work-missing, hospitalization-needing, suddenly-disappearing-from-daily-life crises. I’ve lied about the cause of my absences every time. (Appendicitis! Death in the family! Someone else had a crisis I need to attend to urgently!)

Is mental illness something to be ashamed of? Of course not. Do I want to have to tell people who depend on me in leadership roles to worry that I can’t handle my work? Of course not. Do I want to frighten my loved ones who have to keep pulling me up out of the swamp and also make them have to lie and on my behalf? Of course not.

I have deep admiration for people who publicly state that they live with Schizophrenia or Borderline Personality Disorder. Go you! Defeat stigma! Show that you, an accomplished and capable person, mange all you manage while also hearing voices or not always knowing what’s real and what’s psychosis!

The reality is that even though ADA protections exist (barely), there are many ways to fire a difficult employee without saying, “We’re letting you go because you’re Bipolar and you miss too much work.” The reality is that I can’t lose my job and health insurance. The reality is that whenever people who are close to me and do know the truth don’t leave me alone with their kids, I wonder if they think I’m too crazy and unsafe. The reality is that it would be so much easier to function well in the world if I could say to colleagues or my boss, “I’m overwhelmed. I need to go home for a nap now I will make up this work/ these hours this weekend when I’m rested and can think clearly again.”

Keeping my secrets hurts me and others. Keeping my secrets protects me and others. There may come a point when I can no-longer keep my secrets (I’m hospitalized too long or too often; my behavior in public is bizarre). Part of me says, get ahead of this while you’re still in control of the narrative. Also, your bravery may help someone else. Part of me says, the stakes for you are far too high and you can care about justice and act for justice without lying yourself down on an altar for sacrifice.

What’s a Crazy Person to Do?
(Edit away; this was written in a tizzy.)

Dear Crazy Love,
(Can I call you that? You call yourself “crazy,” so let me pour love on it, too.)

What a world we live in: putting your most tender parts in tension with each other, every day. I feel it with you, through your public pain, privately offered here. This is so, so hard, and as you already know, there are no easy answers. Whether we are caring for mental health with the gifts of prescriptions and talk-therapy, or we are navigating the broken systems of healthcare full of waiting for answers and more paperwork than any person should have to manage alone., there are so many of us navigating these places of stigma and disclosure, disability and public presentation of wellness.

You may already know that bees don’t have a lot of room within the hive for disease. Truth be told, I’ve been praying for YOU, the author of this letter, since I started writing these love letters of honeybees and people. What happens when we look to the reality of complex illness in a hive that doesn’t clearly hold space for it? Then, how do I hold space for disability justice and integrated communal care here, when the bees themselves do not have tolerance for such things inside their hive?

So in the awareness of the tension to follow, I’ve been praying for you, even without knowing who you would bee. I’m still praying, even in the writing and what’s to follow.

What strikes me is that you know this tension as a whole life. You’ve clearly named all parts of it, and could spiral in any one direction with all the talking points written out until you are exhausted and finally pass out. (Oh, sweetheart, the ache… it’s so much.)

The truth about the bees: In the hive, honeybees are tending to the whole with a bias towards health. They use the scent of wellness as the biometric of care, and nurse bees quietly remove brood that holds disease. Guard bees attend to the entrance, and will not let bees return to the hive if they carry signs of illness. For the hive, this is protective, hygienic behavior. And if we rest right here with the bees, then the bees join the systems of this world, yet again discarding you.

Yet, that’s not what I, or all the divine which is Love, would call Truth. You are not a diseased bee. You ARE a whole, holy, human in the world, just as you are. You belong. It’s not contingent upon what the systems of this world decide.

I actually think you’re more like the hive as a whole. Within you, two realities operate at once: the public self performing, and the private self recovering. While your bodymind could be attending to one reality, another part of you is holding something completely different. You’re aware of the possibilities of each outcome; what disclosure costs, and what silence does. Also, the protection of disclosure, and the safety of silence. You are the hive, holding two true things at the same time; and you don’t have to choose between them to remain one hive.

The blessing, for you, sweet Crazy Love, is in a shift of perspective, where you can.

There are gifts that each of your private and public selves offer. The recovery, the pause point, the self preservation… it invites micro moments of peace where-ever they can arrive. When you can sit, breathe deeply, and trust that the hive is complex, whole, and tending to itself.

When the way you’re Created offers you the ability hold disclosure’s cost and silence’s safety in the same breath, you are able to hold a more empathetic view of the world in all of its complexities. You are able to hold the hard work of justice in tension with the reality of these systems because it is operating on the micro level within your very self. You understand the risks, bodily, and also know the hope of belonging.

I want to also notice the slight mourning in the lack of your “bravery” of coming out in service to protection. Crazy Love, I’m not sure you need to step into that teaching role with your life as the subtext. Some don’t have the privilege of choice; and as you’ve mentioned, there may come a time where you don’t either. It’s a particular call to make that step, and it’s not for everyone.

For then, you can set up what needs doing now with the people whom you choose. Whether it is a trusted friend or colleague with safe words of checking in, or a medical professional along the way, you may be able to set up the narrative of your future from a place of wise mind, in the event of unavoidable disclosure.

What letter do you write, now, for those who might need it, then?
How do you help people see the fullness of you, preemptively?

And, almost more importantly, how do you hold your own journey with the deep compassion of one who knows and navigates this space of both/and/and beyond?

In a teaching apiary, hives are pulled apart to look at the components within. And, there are stronger and weaker hives within each apiary. If I were to pull apart one of my hives for something more extensive than a basic inspection, I would choose the one that is stronger, ready, and more likely to recover easily. Of the smaller hive, I’m more protective, so its energy resources are able to be fully attentive to the critical work of survival.

Your work, Crazy Love, is to bee the hive you are. Let the people whom you trust know enough to tend you well. Write the letter now, that you may need them to have, later. Hold trust that the Divine who is Love is not standing at the entrance to Belonging with a scent biometric on “healed enough to enter”, but is more like the beekeeper, walking gently, waiting for the right moment, and protective over you when that’s what’s most needed. The Divine is cheering on your survival, right here in this world that wasn’t built for it.

And you are not alone in shaping these systems towards that which is more just, more generous, more aligned with the world God calls us to build, together.

💗🍯🐝

P.S. Dear Reader— yes you! Are you holding something close for which you might need a little honey? Then write in and and join alongside this ever-growing hive of hope and care! 🐝

i’m incredibly possessive over my home space, and i have been ever since i can remember. i’m currently working through that in therapy (EMDR, all that jazz) and discerning that it started when i was young & was reinforced many times over the years. all that’s to say, being territorial around my home feels like an innate part of me, at the core of how i exist in the world. as an introvert, this has been incredibly helpful over the years -- knowing i have a space to retreat from society & self-soothe, rest, etc.

now that’s not to say that i don’t let anybody in my house haha. i have family and friends come and stay overnight, friends have gathered in my living room for craft afternoons, & i love hosting backyard cookouts and potlucks. but in general, i’m pretty intentional in who i invite into that space, and what access they have (i know, i know, i’m also currently working through my relationship with power & control with my wonderful therapist)

when asked in an ice-breaker game years ago, “what would you change about yourself, if you could?” i answered that i wished i was more hospitable and open to hosting people at my house. the more i thought about it, the more i remembered how often hospitality is talked about in scripture. as a public-facing christian leader, this seems like something i should be better at, right!?

and yet, as a public-facing person, with a public online presence, i adore having a place just for me and the handful of folks i invite in. i like that i’m hard to access when i’m at home. i enjoy having decorations in nooks & crannies that nobody but me & my cat may ever see

ultimately, i feel like i *should* be more hospitable. but i already share so much of myself with others -- is it wrong to be a bit of a dragon in a den, all curled up & cozy?

—Dragon in Her Den

Dear Dragon,

First, let’s acknowledge that you are holding some high standards for yourself. I hear in your letter the pressure to be fully, fully known; and perhaps witnessed as one who is as she “should” be in hospitality. It IS totally all throughout the scriptures!

However, the people writing, and most of the audiences reading (until only the last 30 years or so) didn’t have internet. The public presentation of self was a mostly contained offering. And those hospitality texts we love to cite, Romans 12:13, Hebrews 13, 1 Peter 4, were written to communities under pressure, displacement, exile. The instruction to welcome strangers was issued to people who were themselves strangers. That is a different situation than you all cozied up with your cat.

Further, Jesus and his inner circle were nomadic, wandering with the Good News, and found “home” through the hospitality of strangers. Of course hospitality is everywhere in scripture. It was survival literature for people without a fixed address. It makes sense to me that the value runs so deep, especially when we collectively imagine a world where all have access to the choice of home.

And notice: the primary unit of hospitality in those texts is not the house, it’s the table. The bread. The oil. The shared meal. Many do that work through their public professions, and how they show up in community in mutual aid. You are already doing that every time you gather people in the church you serve, the communion you offer, and every time you host a potluck in your backyard.

Of course you’re not wrong to be protective of your home space.

Have you seen the inside of a honeybee hive? It’s predictable, and perfect for the bees. They create it to be what it needs to be for the overall function of the hive. Young bees make wax through special glands on their abdomens. They shape that wax by chewing it up, and then shaping it into perfect hexagonal shapes. It’s precise; exactly as it needs to be. There’s some choice about hive production there: slightly larger cells produce drones (male bees), and specially shaped cells dangle with extra room for the Queen.

A honeycomb cell functions for multiple purposes and can shift. Eggs laid within them become larvae, then emerge as honeybees. Or they fill it with honey and cap it. The cells themselves are boundaries and borders to the function of the hive. They contain everything necessary for the bees, and the integrity of each hexagonal chamber is what makes the whole structure possible.

I think about their protectiveness of their hive. Any perceived threat is going to feel it, physically, through their sting, and bees stand guard at the entrance for intruders to protect their honey horde, their young, their queen. However, when I meet the honeybees out foraging, they are so gentle. When they are on the flowers in my garden, the hospitality of pollination is so abundant! They offer tiny messages of hope and reproduction from flower to flower.

They aren’t able to pollinate if there’s no hive to bring the pollen back to. Their protected hive is the foundation of their hospitality to the bloom.

Dragon, there are many ways to be hospitable, and your assessment of your own is only applying one lens, through the most intimate part of your inner castle. It’s not a binary, sweetheart; where either you’re entirely hospitable or nothing counts at all. It’s a spectrum of care where your public facing self is hosting a hospitality of hope for all whom you encounter. It’s certainly not a control issue to want your home as you like it.

The boundaries made of your home space: the wax cells each holding a treasure telling a story for your own eyes only… this isn’t a failure of abundance, but an architecture of sustainability for the very public facing work you do with your brain, your proclamation, your internet self.

As ministry carries on, it is even more important to have places where you can let yourself just bee. Bee messy… bee hyper attentive to your space… bee cozy…

And bee hospitable to the tiny cat with whom you’ve chosen to share your home.

It’s impossible to be ALL on, ALL the time, and restoration and retreat enables you to sip from the sweet cozy honey of your den to emerge ready to pollinate all that might bloom in communities.

The last thing I’ll offer is through the lens of the Ordained Ministers’ Code of the United Church of Christ. While specific to the UCC, I do think it’s applicable in wider ways. Amongst commitments to church, community, ethical behavior, growth, and family, is the following line:

I will honor my need for time for physical and spiritual renewal, recreation, and vacation.

Dragon-in-Her-Den, your home is your spiritual renewal. Cherish it.

💗🍯🌅

P.S. Dear Reader— yes you! Are you holding something close for which you might need a little honey? Then write in and and join alongside this ever-growing hive of hope and care! 🐝

I’m a trans man in my 40s. I’ve been on testosterone for over a decade, am married to a woman, have a child, and most people who meet me assume I’m a cis man. Some people in my life know I’m trans, but many don’t, and I don’t always volunteer the information.

What I’m struggling with is that even after all these years, I still feel, and this has led to a lot of social anxiety. Part of me is always wondering: Can they tell? Are they noticing something? Are they looking at my height, my voice, my body, my history? I often feel like I’m scanning for signs that someone has “clocked” me, even when there’s no evidence they have.

At the same time, people frequently assume I’m a gay man. I’m actually bisexual and mostly attracted to women, but I have a softer presentation and mannerisms that seem to lead people to conclusions about me. Intellectually, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being perceived as gay. Emotionally, though, I notice it can make me anxious because it feels like another example of being seen inaccurately.

I sometimes wonder whether this is less about gender and more about a lifetime of being misunderstood. Growing up before transition, I spent years feeling watched, judged, and out of place. Even though my circumstances have changed dramatically, my nervous system may not have gotten the memo.

How do you know when you’re responding to present reality versus old hypervigilance? How do you stop monitoring yourself in social situations and trust that you’re allowed to simply exist? And for those of us who spent years being misread, how do we become less attached to being understood correctly by everyone we meet?

—Still Scanning

Dear Still Scanning,

Each time I do a hive inspection, I’m trying to get into the hive and find the story that is told by the whole of it. I lift a frame, spin it around, check what I can see in the sun, and what the wax tells me. Frame by frame, scanning for signs of the queen, patterns of laying, and ratios of pollen cakes and honey stored.

I’m looking out the window now, as I write, and I have no idea what’s happening in the hive. I’m holding the honeybees in my awareness, in my prayers, but mostly holding out faith that they are fine. They’re bees, after all. They’ve been doing this for a long time. They are probably fine. Schrödinger’s beehive? They are fine and not fine.

As I read your letter, I’m (tenderly) imagining your inner life, and all that you’re holding. I want to acknowledge that writing in was a brave step of knowing, and that your self-awareness is likely both a curse and a blessing. Your world has held so many walls and shields out of necessity, and I imagine that there are parts of you that want to go fully “under the radar” and other parts of you that want to be fully seen. Honey, you’ve gotta be tired.

It makes me think about how much happens in the darkness of the hive. How bees attend to their young, communicate where resources are, regulate their environment, and more. The queen moves cell to cell only in the dark. Bee cognition, navigation, and labor are all oriented by mechanisms that don’t require being seen, at all. The richness of the hive is all internal, out of sight.

Even still, I can’t actually know what’s going on fully, even through an inspection. That’s true for honeybees and that’s true for humans. Each one of us (all carrying different weights of assumptions) are moving through the world misunderstood: in intention, in leadership, in decision making. The only one who has access to your full, entire story is you. You have been doing the essential work of your life in the dark, in conditions where being seen wasn’t possible, and that work is real regardless of whether any beekeeper ever read it correctly.

Except for the Divine.

I believe that through the presence of the Holy, you are known, witnessed and held in Love. All of you. All those memories. (yes, even that one.) All those anxieties and worries and secret shames. You, in the way you know yourself: Trans and Holy, Father and Partner, still training the recesses of your inner life to be as you want them to be.

When I’m in a place of incredible discomfort of feeling misunderstood or unknown in leadership and intention (which happens more often than I’d like to admit), I pray:

Search me and know me, God, and know my inmost thoughts.
…It’s ironic, in its own way, praying Psalm 139.
Even before I speak, God, you know my words.
…Mostly because they’ve tried to use that one against us, a lot.
For it was You who knit me together in my mother’s womb,
…But the words become instead something that affirms us: our loves, our choices, our bodies, our power.
I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

I imagine the opening of my life, my heart, my ribcage, and submitting to an inspection only from God. Sometimes with a challenge: HERE I AM. Sometimes with a whimper. here.i.am. While it doesn’t make me more understood by the people, it does center me in who I am, and WHOSE I am. Praying clarifies who and how I want to be, and sets me up to choose how to move intention forward.

For the bees, there is no way that a beekeeper could know the full story of the hive. Sometimes I get all up in there and am fully surprised about what they’ve done. I can’t know what is happening in the dark of the hive, before the lid comes off and after it goes back on. The inspection is a moment. The hive is a life.

Honeybees need a place to retreat. So do you. A place to just bee, outside of the gaze of inspection. I suspect you may already know what that is, and have organized it into a sanctuary of rest. I’d also offer that you may need considerable time to structure into that sanctuary to ensure that you’re able to do the work you’re called to do when you leave the hive. It lets your nervous system re-set and move forward held in the strength of the hive with intention.

Discernment about who and how you show up will be a lifelong sidekick… a true, but not necessarily bad thing. I’m not sure the vigilance really does go away. It served you faithfully once, and will be an easy pathway of response to any circumstance for a long time. Even asking these questions shows that you’re noticing the shifts within you, and offers you the pause point to choose how to show up. The self-preservation and vigilance fires in the body, and you notice (!amazing!) and then you get to choose.

When bees leave to go foraging, if they meet another bee on a flower, they’ll know if that bee is part of their hive. Even out and about, the primary sense of recognition is smell. The scent is there, offered by the pheromones of the queen. You are not alone. You, too, are part of a hive of community in the liminal places of gender, of knowing.

I pray that you can feel it, especially in moments where our visible hive is so present in celebration, Pride, community resilience and resistance. Happy Pride, fam.

May you find those who are able to see the parts of you that you want seen. May you tend to your inner life with reverence, and may the overflowing ongoing work of self-alignment be gentle upon you.

💗🍯🐝

P.S. Dear Reader— yes you! Are you holding something close for which you might need a little honey? Then write in and and join alongside this ever-growing hive of hope and care! 🐝

What do the bees say about starting over… yet again? Perhaps i ask this because I often receive this question too from those I care for and sometimes wonder how to answer. Perhaps it’s because right now, the journey of starting again this time around feels particular filled with grief and exhaustion.

If you had asked me 8 months ago how I was, my answer would have been “doing amazing”. Yet in these last 8 months that has completely disappeared. I have experienced the departure of a mentor figure of mine, the loss of my beloved fur friend and said goodbye to the community of faith that has held me through my seminary experience… and I graduated seminary. This life transition should feel exciting and in some ways it has yet in many ways the life I am stepping into feels more like the desert than an abundant forest that people keep saying I’m heading into.

My life in a way has been a journey of starting over and over again, this feels not entirely new. I have moved time and time again, transitioned in the middle of programs, even my own identity and I know in my future that there will be similar moments for the vocation of my life, both personal and for the people I will walk with. At the same time this starting over feels particularly exhausting and painful. I am holding the grief of what was and the dreams of what is yet to be.

Sure, I know that there are many parts of me are foundational that remain the same, the love for music I carry, my belief and trust in God, the experiences and skills I have built over the years, the understanding of the basic steps I need to reach for. But now I enter into this new place in my life, being called to continue to care for those around me especially this summer at the same time feeling like I’m having to build a whole new house in the wilderness. I wonder how can I offer hope when the ways in which I have built a ministry of hope with God lay in burnt pieces all around me and the relationships I built this identity and call with have scattered? How do we show up for Gods people who are rebuilding when we too are doing the same? How do bees respond when all they built has fallen apart and there is no other option but to start a new?

Sincerely

Starting Yet Again

Dear Starting Yet Again,

I remember when I left the first church I was called to serve. My heart ached— especially for the kids I got to love. I missed them, and I was going to miss all these special moments that I’d spent years anticipating and holding alongside them and their families as they moved on… without me. I ached for the micro revelations that I got the grace to witness as people met each other, and met God through each other. I ached for the sweetness of community, but also… I knew that I had to go.

Honeybees do not pause before they swarm. There are signs, if you are trained to spot them: filled queen cups, overcrowding in the hive, and no more room to lay eggs. But swarms are how bees reproduce collectively. There’s a cognitive switch in looking towards the bees, Starting Yet Again. It’s a loosening of the mind past the individuals of each honeybee, and towards the hive. It’s not about how one bee can forage pollen, return laden, and live her life fully. It’s about the organism of the hive itself, buzzing with energy, pulsing with possibility, and full to the brim with sweetness.

When a hive swarms, the queen and her attendants get louder, they swirl in a tornado-like pattern of movement, searching for a nearby place to land, cluster, and take a beat before finding another safe place to start building again. I saw it happen, once.

It was terrifying.

You may actually be surprised to know that I am not actually a great beekeeper. I’m just persistent. I keep learning and growing, but there are so many spectacular ways to muck it up. In this instance; I didn’t recognize it for the swarm it was until much later. I was more in the mindset of WHAT ARE THEY DOING AND WHY ARE THEY ON MY CAR AND OH MY GOD PLEASE DON’T STING ME QUICK BUTTON IT UP AND CLOSE THE HIVE AND GET OUT OF HERE.

For the honeybees, though, they had been trying to tell me that they needed to move on, and I missed the signs. Now I know that I could have added another honey super (those are those boxes in a square Langstroth hive) and it might have prevented the swarm. Or not.

Either way, though, moving on is in their genes. It’s how they survive. It’s how they make more bees. Because ideally, the remnant would keep going. Smaller, at first, with a brand new queen hatching from those queen cells left behind, and then building up again. This is how we leave, Starting Yet Again… by holding the faith that God is with those whom we’ve left, as well. On the other side of a swarm there are TWO hives, each buzzing into their sweet communities.

I often think about the co-workers of the Way of the early church. Phoebe, Prisca (Priscilla), Euodia, Synthyche, Clement, Timothy, and so many more. They are often addressed by the letters of the Epistles, or carrying those early proclamations place to place as the early believers figured out how they might organize themselves and their beliefs. They started over, again and again. The community itself shaped, and re-shaped, who and how they’d be together based on the migrations of believers, and the people who chose to join in and help interpret the Way Jesus pointed.

For you, Starting Yet Again, you’re moving on, too. Whether by choice or circumstance, you’re on the cusp of something, clinging to the branch (or the car…) surrounded by the faith of those who have come before, and those beside you in the work, and setting up to build over. Take the pause point, the resting place in the exhaustion, and then move when you are ready. Being exhausted does not disqualify you from beeing, though. A hive is still a hive when it’s in the air. Movement is the condition of how we do this kind of work, not an inhibitor to it. It is because we are able to breathe, shift, move, settle that we can carry what we bring from one place to the next. Once you’ve found the place, it’s back to the foundation work. Building combs of wax, and setting up the layers of presence, all done with the faith that it’s about the communities themselves, and you as a part of them.

There’s such a radical faith offering, there, Starting Yet Again. I know the people that I used to accompany as a pastor have moved on. I know that their lives continued to grow and change and meet each other and meet God without me, as it should be! I know that in some places, I was a catalyst, and in other places, I was an inhibitor to growth. My particular skills didn’t match everyone in the same way, and the beauty of the swarm is that by leaving, there is room for another to come. God did what they could, through me. And I have to believe that God had more to do in those communities beyond me, as an individual.

So go with the swarm, sweetheart, and have faith that a hive will hold and have you as you start over, yet again. There will be pollen. There will be honey. There will be wax, again, holding you steady as you (and the community) build a new world.

💗🍯🌅

P.S. Dear Reader— yes you! Are you holding something close for which you might need a little honey? Then write in and and join alongside this ever-growing hive of hope and care! 🐝

I feel called to lead and preach, but I worry I’m too girly — too feminine — in how I talk and dress. How can I get people to take me seriously without giving up the parts of me that feel true?

Love, Girl Talk

Dear Girl Talk,

Girl, yes. YES. Queen, YES! First: I’m imagining you, whomever you are, wearing your absolute favorite outfit.

Maybe it’s dresses and pink, flowers, and glitter, tutus and tiaras. Maybe it’s a power suit and silken scarf. Maybe it’s an LBD* with bangin’ accessories. For me, my absolute favorite casual outfit (these days) is a full body catsuit. (What? It’s a one-and-done and I’m a busy femme.)

While the bees aren’t too committed to what they wear, (with the exception, perhaps of the cutest lil pollen pants you ever did see), they ARE all in on Feminine Authority. And what I love learning from the hive is the way that even when it looks simple: A queen bee surrounded by attendants…. it’s really not.

The queen is the most important bee in the hive. It’s her role to lay the eggs. There is so, so much more I could say about the queen bee: she only leaves the hive once, for a mating flight, to go get the genetic material necessary for all the eggs she’ll lay in her life. And yet, she is genetically exactly the same as all the worker bees… yet she’s been raised up by them to be the queen.

A hive adapts to ensure that they will always have a queen. The worker bees ensure feminine leadership, building queen cells here and there just in case. They act from the collective knowledge that their power comes from each bee having a role, including the queen. It’s not optional, Girl Talk. It’s survival.

What’s been true for me is that my external choices of attire are how I express myself, and also how I pull on the Full Armor of God between me and those who would do me harm. When I first started preaching, I began going BIG and BOLD in my eyeglasses. Something like the shield of faith, perhaps. But the lived reality that people were more apt to comment on my glasses, than my body, when I preached the word of God.

Is it painful when folks are not able to hear the Gospel through how you look? Heckin’ yes.
Is it right? Nope. Not a bit.

And so for me, how I present (especially as one who identifies as Femme) became a way for me to claim that truth in my OWN Feminine Authority, rather than let someone define it for me. I pull on the full armor of God; place my coordinated frames on, breathe deep, and GO.

Not everyone is prepared to witness that power, or equipped to take it in as such. This goes for all of us told we are “too much” of anything— too feminine, too loud, too bossy— or even the things of bodies that cannot be changed: too queer, too Black, too trans, too young… all of that and so, so, much more.

Odds are, those that can’t hold space for this— they aren’t your hive. Your people are the 5-year-old girls looking to you, seeing themselves, the outfits they always wanted to wear, and seeing your authority preach. Your people are the trans girls wondering if there is a space for them in God’s kindom. (There is.) Your people are the men nodding along wishing this truth for their daughters. Your people are the Femme Leaders calling together the exact right outfit for Pentecost, with a hat that matches, because this, too, is a way to honor God in adornment.

I think part of finding your hive is the continued commitment to your truth as power. And that is a collective journey with so many of us coming into power, leadership, preaching, teaching, writing, buzzing, bee-ing— together. We are collectively building conditions of possibility for leadership of the Feminine Authority in our communities, again and again, and again. We are building the queen cells.

Just as so many queens have done before us, all through the centuries:

from Sofia Wisdom to the Marys to Coworker Lydia…

to Ella Baker, to Anne Braden, to Dorothy Day…

to Rosemary Radford Ruether to Marcella Althaus-Reid to Katie Geneva Cannon…

to Beyoncé to Dolly Parton to Chappell Roan…

The queens are building the path, and so are we.

Together, we will continue to build the queen cells that our sister preachers (and I want to be clear— SISTER preachers, not CIS-ter preachers…) can emerge, come closer to community, come closer to God, and preach the truth that only they can access. It’s a hive project.

Your feminine truth IS your power.

And, Girl Talk, am I ever glad to be on this path with you.

Now, excuse me while I go plan out my outfit for tomorrow’s leadership adventure.

*Little black dress.

I’m struggling if I should do something about this or let it go.

At my 4 year old’s daycare, they have been playing restaurant. This would be great, but they are pretending to work at chick-FIL-a.

As a queer family, we try to avoid supporting places that spend their money to infringe on our freedoms. So it’s hard for me to see my kiddo playing this game. However, I don’t want to come across as an angry lesbian, making a big deal out of nothing. They play coffee shop a lot too. Maybe I can just keep trying to redirect them to play this version of the game at school? What would the bees do??

Dear Chick-FIL-hey,

Woooof. This is a tough one, and it’s the kind of question that while it seems simple, once you start peeling back layers it gets more and more complex.

Kind of like a beehive.

There’s a bit here about the collective, a bit about the individual, and it’s all held together with the kind of sticky glue we’re all doing our best to make… all in that tenuous place of wax and faith and family culture.

Okay here’s what I mean by that:

Chick-FIL-hey: yes, an evil corp, real harm to real queer families, and you are not wrong to feel the sting of it when your kid brings it home like a field trip souvenir. Culturally, it’s got meaning behind that crunchy chicken. Meaning that makes resonate a particular kind of ache for you, sweet queer parent, as your own darling goofs around like it’s just a game.

It puts you into a kind of place of tension: how much do I hold awareness for this, and how much do I let the play happen? To what degree does this set a precedent of what kind of things we talk about, and how we respond as a family? And what the hell do I even say to a wee one who is meaning making in their own way for a world, social setting, and routine that exists for a major part of their day?

Bees, in the hive, fill in all the gaps with propolis. This is a glue mix of sap, bee spit, and wax. It’s super sticky. (My phone case is perpetually covered in propolis from trying to get photos of the sweet little bugs while I’m all up in their hive. Ask me about that sometime. 😂) Anything that doesn’t fit in there, they’ll cushion it with the propolis, helping their home be at the precise measurements that work for them.

And. It doesn’t mean that extraneous matter stays out of the hive. It will get in there. Your kid will come up against these things that directly contradict the world you hope they grow up within.

This game is a symptom of a much larger system. “Coffee shop” might echo for a family wherein the unethical harvesting of coffee beans extracts labor from people across the world, or families where a union battle for a livable wage is at the forefront. I’ve struggled, here too, and deeply mourned for my family (and others) that there really isn’t a way to “win” here. As many have known, and some are just learning, there IS no ethical consumption under this extractive reality of capitalism.

I don’t say that to dissuade you from trying, but to equip you to hold it in context.

Surround this game with the kind of propolis meaning making that helps it “fit” into your hive. Your work as parent is to help the kid make meaning of the world around them, and to surround them with people who will contribute to that meaning making in a way that builds a community of care, a vision of a world that is just a little… bit… better… than what we had.

I say all this aspirationally, because - I, too, have a wee one that I’m trying to set up to be a kind and loving human in the world, aware of what’s around him, and contributing in a way that builds a better hive for us all. Like you, I choose when to engage, and to be honest, I don’t take every opportunity I possibly could. I DO take opportunities to talk to him about the building blocks, the foundations of meaning making that provide him the tools to eventually discern for himself.

For our family, that’s part faith work, part community work (thank god for queer community) and part family practice.

We talk about what’s going on in the world.. and put propolis around it so it makes sense. For families like ours, at something of a distance from the immediate danger, we try to build the architecture of community care early. For example, “ICE are baddies and they are hurting our neighbors and we help our neighbors,” is a real, simple way that this child is learning.

Is it hard? Heck yes. Is it too much? Maybe. But for me, I think of the kids who don’t get the choice of whether to engage in such things, and try to set up the building blocks for collective care as early as possible. As an aside, he’s also learning “we are kind and gentle people,” and, “there is a little goodie and a little baddie in each one of us and we’re all doing our best.”

Finally, I’m not going to leave you buzzing with lots of moral consequence and no tangible suggestions. Cover them in your own propolis to make it work for you, Chick-FIL-hey. If it were me in this circumstance, I’d probably take the path of playful redirection with a bit of glue to help shift. For example, I’d begin playing the game WITH him, here at home, and play it once or two times the way that he’s “learned” at school. Then I’d start introducing variables: rhyming the name, making it more and more goofy. “Quick-look-away!” “Tricka-the-Play!” “Schtick-a-the-Gay!” and when he got back to the OG game, I might say something like “Awwww that one isn’t as fun/doesn’t have space for us inside” or something like that.

In other words, I’d try to make the revolution way more fun than the original game.

I don’t believe in a God, but lately I’ve been wishing I had whatever brain chemicals people have that make them feel at peace. I did the Catholicism thing for 22 years and like most people it didn’t bring me peace, it brought me a lot of guilt, shame, and fear.

But now, my life is filled with lots of change and uncertainty and more and more the only thing I want to ask is for prayer. I feel like I can’t do it so surely someone else who has it figured out will pray for me.

That caveat aside, the last 6 months have been filled with lots of grief and anger & letting go. In February my mom was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and was told she had 3-6 months to live. The stress of the experience, my troubling pattern of caring for others instead of myself quickly wore away at a new romantic relationship as well as an already fraught roommate situation. Neither were meant for me, and I know that now, but the experience of losing them in quick succession, all throughout the rapid and confusing process of my mom’s cancer treatment brought up the kind of trauma that reshapes a person --in maybe the way people of faith say that God gives us struggles to teach us lessons.

My mom had her entire lung removed. She now only has one kind of less threatening cancer in her body. I’m mourning the first of a kind queer breakup. And I have to put this version of myself in the world all while trying to find someone to share my home with me just so I can afford it.

Most days the anxiety is worse than the grief. The experience was like re breaking bones so that they can heal right. I know it’s what’s supposed to happen, and all these things will make me a more healed, more whole, more self determined person but all I feel is broken and alone and scared.

Hope feels so far away. Stillness feels impossible.

So idk. I guess what I’m saying is I need a little hope. I need a little sign everything will work out. I’ll feel love one day, I’ll feel safety one day, I’ll be able to rest.

Dear Waiting-for-Hope,

Oh, honey, you’re IN IT, right now. In the middle of the painful, waiting moment while everything feels dark and lonely. Through your words, I hear the yearning for meaning and something-greater… even though, even still. And yes, sweet one, know that even as I write an answering letter, I— and the readers in the hive— will help hold this with you, and will pray alongside you in your multiple heartbreaks. (I am, right now!)

Faith is complex.

It’s both simple, and annoyingly difficult.

It’s a framework that has access points at the most binary, AND through multiple levels of meaning making, scientific reason (thank God!) and community care.

Sometimes, in these lonely nights of longing, I imagine what it’s like to be a bee, forming and becoming herself in the goo. What I mean by that is: a honeybee’s lifecycle includes 21 days before she even comes into the day. She is by herself, an egg in a hex cell, a larvae being fed by her sister-workers, a pupa covered in that cell by wax. She’s alone in there. For about 9-10 days (half of her development into a winged-insect)… she is alone in the dark.

I might imagine you’re feeling something similar, right now: alone in the dark. Each wave of memory washing you anew with grief and the life you had, as well as the life you thought you were building. I’m so sorry, Waiting-for-Hope.

For the record, I don’t actually believe that “god gives us struggles to teach us lessons,” though I understand some people find comfort there. I think sometimes, struggle is just struggle. And for so much of our human history, struggle and grief are a uniting companion of experience. To live is to grieve. To struggle is to join beside sister-workers across the ages each holding just a piece of what is. Each imagining what could be. The systems that cause struggle are the same systems that my faith enables me to keep fighting against… and the hive has always been how we do that fighting together.

After those days in the dark hex, the bee has to chew herself out. She has to do that part by herself, with only the vibrations of her hive to comfort her. She doesn’t know them yet, but she’s pulling herself out to join in. She’s never alone— they buzz and dance and work all around her, but her emergence (or beemergence?!) is hers and hers to do alone. And it will not be like this forever. You will not be in this darkness forever. Things will change and shift, and you WILL emerge.

Here is what I see in you: your stretching for connection, your reaching for hope-- that itself is a connection. You don’t have to have it yet. The act of stretching puts you in communion with so many across generations: your own ancestors, your mom. Your struggle and hers are connected, next to mine and ours and the struggle of our people across the globe for the very thing you write toward: a little hope… a little sign everything will work out.

That’s the faith work. You don’t need the answer, honeybee, but the stretching itself is a measure of connection to so much greater than you. And the beauty of a honeybee hive is that it’s about all of us. So while you ache, know that we will hold that hope in escrow for you, cherishing the future where you feel the Love that already surrounds you. Where your safety is held with as much ferocity by your fellow human companions as is necessary for our joyful survival. Where you can lay your head down and rest, knowing that your struggle is joined—and held— by the collective hive, and your rest is a holy prayer of gratitude in deep belonging.

I’m praying with you, Waiting-for-Hope.

And she does it BECAUSE she's a Christian. Because the border was the source of all of her problems, because Kamala supports abortion even though she had an abortion and her mother had an abortion- but it's all done in secret and shame because they are Conservative Christians.

I have no respect left for her and I struggle, oh I struggle with how to love her as a Christian, a progressive christian myself. She wants nothing more than relationship with me but sees I let "politics" get in the way of our relationship.

I don't like the distance. I am heartbroken. I don't want to fight over all of these things because one thing I have learned after the fights with conservative evangelical white Christians is they won't change because they don't want to.

They are happy with so much of what is happening because "God" and "Christianity" is coming back to America (which is basically saying that Queer people aren't part of Christianity and they are trying to criminalize abortion).

Those topics are one and two. But she doesn't want to change. She doesn't want to understand. She just wants to love her daughter and have a good relationship. And I don't know how to do that anymore.

I know God is a God of reconciling relationship- but I don't even know what the "Christian" response is.

I'm supposed to love all people right? It's what I preach. How do I do that when I feel utter rage and disappointment that is growing with each day as things get worse for the marginalized and the least of these?

Thanks for providing this space. I don't say this stuff out loud.
-MAGA is my family

Dear MAGA-is-my-family,

Oh, honey, I can hear the pain in your writing, and the yearning for belonging and relationship with your family, and your mom, especially. It hurts that they aren’t who you thought they were, and that they are unable to see YOU in who you have become. Let’s hold that grief together for a moment.

You know, in a honeybee hive, it’s really hard to make it through the cold, wet, winter. Honeybees, in a symbiotic relationship with humans, can prep a hive with enough food, enough protection from mites, moisture control, and a wee bit of insulation, and do everything technically right…. and yet still the hive still can collapse or shrink to the barest of clusters attending to the queen.

As the honeybees each individually near the end of their natural lifespan, they die. Some leave the hive, some continue to seek food in the combs and stay frozen in a mirror of the aching within them. The organism of the hive, made up of the whole of individual worker bees, the queen, the drones, the ecosystem of possibility— the hive as a whole has a chance of survival.

Sometimes I wonder how the individuals of the hive “think” or consider their connections, or lack thereof. Yet, I know that this is a total projection of human emotion on insects that attune to the hum of survival and work ahead. I think both can exist at the same time: the hive as it actually is, and my perception of it layered with my own experience and emotion.

Same with your mom, dear one.

How Christianity functions for you, in the midst of an abundant God, radically welcoming and inclusive, pouring empathy on each and every human in all our bodily autonomy and choice… that doesn’t need to change. Keep holding that Truth close.

At the same time, you mom is projecting her assumption that the only way to the Way, Truth, and Light, is through border control and the control of bodies capable of carrying children, wrapped in shame… all of that she is projecting upon you.

I’m not saying that one or ‘tother needs to leave the metaphorical hive. I am saying that perhaps the best way to love her is from a distance, with the occasional baseline touch point. This does not preclude the real impact that her vote and ideologies have had on real people; and I hear your deep wrestling of responsibility for that harm caused.

If you’ve attempted these conversations of redirection before, she already knows how you think and feel. To whatever degree you choose to stay connected, you have moments of signaling that in microways that allow her the choice of ignoring it. (Yeah, wear those rainbow earrings! Paint your nails! Park backwards in the drive so your bumper sticker is really clear!)

And you know where she is, and can probably point to her own passive aggressive displays of politic.

I think the work here is the long game, should you choose to stay in it. When people begin to crack at the edges of a cult, they look towards places where they feel safe enough to have questions. That won’t be the place where there is argument and shame-tools of “you should have known.”

It will be the low, slow, simmering relationship—to whatever degree and depth it remains.

One year, I remember standing next to the hive in April, ready to open it up and see them lost, yet again. I lifted the lid and inner cover, and began pulling out frames.

There, at the bottom, the barest hum of life. A queen surrounded by a handful of bees, still buzzing. Tiny, humming, hopebeats. A possibility of renewal, even though all seemed lost.

Change, for your mom, isn’t going to come in a conversation that points to the scripture. Change, for your relationship with her, is a choice of engagement. It’s okay to love her from afar, and in contained ways; or to choose connection with informed consent (for you and yours) of what that connection may entail.

It doesn’t make you any less of a Christian, or Christ follower, to choose distance and pre-printed cards as a line of connection. YOU get to choose, and be loved abundantly by God, in that choice. And all of this can exist at the same time— the hive as it actually is, and the projections we place upon each other full of assumption, hope, love, history, aching, pain, trauma, and more.

You can love her AND be estranged. You can be a preacher of reconciliation AND not know how to walk back into that relationship yet. You can grieve who she is AND refuse to pretend she is someone else.

Doing the work isn’t coming in with a hammer to knock at the doors of her understanding with scriptures and source texts, in this case. It’s the accompaniment of a lifetime, to whatever degree feels right to you; demonstrating in a Christian way that love is still happening: near, far, and all in between.

I’ll end by saying: I think that where we can’t show up, God does. I’m assuming that you, or your chosen family, is full of abundant queer joy, or the yearning thereof. If that precludes you from direct relationship with your mother, that’s okay, MAGA-is-my-family. God is bigger than one relationship, individual to each other. God is all of us, in relationship to the world we build for our great-great-granddaughters.

When we can do that work well, we show up across these differences with love and attention even when we are not related. To me, that says there are worker-bees near her who are ALSO doing this. Someone else is also showing up for her. In the the same way that you might be able to hold a little more grace for the MAGAs in your neighborhood because of the distance of relationship, some one else is holding just a little more grace for your mom because of the proximity of presence. God shows up through them, too.

My prayer for you is the buzz of the hive. The hope in the possibility. The long, slow, collective work of hive care that is beyond the individual, and even beyond an individual hive, pulling us into an apiary of belonging that is so, so much bigger than just me or you. It’s both/and/and beyond, pointing towards the future full of milk and honey: one where all people have enough… enough food, enough care, enough home, enough belonging, enough love.