I’ve never understood people who have a fear of bees. Ever since I was young that whizzing by and around and around of that little furry bug was a source of delight for me, while it sent others screeching and running away. I would always say to that person, “If you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you.” But I wanted to bother them. I wanted to hold my face as close as possible to a bee humming bush and hold my breath, hoping that I’d just be mistaken as an abnormally large bee so that I would be able to have a good view of the bustling activity going on from flower to flower. Growing up, I had developed an ideal of what it would be like to tame those bees. It was the epitome of a summer’s day in my mind. It was the warm air, the warm sunshine, a brightly colored vintage dress, a blooming garden that was packed with the hum and buzz of bees, and hidden in their home was the sweet smelling, golden syrup that they had packed away for safekeeping in perfectly formed cells of wax comb.

            Around the same young age I was on vacation with my family at King’s Canyon & the Sequoia National Forest. My parents thought it would be a great family activity to go on a tour of the stars. I remember putting up a fight about not wanting to go out that night, but go we did. I ended up sitting with my family and a few others on a giant rock that was embedded into the mountainside.  When the guide started talking, I forgot about all the arguments I had for not going and simply let my head hang back as I took in the vast and sparkling night sky. He started to point out different stars and telling us their names. Then he began to point out and connect the stars in a series of shapes. I remember something about three stars that make up a triangle shape of some sort. And then we were told that those three stars were the swan constellation, which in later years I learned by its name, Cygnus. But those three stars that make up a triangle are and have been for thousands of years thought of as a swan. Suddenly, the fairy tales and myths that I had filled my head with were also pictures in the sky that had been drawn out with tiny flickering lights.

            The sky was alive.

            It became one of those humming bushes that I would stick my face into, filled with activity and story. The hum and buzz of the stars that you feel deep inside your chest like the dense reverberating of the bass when you turn up the volume on your favorite song, or like the steady resonance babies feel coming from their mothers softly singing as they rock their child off to sleep in their arms. Bees and stars. Honeycomb and constellations. The night sky and the hive. They offer us so much with their role in different cultures, scientific importance, story telling, harvest of crops, and histories. But they also offer pure delight that offers the possibility for just a moment to let go of those things, breathe in deep, and just bee.

“You are an evil villan, Marley! RRRRRagghhhh!”

*thump thump thump* ” Gus-Gus!……It’s Marcus!”

-Neighbor kid playing with his dogs