Watching Bees
If you want to know how your mind works, just watch pollinators. If you want a regular up-close and personal experience, and you have garden space, plant some flowers that attract bees and the like. Then watch the miracle unfold. When the blossoms mature, they will play host to a plethora of pollinators, some we might see in daylight, others prefer flying at night. Nonetheless, we are doing our part in supporting life-giving beings.
Pollinator species are responsible for our life here on Earth. Without them, we would have no food. So, the support we offer in our small plots of soil can have a profound effect on the food chain and help balance the scales of human impact on the Earth. I haven’t even begun to speak of the effects on our mental health. Growing things for ourselves and others provides an obvious benefit, but there are more subtle insights we gain in the simple act of observing natural rhythms.
When we settle our minds under the influence of nature’s pulse, we can experience the true essence of mind. When I watch pollinators in our garden, something happens to my awareness. Thoughts disappear in the interplay of form and space. Bees hover in space and land on form—in the shape of a flower. They lift off again and return, like dancing in a choreography that repeats the same motion. Yet this is done amidst flowers swaying in the breeze; a very flexible repetition.
I’m reminded of the Heart Sutra line, “form is emptiness, emptiness is form”. I swear the author of that text penned it while watching bees and butterflies do their thing. When my mind rests in the space between bee and flower, I understand the union of the two; no separation. The same interdependent dance is mirrored in my breath and between the waves of thoughts arising and dissolving in my mind.
I make no claim to being able to maintain this state of awareness for more time than it takes a bee’s wing to flap only once. But I aspire to abide in that nano-second, repeating it over and over. Tsogyal Rinpoche said it requires “glimpse after glimpse after glimpse…”