vital conditions – garygunderson Blog

Sh-t

A scenic view of an open field with tall grass under a bright blue sky and the sun shining in the upper right corner. A wooden fence line is visible in the foreground, surrounded by greenery.

Sunday night on our canal narrowboat often involves sunsets and pub music. But Monday morning usually finds me trundling down the towpath a quarter mile to dump our 35 pounds of the week’s waste. The technology involves a plastic cassette and a special little building to which we have a key. Still, not much different from thousands of African townships in which this is done with open buckets.

Likewise, we keep an eye on our fresh water that lasts about a week. But TC, unlike African women, does not have to walk miles with the water tank on her head. It is my job to fill up our 200 liter stainless steel tank by hose from either the common tap or, sometimes through the hedge from David and Lisa’s handy home. We have three big solar panels and deep batteries, but I am sharply aware that my three minute hot shower draws down 10% of the battery and a few gallons of precious water. My pot of tea draws less, but still some. Unlike propane both pleasures are quickly replenished by the sun.

Still, the floating tiny house teaches us about living gratefully within limits. We sold our Bolt electric car and electric bike to help buy this little boat. I now pedal under my own power for scones, tea and pub. An upgrade. We move slowly enough to appreciate the hand-dug canals with stonework for coal, slave cotton and trade.A quarter millennium later we layer on sophisticated solar electronics but still learn all about the cycles of change.

Few Americans even know there are any limits at all; much of the current political savagery is aimed at the very thought. But any grown up knows that. Every religious tradition of any duration at all knows. It is cruel to hide that from our children from whom we borrow every single thing we consume. This thing I think of “my life” is entirely and only what passes through—”dissipative creatures,” said Capra. Not a single cell will be with me as I finally turn to compost. Ridiculous poofs perched on golden toilets, the nameless poor with metal buckets or me with my plastic cassette; all same at the end (pun intended).

View of a canal with a small building for waste disposal beside it, shaded by a large tree, under a partly cloudy sky. — *The Skipton “elsan” site where boaters have a key to dump our waste cassettes. The second door is a bathroom and the gate opens to rubbish bins. The ambience is all you’d expect.*

As I walked this morning, I thought of Rev. Dr. Steve DeGruchy one of the creative founders of the Africa Religious Health Assets Programme who died tubing in one of his beloved rivers in 2010. He knew sh-t, including its profound theological implications. He imagined a Jordan River theology “that invites a spirituality of taking responsibility for the land for one’s children and one’s children’s children. It is a rules-based tradition in which law binds the rich and the powerful, reminding them that they are not gods. It gives rise to a prophetic tradition which speaks truth to power. It reminds us of the gift of the earth, and of the importance of the common good, celebrating those who find their vocation in serving this wider good. It is a spirituality of song and dance and art, responding to the rhythms of the earth’s seasons. In recognizing that we all live downstream, it knows that freedom from bondage is nothing if it does not come with the responsibility to tend one’s garden, respect both the neighbor and the stranger, and deal with one’s own shit.”

He sought an “olive” program and ethic that blended the brown poverty agenda with the green ecology movement as he saw that water and sh-t made them inseperable. Gary Machlis recent book “Sustainability for the Forgotten” is following the same intellectual current that should be drawing us toward everything worthy. We must see an even broader unity among what must be built as those who see the links among what must be suppressed.

In these toxic times we must nurture the vision of graceful lives given to the service of the whole—the whole people, all we need, have and pass through, including all our sh-it. Says Steve: “The development of public capacity is therefore crucial. Those who believe in freedom have to encourage good people to take up vocations as public servants, scientists, engineers, technicians, public health workers who can provide the leadership and knowhow to protect our water and deal with our sewage.”

We are awash in a flood of shamelessly childish behavior. But only the most damaged souls are proud of the reckless cruelty and feckless waste. Tragically they have most of the billions and the silicon. We forget that most people pick up after their dogs even if tiny a minority does not. I expect the rise of the normies who do.

I have come to learn, albeit slowly, that limits are gifts as they help us savor what we have, hardly noticing the absence of what we never needed in the first place.

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Find Steve’s amazing 2009 paper here. Steve de Gruchy. ‘Dealing with our Own Sewage: Spirituality and Ethics in the Sustainability Agenda’. In Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 134 (July 2009) 53-65. Republished in Steve de Gruchy, Keeping Body and Soul Together: Reflections by Steve de Gruchy on Theology and Development, ed. Beverley Haddad (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 2015).

And do subscribe here for free: it helps me know what works.

Bees politics

TC and I arrived in Skipton, Yorkshire (UK) Tuesday to live for a while near her twin sister Lisa. On Thursday an urgent pounding on the door revealed an anxious Royal Mail man gingerly holding a box of 10,000 loud bees that we had ordered from Abelo in York. He did not stay for the congratulatory selfie.

A person wearing a beekeeping suit and veil smiles for the camera, with a beehive visible behind them, nestled in a lush hawthorn hedge. — *Buckfast Bees nestled into the hawthorn hedge by the Leeds and London Canal.*

We introduced the bees into their box nestled into the hawthorn hedge bordering the canal behind Lisa and David’s home. The honeybees were a nucleus 5 frame hive of Buckfast bees, a distinctive species developed at Buckfast Abbey by Brother Adam after many years of careful breeding.

I noticed some difference from my Italian-Americans in the Carolina’s. My home bees dispatch a line of sentinel bees to the opening, lift their rear ends high in the air and fan the scent of the hive to help its missing members find their way home. The Buckfasts maintain a very British dignity with no anal display at all. But within an hour all the bees that had been in the delivery box were enjoying their spiffy new hive with lots of room for new sisters and, eventually honey.

As if to welcome us and the bees, David Attenborough posted the very same morning about the ancient practice of “telling the bees.” He noted that “beekeepers in 18th and 19th century Europe and America believed that bees were not just insects—they were members of the family, messengers between this world and the next. And like any family member, they deserved to be told when something significant happened.

“When a loved one died, got married, or even when a child was born, the head of the household—or more often, the “goodwife”—would walk solemnly to the hive, knock gently, and whisper the news. They’d say the name of the person who had passed or wed, and even drape the hives in black cloth during mourning. Why?

“…it reflected a powerful belief that bees could feel joy and sorrow, that they needed to be included in the life of the household. The practice likely finds its roots in Celtic mythology, where bees were seen as spiritual couriers, able to travel between the worlds of the living and the dead. Seeing a bee after someone passed away was interpreted as the soul in flight.”

A close-up of a green box containing live bees, with a warning label stating 'Live Bees', 'Handle with Care', 'Do not expose to Direct Sunlight', 'Do Not Drop', and 'Do Not Shake'. — *How would YOU like to the mail man delivering 10,000 bees?*

I’m a Baptist-Druid, which rounds out to being Celtic, so this all makes perfect sense to me. It is why a friend suggested I should tell the bees that the young experiment with democracy in the Colonies was dying.

The bees already know. For what democracy could survive in a culture willing to poison itself? The bees are not the vulnerable species here. They’ve survived many, many times longer than humans and seem certain to last millennia beyond us.

They are an untamable species without rulers, which is why they are smart. Dr. Tom Seely, the epic honeybee scientist from Cornell wrote Honeybee Democracy that documented how all major honeybee decisions are made after transparent deliberation of comparative data. (Here’s his great lecture.) Seely says that there is no boss bee expected to know everything. Male humans back to Aristotle thought the biggest bee ruled the hive who they assumed to be King. She is not a King or, really a queen. Despite her size and crucial role (birthing babies) she makes no more decisions than anyone else in the hive. It is a pure democracy so sophisticated we lesser species can’t figure it out.

No bee would imagine a process as flawed as American “democracy” in which fear of one deeply flawed person disables the thinking of millions so that he would not just be obeyed, but enriched with more honey than 1,000 hives could ever consume. They bees don’t need to be told about the death of this dumpster fire; they have seen it coming.

Not many humans in this part of England need to be told, either. They have seen actual kings, not the trashy American knock-off. They, like the bees, know about the certain suffering that follows from elevating one human so far above the others, wrapping them in layers of stultifying privilege and then letting them decide anything. They become stupid and then dangerous. The one in the gilded bubble inevitably make horrible decisions that damage and impoverish everyone. And then they, of course, go down, too as the consequences of their folly roll out.

View of a canal lined with boats and greenery, including a hedge, in Skipton, Yorkshire. — *The Buckfast Bees love the gardens but love the corridor of canal wildflowers even more.*

The English Magna Carta and closely linked tradition of habeas corpus were evolutionarily necessary for the human species to survive. They first established that nobody—certainly not the king—was above the law. The second established that no human could be judged without a fair trial. No human society that violates these can survive. Trust dies first, then facts, marked by random decisions that fuel greed, fear and loss of every certainty. There is no way to navigate or talk: nothing but raw violence as the single ruler and the tiny group he depends on run us all off the cliff.

It would be so convenient if it was possible for one person or a tiny group to manage all the vast interwoven complexities of life on this wild earth. Democracy is messy, inefficient and slow. But letting one person, especially a man decide things is dumber than any insect could survive.

The English figured this out about a thousand years ago, so this can’t be considered a “secret sauce.”

We don’t have to tell the bees. We should ask them.

Pitchfork 1

A pitchfork is perfect for moving hay, compost, and the messy ensemble of cow poo that accumulates in barns. And the five sharp tines get attention by someone angry when the banker and landlord are insufferably arrogant. The wealthy are usually surprised. I know I was surprised last month as my party and candidates were so rudely put aside in favor of….well, you know.

*“Reasons You Need a Pitchfork” from the Minnesota Horticultural Society (not the book Frankenstein)*

Once anger flames, rationality has nothing to do with what happens next. Righteous anger can open the way for cynics with very ugly intentions to do things nobody voted for. Who voted for polio, measles, coat-hanger abortions and run-amok preachers? This is why Project 2025 was buried during the election and whipped out immediately after. This is why North Carolina losers used anger’s shadow to change the job descriptions of those that won. Ugly. And predictable.

Even when it is obvious that anger is being used by opportunistic frauds; it does not mean the anger will subside. Or that it will suddently become smart and be redirected toward the billionaire blowhards that actually do deserve a pitchfork.

What to do? Don’t argue with angry people, especially by telling them they are foolish to trust such obvious frauds. They don’t want instruction, especially from people like me they see as part of the “elite” that reminds them of their stolen dignity every time they go to the grocery store, bank, school or hospital.

Let’s talk about the hospital part of the conflagration. That’s the one I know best, having been inside the beast for nearly twenty years until recently. Why would anyone be angry at a hospital since everyone is going to need one? Normal people (the angry ones) understand that the shiny medical castles are only partly there for them. Hospitals are one visible knot in a complicated web of privileged guilds and professions including, executives, bankers, doctors, nurses, suppliers, technology companies, insurance companies, pharma, ambulance drivers, all seamlessly integrated into the government and universities. All that feels quite personal one is vulnerable and in pain with no possibility of negotiating anything.

All parts of the system—cruelly called “health”—seem to be more and more obviously about money—theirs—and less and less about those who need their “care” (the services people cannot not buy). This system costs roughly a trillion dollars a year and yet wants more. It drives every in the economy cost higher while whining all the time that it isn’t enough. Ironically, many of these hospitals (including my own) are not supposed to be “for profit,” so they do not pay taxes. All of this is painful at the family level only beginning with insurance and the huge indecipherable bills that result when you actually need the services. It makes the economy sick as every business thinks constantly about how to offload these costs onto vulnerable gig-workers or by shifting everything possible across the border or replacing humans with robots.

This interwoven system is the leading cause of bankruptcy in most states (for medical debt under $5,000). So who needs democracy when I can’t take my kid to the doctor without risking eviction or having my car towed away?

Pitchfork.

It is ironic that this web of privilege thinks it (we) are protected by our non-profit status and science. Who could quarrel with charitable scientists? Well, we don’t look charitable and we don’t look scientific. Offensive executive and physician pay levels pulls one fig leaf away. The other fig leaf—science—disappears as it is always used to justify another shinier and more expensive building. What about the low-cost and low-tech science of prevention that makes at least some of those buildings unnecessary? Silence. What about the science supporting investment in education, faith and good stable jobs? Maybe later. What about the science linking democracy and neighborhood stability to health? Sounds woke. Everybody in healthcare knows that science, but we build bigger buildings instead of following it. So the angry people give us a Secretary of Health who doesn’t believe in science either.

The whirlwind is partly our fault. Those of us who do believe in that science and do believe in the non-profit mission should have been far more aggressive in pushing the medical industrial complex to act appropriately. Instead, we prodded gently and waited for a better time.

It’s not too late. Dr. King said it is always the right time to do right. It is crucial that we not be pulled into defending the indefensible. Not everything is worth defending from president Musk who will be losing support pretty quickly on his own. And as you pull apart the data we should notice that some of those most angry are people friends. This might be a good time to lend some intelligence by helping aim the energy where it can do some good, instead of bad.

For instance. I offer two minor tweaks to non-profit health policy everyone should agree with:

First, hospitals’ non-profit tax status now rests on superficial “community benefit” rules. It should never have been allowed to be superficial. Those rules have little to do with the science of prevention and social determinants because implementation plans have no accountability to local public health (except in Ohio which is a story for another blog).

Give the local public health department authority to approve the hospital’s community benefit implementation plan so that it aligns with actual public health science and local government. This has been discussed quietly at the National Academies of Science for years. But religious hospital lobbyists fought it (!?!?!?!) It would have been better to make the hospitals uncomfortable, Than having the voters angry. Do it now.

Second, hospitals are huge financial enterprises which often make as much money from their investments as from selling expensive medical procedures. It is likely they have about a trillion in their basement, which nobody ever thought possible. But there it is; they are banks that also offer medical services. Legally, their investments are invisible to their non-profit status; they aren’t required to report how much investments they have. They are usually required by their bankers to have between 100-300 “days of cash on hand”. Take your local hospital’s annual revenue and do the arithmetic. Unlike hospitals, your local banks are required by the Federal Reserve to invest some of their corpus in places impacted by their historical racism. Why not hospitals, which have done the same in the past (usually to the identical neighborhoods)?

Add transparency to the legal “community benefit” form. And give the Federal Reserve responsibility to oversee non-profit investments instead of the IRS.

Dumb is going to happen. But the chaos breaks open some room to do some good things, too. This is a great time to speak very specifically about how our public goods can be available to everyone no matter how they voted, prayed, worked, worried or shouted. If we use the pitchfork to shovel out the barn, nobody needs it as a weapon.

“American Quarantine” an American Gothic parody created by me with Photoshop. In this together, separately…
byu/rvtherford ingraphic_design

Bee sex in Texas

Humans get so many things wrong about honeybees. I’m sure they are a bit confused about us, too. But they must be especially mystified by the way we call the one who sows all the eggs in the hive a queen, which implies the off-putting and inefficient pomp of human royalty. Mother is closer, given her role in laying many thousands of eggs; but also wrong given her lack of maternal qualities. She lays eggs but has no role in raising them. And the first thing she does when she emerges with her impressive stinger is to kill her competitors. Not like my mother.

The one we call queen is more like a sower of seeds. She is not even a gardener that carefully plants a seedling, making sure the roots are nestled just right in the soil. Let’s call her Sower.

Honeybees have successfully flourished for 30 million years precisely because they have no royal qualities at all. We have no idea how 60,000 bees in the hive think collectively, but we know it’s not the queen. Every single worker bee—all girls—have the identical genetics of the Sower. The hive every egg “royal jelly” for three days before switching to the more mundane “bee bread.” But the hive feeds the Sower special food her whole life turning on the genes that make her much bigger and living 10 times as long and, of course, able to lay a thousand eggs a day. But she isn’t any smarter than the other bees. Her most consequential decision is which egg to lay in which cell and doesn’t really decide even that. She sticks her tentacles into the cell to see which one the architect bees intended (the 10% drone cells are slightly bigger).

Why is this important for humans? We have long fallen for the idea of the Elevated Decider who receives ridiculously disproportionate privileges in exchange for making big decisions. The honeybees make those decisions collectively without the process skewed by privilege. Flat democracy so perfect humans can’t even recognize it.

Now and then humans approach smart by accident, such as recently seen in Texas of all places.

Honeybees typically produce way more honey than they can possibly consume, leaving plenty for us. They can also produce more hives, which is why they are so adaptive, able to explode into almost any niche given the chance. The Texas department of agriculture triggered an explosion of bee hives by granting agricultural tax abatements to any “farm” over 5 acres with 5 or more hives. Texans are not known for environmentalism, but they known a lucrative write-off when they see it.

Honeybees are insects, as TC reminds me, with little emotional bandwidth. They don’t care about dubious Texan morality. Suddenly, there were bees everywhere! And the people dumping poisons suddenly were surrounded by tax-incented Texans. (Here’s the story.)

We are so used to complaining about environmental decline that we overlook the natural superpowers like the honeybees’. They can make a new Sower and thus entire new hive when they need or want to do so. Normally, this is when the old Sower starts to show signs of wearing out and getting erratic. The hive puts some promising eggs in larger cells and feeds those eggs nothing but special food. In about 16 days a Sower will emerge. (She isn’t nice: as I mentioned, her first act is to kill the other potential queens.) She’ll fly off to mate with six or ten drones and returns to lay eggs in the dark for a couple years.

Often in the Springtime the the hive will find itself thinking of reproduces itself. Honeybee sex involves the whole hive. The existing Sower is chased around the hive to lose weight so she can fly one last time. About half the bees in the hive pour into the air in a swirling ecstatic cloud bringing the old Sower with them. They pause in a tree branch to give the scouts a chance to find a new permanent location in the neighborhood. While they are pausing an opportunistic human can persuade them into a box they may find it acceptable.

Kelly Carpenter’s bait hive for Methodist bees. So far it has captured four swarms that have come from his church rafters.

Kelly Carpenter and I have captured three Methodist hives this way in the past couple weeks. Combined with some Texas-style splits, 5 hives are now 16. The process is risky and wild. They bet everything on expansive possibility which has worked for thousands of millennia.

Last year about half of all hives in the United States did not make it through the gauntlet of toxins, sprays, overcrowding and stupid human behavior that magnify the threats of mites and such. But it is important to note that most of the hives that failed were the ones kept by humans.

Many natural species are also capable of exuberant expansion once humans quit pumping poison into their neighborhood. Nature out-generates death every chance it finds. Humans can help the most by removing the financial incentives to poison. Just imagine if we gave tax rebates for planting butterfly and pollinator flowers. Do we really need Texans to show us?

Why five acres? Our townhouse community has one acre of sanitized fescue vacuumed in the fall. The city council could change the game for bees and bugs and songbirds with a 5% property tax rebate. Of course, we could just do it. We not legally bound to spray neurotoxins on ourselves.

Too small to matter? One of my favorite organizations is Homegrown National Parks. “Homegrown National Park® addresses the urgent biodiversity crisis with a simple, science-based solution to a global challenge. We are a grassroots call-to-action to regenerate biodiversity by planting and preserving native plants that support critical ecosystem services and removing invasive plants that do not. We are catalyzing action that will have meaningful, tangible, measurable, and immediate results. We can do this NOW, without waiting for legislation.”

We are not inherently smart as honeybees. We have to think hard and do things on purpose. Somebody had to notice that there is more private land currently planted in lawns than in all the national parks put together. And think about what that means.

We can just stop behind stupid. Start choosing abundance.

Nature just won’t quit trying. Here’s an eager dandelion emerging from our parking lot. Never quit trying….

How Long?

Dr King has been dead longer than he was alive. And his dream seems as wobbly as the 94 years old he would have been this year. This is what happens to dreams too tethered to specific humans as we tend to age quicker than grand hopes can be fulfilled. King got the idea of “beloved community” from Josiah Royce, who would have been 169 this year. Amos, the prophet who imagined the waters of justice rolling down would be 2,788. Born 11 miles south of Jerusalem, I doubt he’d be feeling fulfilled if he’s watching from wherever.

Closer to home in little Winston Salem there is energy stirring to come together in a different way, one organized around the “vital conditions” linked to the Leading Causes of Life. Deeply informed and illuminated by the strategic fervor for equity, the vital conditions look at the community of people and organizations who hope with the tenacity of King and Amos for justice to roll at least a bit. Monte Roulier, the bard of Community Initiatives, was here just a month ago to talk about how we might do the plumbing for those rolling waters and not just chase whatever bothers us the most at the moment (homelessness, no–addiction, no-reading levels, no-toxic waste, no-poverty, no-whatever). Precisely because we have so many non-profits within 10 miles of city hall, each of which is organized around solving something ugly, it is very hard to work together long enough to see any change. Most of the organizations have some staff and a Board and donors whose attention span competes with all the other organizations’ needs.

Our fears compete while our common hopes are starved. While tribes can be built on fear, community is built on hope and possibility.

It is odd to look at civic body experiencing the Iowa caucuses next to the day honoring Dr. King, while the journalists run out of adjectives for the suffering in Gaza, Ukraine and among those struggling north to the US border. All this while a man who once held our highest office does all he can to shred the social and legal threads that hold us together. He has a tribe built on the fear of of community. It’s not the only such tribe around the world.

Anyone who is not depressed and anxious is simply not paying attention.

TC urged me to read Johann Hari’s book, Lost Connections, an exploration of the roots of our pandemic of depression and anxiety. He unpacks how our therapists and physicians are treating our depression and anxiety with a staggering amount of pharmaceuticals rolling down like a mighty river in our veins. His simple point is that the epidemic of depression can’t be fixed by pharma because the problem is not in our heads; it’s in the space between us, the one now filled with vitriol driving us farther apart at the very moment we need each other most.

“You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met. You need to have a community. You need to have meaningful values, not the junk values you’ve been pumped full of all your life, telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all these things.” (p318)

And of course, when he says “you,” he means me, you, himself and every single one of those we think we should fear or want to hurt. When depressed and anxious we lose the capacity to trust ourselves or anyone around us. The pills only dull the pain; they can’t resolve the disconnection.

We are deeply ill as a body politic, circling in our fears from the very people we need the most. Who do we need most? People who are annoyingly different, inconveniently complex, who don’t echo what we want to hear. Sort of like you’d find sitting down the row from you in church or standing next to you in line to vote.

Johann Hari is clear that this circling inward is serves the interests of the professionals plundering our souls by misdiagnosing our suffering . The pills for depression and anxiety are not medically effective except in rare circumstances. They create collateral damage at the individual level in such predictable things as weight gain. The pills and pill hucksters gain from our loss of energy, clarity and self efficacy. Every syllable is an accurate description of the venal way politicians exploit our fears.

No wonder people would vote for a transparent fraud. No wonder so few weep over Gaza and Nova Rave. No wonder people find the institutions of faith so hollow.

Hari suggests 7 anti-depressants—reconnections. None of these are in our heads or even our Spirit. Rather, the solutions are near at hand. He means literally at the fingertips where we touch other humans and focus on their joy or possibilities instead doing another lap inside ourselves.

Ask ourselves who is trying to make me and you more afraid. Walk away from them. Certainly, do not vote or give money to anyone who would gain from your fear.

Ask instead who might need some hope. Go toward them and show up in a real way. You should not go alone. Our culture, even hollowed out and brittle, still has an almost bizarre range of voluntary associations that will be happy to see you and give you a task that fits your hand.

Many such organizations were created in the aftermath of Dr King’s murder those many decades ago. They are what Jimmy Carter once called the mundane revolution, as practical as a bag of food, as basic electricity not being turned off, as modern as vaccine.

Hari’s hope is realistic and well-founded because it is not normal for humans to be so disconnected, medicated and fearful. Rather, we should expect to see a great turning toward the life of the whole people. It would be normal to experience an epidemic of connections of meaning, trust and respect.

A 94-year old King would remind us that he never promised that he would get there with us, and we might not either. Walking in hand is the way.

Iris Dement sings it:

Power, greed, and profit
Will never feed the soul
These three shovels have dug us
A deep dark hole
Compassion, understanding
And living one for all
And all for one is what it’s gonna take
To break this fall

How long? How long?

He said “Till justice rolls down like water
‘Till justice rolls down like water
‘Till justice rolls down like water
And righteousness flows like a mighty stream”

(You can listen to How Long: https://irisdementofficial.bandcamp.com/track/how-long)

Honeybee Collaboration

I once got up in a frigid December night to put a blanket on the honeybee hive on our deck. I do not know how to “keep” them or assure their thriving. But I sit with the bees and notice they find their way improvising amid circumstances no one bee or any one hive has encountered. I wonder what we could learn.

Worst bee picture ever. But they are alive where I thought them all dead after the frost! A great picture!

Late in the summer a hive that I thought robust was overcome by wax worms. You may have read about them because of their recently discovered capacity to digest plastic. They prefer eating wax and also spin a sticky web of yucky gloop inside the hive that the bees can’t overcome. The bees in this hive gave up, took their queen and fled about 100 feet across the circle underneath an empty hive box—a desperate tactic. I jiggered a way to get them inside a box but thought they were too few with too little time to build up for winter. I was not surprised that after the first frosty night, I saw no activity. And then I was surprised again when they mocked my despair this week coming and going with elan. I wrapped them in insulating foil to celebrate.

I wrapped the other six hives, too, after our state bee magazine reminded me that bees are supposed to be inside a tree surrounded by 3-5 inches of trunk, not our flimsy ¾” pine boxes. Anything we can do to keep the bees from expending energy is good the winter. I put a “sugar board” for nutrition and then added a “quilt box” on top filled with cedar shavings for warmth and to absorb moisture. I’ll do a final treatment for mites this week, blowing in oxalic acid to beat down the mites.

This hive is ready for the sugar board for winter nutrition and quilt of cedar shavings for insulation and to absorb moisture

The only thing I don’t try is to coordinate anything. Nobody has ever tamed honeybees, though we humans subject them to bizarre circumstances to which they adapt as best they can. No bee coordinates anything, either. How bees think is as much a mystery as the how a three pound squishy mass in our skull “thinks.” Thirty million years with no boss, much less royalty. No executive committee. No “table” around which important bees gather to decide the future. And they don’t get tripped up by “perfect;” taking what is real and finding the way.

Many important humans are currently making such abysmal choices that the whole species seems locked in a doom loop. Artificial fears blind us to our real peril. It was hard for the “last chance” climate conference in Qatar to remember to even pretend to try. The honeybees don’t care, except that the horrible decisions include releasing plumes of toxic chemicals that make it hard for them to fly straight. It’s a small planet.

As the global people were squandering their opportunity in Qatar, some key people in our little city met to think differently about how our civic hive might work better. We brought in Monte Roulier of Community Initiatives, one of our Stakeholder Health friends who, with ReThink Health and We In the World, have brought the Vital Conditions framework alive all across the nation, even into the dysfunctional thicket of Washington. Honeybees have the Vital Conditions in their DNA; every single bee and every single hive knows what to aim for, not just what to fear. Fears fragment our focus, while vitality integrates. If every human—like every bee—had roughly the same idea of vitality and life, we would need far less complicated coordination. We would count on everyone buzzing to a roughly similar tune.

Even a small town of 250,000 humans is an ensemble of many hives, neighborhoods and overlapping zones of power and ways of being. Nobody can possibly coordinate such a complexity even when so much depends on working together. We burn energy and time trying to create a table with clear agenda, shared data, distinct roles of authority. But the more power is concentrated, the more energy emerges to resist. We, like bees, work better knowing the other hives have a similar idea of what to hope for. Honeybee organization spends little friction on forced coordination; entirely focused on adapting to the actual circumstances. Multiple generative nodes are way smarter than any table of self-chosen geniuses trying for a singularity.

Better to gather with curiosity about each other’s hopes for vitality, hopes for life. Food helps with coffee in the morning and wine later in the evening. Like hearts learning to beat together, common life will emerge.

At The Carter Center’s Interfaith Health Program we traveled widely to help complex communities find their way to implement the gifts of science for health. We spoke of a “limited domain collaboration” as a way of creating multiple nodes of aspiration without leaders quarrelling. I was not yet informed by honeybees, so I didn’t realize they figured this out 30 million years ago. It’s Honeybee Collaboration; giving credit where it is due.

Humans have less baked into our DNA than honeybees. This makes us more adaptable but also easier to miss the point, chase our fears and waste time on needless friction. Every honeybee is imprinted with the ideal dimensions and qualities of the cavity in which to build a good hive. Maybe the Leading Causes of Life which underlay the Vital Conditions are like that. They see the interplay of five facets—Connection, Coherence, Agency, Intergenerativity and Hope as a pattern out of which life emerges over and over again. Jim Cochrane points out that the Causes of Life are actively dangerous if captured by any one tribe, nation or committee. If informed by the creative imagination for the whole and animated by the energy we call Spirit, they find the way toward life even when all seems lost. But that is a lot less exact than the bees, with their DNA imprint of the dimensions for the ideal hive cavity (22 quarts, dry, with a 1 ½” hole).

The wisdom tradition of Islam, the Jews and later, Christians, thought the honeybees were the species closest to the qualities of God with the sole exception of humans. We emerged millions of years later, so we may be an experiment by God to see if a species without the imprinted DNA can be agents of life for everybody on the little planet. It’s a perilous risk, working barely, if at all.

But that may be the Christmas miracle. Kate Hauk reminded me of the poem by John Roedel:

Me: Hey God

God: Hello there, my love.

Me: It’s over

God: That’s not true. You won.

Me: How can you tell?

God: Because you’re still here.

Me: Barely.

God: Barely is all it takes. Barely is amazing. Barely is a miracle.

The bees longest day is Friday. Six weeks later, still amid the frost, the queen will lay the eggs that will become the bees who will leap into the Spring sky to greet the early blooming maple and redbud. Miracle.