Healing and the Buzz of Honeybees
Healing and the Buzz of Honeybees
Nancy Lovas
On a midsummer night, some dozen years ago, I hiked with my camp friends to the lakeside amphitheatre to sing and pray. We settled back on the rough concrete, the last of the day’s humidity hugging us close and cicadas joining our song, "I've finally found where I belong, in Your presence, God."
In the years since I left my childhood home, I’ve longed for home, a place to belong. I have searched, found, left and lost, searched and found again: people to belong with, a dwelling to rest in, and work to put my hands to.
Where do I belong?
When I first went to Washington, D.C., I was in my early twenties and single, the city made home by a warm church community. Four of us lived in a small Capitol Hill rowhouse, where my roommate planted bright flowers in the front garden and blackberries ripened under the backyard clothesline. The house itself was falling to bits, but the love spilling out made it our home. For fajita fiestas and Easter feasts, friends old and new flooded out into the backyard and laughter echoed for hours. Some Sunday evenings, we four lingered late round the table, glasses of red wine in hand. I cycled up the hill to work; in the afternoons, I stopped in the park to watch puppies playing. I belonged in this corner of the city. But after four hard, sweet years, it wasn’t to last. I became dissatisfied with the continuous churn of people coming and going and the pain of saying goodbye. My right shoulder tightened as I embodied the city’s busy tension.
Where do I belong?
I left, moving away back south to a college town for work at a university. My first winter here, bumping along on my bus commute, I slowly made my way through Wendell Berry’s essays in The Art of the Commonplace. Berry's words counteracted the dissatisfaction and tension I had felt in D.C. In staying put and learning the land, Berry seeks the health of his place. He writes that, on the whole, Americans and American society have lost their place in pursuit of materials, money, influence, and power. Our lost sense of place is integral to the mess we have made of things. Committing ourselves to a place, whether again or for the first time, is a way forward to healing and remaking ourselves; it is the way of remembering who we are. We remember who we are when we are where we belong.
In the pandemic midsummer, I write in a field by an old farm pond, distant road noise masked by birdsong and cicadas. I told a dear friend yesterday that I belong here in a way I don’t yet understand. Unlike the city, I feel there is time here to linger, to be slow and to be still, and to listen for the Lord. I need not rush. There is time yet to lie back in the field and watch honeybees at the clover, hear children laugh, and cry to mourn what is lost.
Berry writes of walking the same acre of land, day after day and year after year. Only then does he, can he, begin to know the land where he belongs. Day after day from June to November, I walk the same miles in my town. I raise my coffee mug in a morning salute to my elderly neighbor sitting on his front stoop. I see free range chickens roaming the neighborhood and watch the growing gardens in my neighbors’ yards. We share salads, stews, and desserts out of abundance. I am beginning to know the town where I want to belong.
Can I belong?
Robin Wall Kimmerer narrates the audio version of her book Braiding Sweetgrass. My soul, tilled by reading Berry and many others, soaks up her words and gentle questions about plants, land, home and belonging as gardens around me soak up the steady autumn rain. "Can immigrants become indigenous?" she writes. Can immigrants learn to care for the land, to listen to the plants, to know the place where they have arrived and find belonging? These questions resonate. By definition, Kimmerer writes, immigrants can never be indigenous. Then, she contrasts the ways of two plants. White man's footprint, as the Potawatomi people call this one, is not a plant indigenous to the Americas. White man’s footprint came with the white colonizers. But this plant does not colonize: instead, it provides medicine and food as gift to the people. White man's footprint has become naturalized, fitting into the ecosystem and bringing health to both communities of plants and people; it belongs. Kudzu, in contrast, colonizes. It takes over, consuming and subsuming native species.
I am not indigenous to this college town where I moved for work. And I moved here from D.C. where most folks were from other places. This stretches back in my family: even though I grew up in the same Southern city as my parents and generations before me did, we are ultimately still immigrants. On my father's side, I am the 3rd generation born in the U.S.; my great-grandfather came through Ellis Island a mere century past. On my mother's side, my grandfather traces our family's presence in North America to the 18th century. We are not indigenous, and though we have learned much we have much more to learn. In my move for work, I have returned to be nearer to where my ancestors settled when they immigrated. Perhaps I was unconsciously seeking home. So I ask myself, can I be like white man's footprint instead of kudzu? Can I learn and care for my town and this land? In so doing, can I become naturalized, to belong, to this place?
In the deep of winter, the memory of my rector's voice echoes, referencing Scripture: we are not citizens of this world but of God's kingdom. Seeking the health of my place on earth is part of being a good citizen. All those years ago, by that lake in a narrow mountain valley where I first remember sensing true belonging, I sang that I belong in God's presence. I'm learning: there is no place where He is not. I live now in a town that feels like home and I want to learn and care for the land. I want it to be my place. I want to be able to remember who I am, help bring healing to my community, listen to children's laughter and the buzz of honeybees, and move through space with careful intentionality. Perhaps, by God's grace, I will belong.
Nancy Lovas
Writer & Educator
Nancy lives in the Southeast U.S., where she faithfully visits the farmer's market and organizes neighborhood gatherings. Her other writing can be found archived at Humane Pursuits.
Photography by L'oeil d'Eos