Missing Witches - You Are Bee Kin Meditation

00:00:00.000 the missing witches podcast is entirely listener funded if you want to support the project

00:00:08.280 join us and our coven at patreon.com slash missing witches you aren't being a proper 0.81

00:00:15.400 woman therefore you must be a witch you must be a witch 0.97

00:00:30.000 I want to talk about bees. 0.97

00:00:36.080 They've been working all winter long,

00:00:38.680 walking in formation through the dark, cold nights,

00:00:42.040 eating their stores,

00:00:43.900 shivering to keep the center warm where the women sit, 1.00

00:00:47.200 who will bring their whole community back to life when it's time.

00:00:51.660 And it's almost time.

00:00:54.820 But first, I want to entreat you to listen to your room,

00:00:58.800 Wherever you are and in your room, your breath.

00:01:05.200 And beneath your breath, your heart.

00:01:08.360 Place your hand on your heart or against your vulnerable throat

00:01:11.600 to hear the bass line that is with you all the time.

00:01:16.120 Let it begin to move you.

00:01:21.400 Bring your awareness down to feel that internal rhythm in between your hips.

00:01:25.500 feel the curling serpent of your spine

00:01:28.600 a flock of tiny bones

00:01:30.260 a song of nerve ending

00:01:31.660 and let them move like a reed

00:01:34.220 in a stream running deep

00:01:35.600 sway

00:01:37.820 just a little private

00:01:40.360 salome

00:01:40.940 worship for a moment

00:01:44.060 your own Bastet

00:01:45.240 dancing goddess of both pleasure and health

00:01:48.200 or Nataraja Shiva

00:01:50.320 divine cosmic dancer

00:01:52.020 who manifested the universe through dance

00:01:54.480 and who is honored with a bronze statue of the dancing god at CERN,

00:01:59.720 the Center for Research in Particle Physics.

00:02:02.880 You are a particle and swarm.

00:02:06.400 You are dancing all the time.

00:02:10.740 The gods Vishnu, Krishna, and Indra were called Madhava,

00:02:14.720 the nectar-born ones, and their symbol is the bee.

00:02:18.300 Divinity is in bee nectar-born.

00:02:21.420 Bubbling in the crook of trees, Dr. Julia Skinner tells us

00:02:24.360 people found the first honey mead, ferments, and fungi opened our third eyes, inner eyes,

00:02:30.100 and we saw the nature of the divine, or nature in all ways it is and was already what we

00:02:35.940 call divine. Hindu bee goddess Barami came to be when a demon set out to destroy the

00:02:43.420 natural and divine world, and no god could stop them on their own. But the gods called 0.98

00:02:48.620 upon the goddess mother, primal energy, and a new divinity kinship formed, massive, bees 0.97

00:02:56.680 swarming from her four hands. She closed her eyes and summoned bees, hornets, wasps, flies, 0.99

00:03:03.420 termites, mosquitoes, and spiders from the skies, and they crawled onto her body and

00:03:09.440 clung onto her, merging with her to create the divine form of Barami Devi. They were

00:03:17.440 multiple, as we are in our own bodies, with our billions of microbe, fungal, and might

00:03:26.040 companions, and together they defeated the end of the world, and the sound of their kinship

00:03:32.760 remains in our essential life, sound, breath, and heart.

00:03:38.100 This buzzing is imitated in Vedic chants, and it both represents and is the essential

00:03:45.380 sound of the universe.

00:03:47.440 the essential sound of the universe is in swarms and particles

00:03:52.620 and in your own heart

00:03:54.500 this kinship is how we defeat the end of the world

00:03:59.440 the god of love carries a bow with a string made of bees

00:04:05.080 bees are particle and wave and strings and weavers of love

00:04:10.500 the twin horsemen the aspens lords of light have a whip dripping with honey

00:04:16.060 and a Vedic prayer rings out

00:04:18.460 O ascens, lords of brightness

00:04:20.580 anoint me with the honey of the bee

00:04:22.480 that I may speak forceful speech among men

00:04:25.920 swarming kinship be with me

00:04:30.620 let me speak truth forcefully

00:04:33.740 let me remember the swarm that we are

00:04:37.740 let us return to our dances

00:04:41.160 wherever you are

00:04:44.920 no matter how constrained, you can imagine dancing

00:04:48.160 and bathe yourselves in neural light

00:04:51.600 because the neurons that fire when you dance

00:04:54.580 or when you imagine dancing are almost exactly the same. 0.98

00:04:59.540 Neither your body nor your desk job can fucking stop you, holy dancer. 0.99

00:05:04.680 Bathe in light. 0.99

00:05:07.600 When a person dances or imagines dancing,

00:05:10.420 the area of the cerebrum that holds images of muscle movement is stimulated.

00:05:14.920 and sends messages to the hypothalamus.

00:05:18.020 If the dance image is one of deep joy or release,

00:05:21.200 the body is put into a healing state through the hypothalamic pathways.

00:05:25.980 The body can bathe every cell in the body with a hormonal flood

00:05:29.640 as the imagery lights up the neural nets in the brain.

00:05:36.520 So imagine your hips are rocking side to side,

00:05:40.120 like a boat that is safe in quiet waves, warm breeze.

00:05:44.920 beneath the vast dance of the cosmos.

00:05:49.700 Imagine you are a tree in a summer wind.

00:05:54.340 Imagine

00:05:54.860 you are holding a sleeping child in your arms.

00:06:02.180 And you are rocking and bouncing

00:06:04.300 and humming gently.

00:06:06.920 And you are beyond tired

00:06:09.320 but the movement comes of its own volition.

00:06:12.140 rock your child

00:06:15.740 and by your child I mean that unique spark of life

00:06:20.700 that is in each of us

00:06:22.780 no matter our gender or sex

00:06:25.520 to bring forth into the world

00:06:27.580 whatever form it may end up taking for you

00:06:30.120 rock this spark of potential

00:06:33.700 in your mind's eye

00:06:35.200 let your strict spine and tense wrists go soft

00:06:40.620 feel the milk, bone, blood

00:06:44.660 of your strength holding you

00:06:46.700 long after you let go

00:06:49.740 feel us buzzing and upholding you

00:06:55.080 feel us swarming and rocking you

00:06:58.820 you are one of us

00:07:01.740 you are beacon

00:07:04.080 imagine us dancing together

00:07:10.180 all across the world in this dark cave of listening

00:07:13.440 where we hum and ferment 0.89

00:07:15.060 our earthy, funky, messy, buggy, sexy, bloody, sticky divinity.

00:07:22.220 This cave between our ears is a sacred cave 0.84

00:07:25.200 of the divine Minoan bee goddess worship.

00:07:28.020 Maybe those temples in stone have been lost,

00:07:30.960 but all these billions in bone,

00:07:33.720 we resonate still.

00:07:34.920 the hum within us is full of echoes of the ancestors who've rocked us

00:07:41.400 and the ancestor's self who is one of ourselves rocks us even when we are alone

00:07:47.460 my kid

00:07:51.980 my kid three years old woke up in the night afraid of bees

00:07:59.260 they were coming in the doors she said she was afraid they'd sting her and i rocked her

00:08:04.920 and told her, bees want to play and palm it and ride the wind and snuffle sweet flowers.

00:08:13.720 They don't want to sting.

00:08:16.600 But they will if they need to. 0.99

00:08:18.800 To be clear, we will fucking sting if we need to. 0.98

00:08:22.260 I will sting to protect her and to protect you. 0.99

00:08:27.920 I told her stories from last year, which she remembers like a dream

00:08:32.160 of her helping our squash babies by pollinating them for us.

00:08:37.380 She played the bee then because the plants were missing them.

00:08:42.880 We've been missing them, our bee kin.

00:08:46.960 We celebrate when we see them and leave out small bowls of water and sweetness.

00:08:53.300 We leave bowls of sweetness in their honor. 1.00

00:08:58.240 Offer yourself a bowl of sweetness in honor of your bee kin. 1.00

00:09:02.160 Offer yourself a celebration.

00:09:05.680 Play the bee to all the livingness around you who have been missing your kinship.

00:09:11.780 Leave out bowls of sweetness.

00:09:15.340 Imagine dancing with the wind and snuffling sweet flowers. 0.98

00:09:20.780 You are bee kin. 1.00

00:09:24.740 I held her as she fell back to sleep.

00:09:27.760 And I thought of beekeeper families going out to tell the bees when their keeper has died.

00:09:33.800 Because if you don't tell them, they get confused and flustered and disperse.

00:09:40.560 Julia told us the families of beekeepers go and sit with them and mourn.

00:09:47.580 Let the bees understand from your sorrow what has passed, what you were missing.

00:09:54.160 Maybe they can help you find it

00:09:57.680 I held my kid and thought of family's mourning in silence with the bees

00:10:03.620 And held the sadness for all that's missing

00:10:06.640 And held her fear

00:10:07.880 We hold swarms of hope and gather and loss

00:10:12.980 And the intricate patterns of family

00:10:15.420 I whispered to her and I'll whisper to you, little kin

00:10:21.060 Little beloved one

00:10:22.580 how the bees talk to each other

00:10:25.260 in funny dances

00:10:26.300 with a buzz and waggle

00:10:28.180 and a shake and a sway

00:10:30.360 we fell back to sleep finally

00:10:35.200 muttering waggle and shake and sway

00:10:38.100 back into the buzz and dance of dreaming

00:10:43.160 of finding the world to be more magical

00:10:46.220 hopeful, heartbreaking and vast

00:10:49.760 than you knew

00:10:50.640 you are more vast than you knew

00:10:54.560 and the dance of the world is always inside you

00:10:59.340 you are beacon

00:11:01.940 you are swarm

00:11:04.640 hold this safely in your belly and your heart and in your lungs

00:11:10.520 Artemis, Demeter, and Persephone had priestesses called Melissa

00:11:16.920 or melissi, bees, or melissinomoi, beekeepers.

00:11:22.980 From Minoan culture on into high Athenian society

00:11:26.460 up until the Roman Empire violently suppressed pagan religions, 1.00

00:11:30.620 women who celebrated and tended to the spirit of harvest, 0.99

00:11:34.340 of fertility, of creation,

00:11:36.600 were bound up with the dances and knowledge of bees.

00:11:41.920 In 1954, for the Classical Weekly,

00:11:45.500 Lillian B. Lawler wrote

00:11:47.560 A memetic dance of bee priestesses 1.00

00:11:49.720 would have included flying and flitting movements 1.00

00:11:52.540 the unflinging of arms

00:11:54.940 in abandon or invocation

00:11:57.060 swirling in dizzy circles

00:11:59.220 here one recalls Cretan paintings of women with hair flying up

00:12:02.920 as they circle rapidly in the dance

00:12:04.820 half circles to right and to left

00:12:07.440 with shaking of the hips

00:12:08.720 on occasion a grape-like figure or picture

00:12:11.700 representing a swarming cluster of bees

00:12:13.880 and probably similar pictures

00:12:15.480 representing lilies and other flowers

00:12:17.600 visited by bees

00:12:18.840 and a mimetic or symbolic portrayal

00:12:22.300 of the feeding of honey to a divine child.

00:12:25.840 Throughout there would have been much humming,

00:12:27.660 buzzing, or intoning of sacred songs.

00:12:31.040 The dance would probably have been

00:12:32.420 accompanied with symbols.

00:12:33.920 Symbols were actually found in the Idean cave

00:12:36.580 and would have increased in frenzy 0.99

00:12:39.020 until one or more of the priestesses 0.99

00:12:40.820 was seized with the spirit of prophecy

00:12:42.640 and cried out words of dread import. 1.00

00:12:47.960 I love to imagine these prophetic, pollen-dusted dancing women. 0.97

00:12:54.640 And I love to imagine you, prophetic and pollen-dusted women,

00:13:00.260 men, queer, transgender, expansive,

00:13:04.260 unflinging your arms in abandon or invocation,

00:13:07.480 hair flying, humming, intoning

00:13:11.180 winged and pollen dusted

00:13:13.620 dancing to hear better the truths of your bee kin

00:13:17.100 dancing together in celebration

00:13:19.200 in movements learned directly from the dances of the bees themselves

00:13:22.920 because they are dancers, our bee kin

00:13:26.960 and we have been dancing with them for longer than we remember

00:13:30.920 Lillian wrote

00:13:33.340 the bee performs two dances 0.81

00:13:34.920 the round dance and the waggle dance

00:13:37.100 Both are used by workers returning to the hive to report the finding of a good supply of food.

00:13:43.040 If the distance of the food from the hive is less than about 50 meters,

00:13:47.360 the worker bee performs a round dance, describing circles about its own axis.

00:13:52.160 The dance is spirited, even wild.

00:13:54.640 The bee throws up its legs as high as it can and moves in dizzy circles.

00:13:59.960 Other bees at first look on.

00:14:02.240 Then the frenzy of the dance seems to communicate itself to them.

00:14:05.600 and they join in.

00:14:08.440 After the dance, they fly out to seek the food.

00:14:13.040 We knew of these dances and then we forgot

00:14:15.680 and now we rediscover them again.

00:14:18.220 We slowly and suddenly slip into the memory of dancing

00:14:21.560 and it washes our neural nets in ancient life.

00:14:27.000 We are Beacon, descendants of Melissi

00:14:30.600 who devoted their lives to the ritual and play

00:14:33.380 and resonances of bees.

00:14:35.600 we follow them back to the hive of our communion with our beacon with each other

00:14:43.220 with a resonance that crafts tiny interlocking hexagons of interdependence

00:14:49.040 back to the dance the melisai dance here in the cave of our memory they unfurl unfling our bodies

00:14:59.660 are neural hives. They dance in you a DNA memory, a whispered possibility of sacred sway and play

00:15:07.560 where the lines between us and others soften with the grace of joy. In the Homeric hymns to Hermes

00:15:15.180 we find there are certain holy ones, sisters born, three virgins gifted with wings, their heads are

00:15:22.100 besprinkled with white meal, and they dwell under a ridge of Parnassus. They are teachers of divination

00:15:28.960 and apart from me the art which I practiced

00:15:31.140 yet as a boy following herds

00:15:33.100 though my father paid no heed to it.

00:15:35.920 From their home they fly,

00:15:38.080 now here, now there,

00:15:40.220 feeding on honeycomb

00:15:41.300 and bringing all things to pass.

00:15:44.220 And when they are inspired

00:15:45.420 through eating yellow honey,

00:15:46.880 they are willing to speak truth.

00:15:49.400 But if they be deprived of the God's sweet food,

00:15:51.940 then they speak falsely

00:15:53.180 as they all swarm in and out together.

00:15:58.960 Maybe we've been deprived of the sweet food of the earth and our dances have lost their

00:16:04.580 truth, but that doesn't mean we have to stay this way.

00:16:10.340 In ancient Crete and Greece, there were those who devoted their lives to these sisters and

00:16:15.220 their arts, and then there was everyone else, and on certain holy days, the line between

00:16:20.640 those blurred.

00:16:22.880 Everyone who joined the dance became, for a little while, one of them.

00:16:26.880 Melissa, Melissa

00:16:29.880 and this is the dance

00:16:32.960 the witchcraft of beaconship invites you to

00:16:35.800 call yourself what you like

00:16:39.200 you are called by your secret name

00:16:42.380 invited, chosen

00:16:45.480 to enter this dance

00:16:47.400 remember this dance

00:16:49.760 imagine this dance and shapeshift with us

00:16:54.160 become both bee and beekeeper

00:16:57.460 one with the spirit

00:16:59.700 and also one who is tending to them

00:17:01.940 be one with all this magical in-betweenness

00:17:06.500 caught up in the world of the wild dance

00:17:10.220 dizzy with all its knowledge

00:17:12.740 move together

00:17:14.960 and then fly out to find

00:17:17.900 what the dance told you you might find

00:17:20.060 you are called, invited

00:17:23.760 chosen

00:17:24.880 you are Melissa 0.94

00:17:27.320 you are bee kin

00:17:29.480 bee keeper 0.95

00:17:30.420 you are pollen danced

00:17:32.680 and pollen dusted

00:17:36.760 and unflung

00:17:38.680 the circle of kinship

00:17:41.400 with the humming world

00:17:42.320 and all its in-betweenness

00:17:43.720 includes you always

00:17:45.640 you've always been here

00:17:48.380 and we've always been missing you

00:17:50.720 we leave bowls of sweetness out in your honor. 1.00

00:18:06.500 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00

00:18:13.120 You must be a witch. 1.00

00:18:15.860 The Missing Witches podcast is entirely listener funded.

00:18:20.720 If you want to support the project, join us and our coven at patreon.com slash missingwitches.

Missing Witches - April 25, 2022

You Are Bee Kin Meditation

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