I have been interested in learning about bees; entry level information is where I am at but yet so much of it is actually really “radical”.

I have no idea how to actually keep bees, or any of that, at this moment.

But I have been learning that there is a way of bee-keeping where less is more. Not touching, poking or prodding the bees is usually the best approach for their health and welfare. Allegedly, meddling with a hive just to check things out can result in several days of re-organization and damage control that the bees have to do.

Well-meaning humans making the instinctual processes of animals more difficult.

Harder on the animals, and harder on their future and their community.

Obviously, that is so much like birth and things I have learned there over the years. Directly relatable! The way we are taught to “monitor” a labor with a doppler or a vaginal exam is akin to lifting the top of the hive up. It can take a woman hours or lifetimes (maybe that’s dramatic but yet birth is ancestral) to “recover” from an interference; or an intervention, or anything that forces her body to deviate from the process because it needs to first go to protection.

“Hands off and eyes on” is a quote from this bee book, and that has been my mantra for so many years.

“Hands off” has come to be a phrase I dislike when it’s used carelessly or it’s used to communicate that birth never needs anything.

This mantra to me means we don’t need to do anything unnecessarily, but yet we hold the space in a way that eyes (and ears, and sound and our sixth sense) are aware. We may not literally have eyes on, but the sense of VISION is important at a birth.

I can witness and hold space and see what is there to see.

This book comes at about the anniversary of a very complicated birth from last year (probably will write more about that this weekend). But what stands out to me about the timing is it feels that I am being reminded by the bees that my instincts are good. That birth doesn’t usually need us.

These can be hard beliefs to reconcile after you’ve seen it be the complete opposite situation.

But a year has gone by, and I feel my hope in birth and birth attending returning. It is a process (much like beekeeping, I imagine) that can’t be rushed and so I haven’t rushed it.

I won’t return to birth attending until my healing feels more complete.

Grateful for the bees today with this message, and this timely reminder of what I know is truth.

Oxoxo
Maryn

PS I am going to be talking more about ancestral wisdom at the end of the Month. Sign up before you forget, and even if you miss it, I will send you the recording.