Pollination Required

The bees dwindle and die. Does anyone care?

WandaVision and The Superbowl play on the flickering box that beams programming into anesthetized minds – and they aren’t talking about pollination. Biodiversity fails. The web spun fine – the pattern of life – fails. It isn’t just the bees: bats dwindle, hummingbirds flee, threatened. We kill our pollinators. We murder biodiversity and the interlocking web of life. We commit suicide. We are too placated by sensorial distraction to notice.

We live in the here and now only when our attention lays harvested by a flicker rate that mimics fire’s flicker. The rest of the time, we worry only about the looming spectre of Death – and we avoid meeting its gaze so thoroughly that we remain strangers, when Death eventually comes. And all the while, we run through life not noticing the intricate web in which we spin a dance more delicate than dandelion’s mane.

Some voices speak around the chatter from the screen, but reason and logic can’t cut through entranced vision. We give our minds away to fear and illusion. Some voices even start to yell just outside the endless droning, but passion and desperate pleas won’t regain attention we willingly abandoned to external spaces. We soon seethe vitriol at those voices as they start to scream, because we haven’t yet cut every string of empathetic vibration connections to the keys of their souls.

Something in us sees a trap…and yet, we cannot drag ourselves out of this hallucinatory play we’ve joined. We begin to produce it ourselves, now. No one who isn’t signed up for the play may take space in our minds. We won’t allow it.

Diversity only exists in the characters we choose to play, not in the cast itself, not in their points of view, not in their windows onto experience of this world, not in the ways in which we allow ourselves to look out upon the vastly intricate, infinite strands that make up the world… we stumble and prance with our eyes closed along the shimmering threads interconnecting us to every last moment, every single consciousness, every incidence of joy and birth and experience ever to exist. We refuse to see the silky strands. We forget.

We look back to hurts unhealed, quickly close our eyes to those knots of pain we created. We make ourselves strangers to ourselves, foreign invaders of the web. Strangers, traipsing in alleged gaiety through a world of flickering light and sensorial entrapment, never holding ourselves in our own attention and never accepting the one inevitability of our existence: our crumbling edifice of self, deleted.

In all that disconnection, how could we stand a chance? How could we notice our only truth is that of our eternal, interconnected, webbed and infinitely reflected soul?

We convince ourselves that Death carries finality and we run from the illusion so fully that we fall and fling ourselves chaoticly, caught up into the web. The same web whose threads we were meant to nimbly run upon. We fall in our blind terror’s urgency and catch up so many strands within our tumbling collapse, rolling and rolling, fragile threads snapping to wrap around us, caressing our delusion, swaddling us, finally, in our resting cocoon.

In the dying light of the smothering dark, we finally feel safe. We embrace the setting sun because the darkness doesn’t force us to look upon our painful, knotted burrs and our fearful spectre, Death. The setting sun and our cocoon keep us warm, smothered, safe. We sleep.

What life is left, our barely twitching connections in the web try to call out, but our ears rage full of theme songs and catchy jingles as we drift off. We place our thumb in our mouth and we nod, soothed. A dream is all that remains. A dream distracted with a thousand flashing lights and a million vapid, laughing, bling-sprayed faces of hollow promise.

In the background, unnoticed, a weaving labors to rebuild a shattered web. Underneath the jingles, a buzzing never gives up and keeps searching for flower stamens to embrace. Death comes to the dream world and reaches out a hand, unable to change its countenance to spare a deluded mind, only hoping to make peace and be welcomed back into the web. All around the cocoon, wings flutter and whisper of endless possibilities pushed out of mind amidst willfully occluded sight. Trillions of layers of thread spun fine, wrapped now around a sleeping mind, can barely register their gossamer and nearly silent songs.

Through a shimmering of veils thicker than earth, something begins to emerge. Layers of thick webbing rolled tightly somehow register a rumble. A vibration running deep like an abyssal wail: from the bottom of oceans of oppression, suppression, rejection, its wavelength eventually rolls too deep and wide for any barrier to hold back. Voices come, lifted up, amplified by that wavelength that never gave up.

Was it a whale that sang the spider back to the web to keep weaving while the bees took up the tune and brought it to the humans who had nearly given up hope?

Diversity cannot describe how Death carries them all back to life. Cross pollination carried on a million forms of hand and wing and pincer and baleen and talon.

Inside the cocoon, fear creeps back at the ingressing cacophony that builds and encompasses the stagnant dream. The piercing waveforms of life’s cry: from the trenches of the ocean to the bursts of green from the ground to the crawling, slithering, flying and the hordes of energies unseen. They flow into every crack like thick honey.

Nothing, it turned out, could actually collapse the waveform that had always existed. And no cocoon, no matter how thick, how nested, how intoxicating, or how broken, could keep its symphony of sympathetic crashing at bay. Not even fear stood a chance.

A rogue wave collects. It contains all truths ever uttered or left unsaid. The fluid mass gathers every remaining creature and urging emergence. It splashes out all their buzzing, beating and joyful outflow back into the shape left waiting, the only shape that had ever existed: the web. The network of all connections. The nodes reflect every moment and every being and every consciousness that ever could exist, ever had existed, and ever would exist at every juncture of the intertwined threads. The threads themselves carry the vibration even further and deeper and higher. The center rebuilds and remembers: it had always existed, had always spun whole.

Bleating dissonance of some sensorial distraction runs through as many threads as it can, as many heads as it can, as the cocoon collapses into itself, trying to remain and gain hold. No matter. The web carries it, too. Nothing so contained and contrived could infect all that sparkling and thrumming weaving. Not in this symphony.

Thick crusted eyes peel open and see that fleeing distraction. Like a drug, like a familiar friend. An urge toward it sends it strength as it flees, but a strength also fills that new view. A strength lent by a thousand murmuring, urging voices that speak of strangeness and the unknown, voices that never stopped placing gathered pollen in cradled hexagons and along threaded strands.

Wiping away sleep, without understanding fully why or how or what will happen, we reach out a trembling hand into the utter darkness – absolute black between the spaces of the filaments of webbing that now stretch out to horizons too far to comprehend. There is no end to the emptiness. We wince in fear again and begin to pull back to the safety and warmth of swaddling…

But the darkness reaches back to hold our hand. In a cold and brutal truth of half of all that exists, Death replaces distraction. The past pains and hurts stab clear, but simple knots disintegrate and untie, in this balance. They fall apart and fall back into their place in the thread of self. Light strewn self, shadow and beam, flying and nesting, accepted and healed.

The future lies darkly in hand, a new friend. The voices that call from everywhere and nowhere at once, to be heard and held, now feel like possibility instead of threat. They pollinate a mind once closed in terror and division. A field of flower and tree springs up in its place, a feast for friends small and large – to thrive.

The bees thrive when everyone cares, not about WandaVision and The Superbowl playing on the flickering box that beams programming into anesthetized minds – they aren’t pollinating anything but fear and delusion – but when they care about biodiversity, which is all that exists, in reality.

The web spun fine – the pattern of life – cannot fail. It isn’t just the bees: bats send out their energy, hummingbirds weave the threads, whales call their reminder. Even the abyss holds all life, every reflection, and infinite possibility in its arms. Death may come for some pollinators. But we create biodiversity and the interlocking web of life with every moment we choose to look around us without flinching and accept all of ourselves as a part of the intricate weaving of spirit.

We murder delusion. We abandon sensorial distraction for full immersion in the reality of all that is. We leave no aspect behind, embracing the entirety of experience and perspective, in order to save ourselves. In order to thrive.

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Pollination is essential to the web of life. It is also essential to the web of consciousness and soul. We need diversity in pollinators to survive, if we want to survive, physically, spiritually and societally.