built into our beings

My family calls me B.

They started out calling me Dana Beth, a tried and true Southern Double Name, but “Dana Beth” is a mouthful. I quickly became “D.B.” and then just as quickly got downsized again. I’ve been B ever since.

I mean, mostly. I have also been Beefer (my childhood fortunately/unfortunately coincided with Wendy’s fast food “Where’s The Beef” ad campaign and I definitely wore a tiny t-shirt with that slogan emblazoned across my tiny chest), Beezus (Ramona Cleary’s big sister, duh), and then, thanks to my nephew, Aunt Bea (of Andy Griffith fame).

My family’s not normal enough to have ever insinuated that being B had anything to do with, you know, BEES. Too basic. But I’ve kind of gotten into bees, lately. It’s high gardening season, and the bees are out in force. This week, I took a trip to the wonderland that is Walter’s Greenhouse, where the big ol’ bumbles were frolicking:

And then I spent some time in my own tiny little community garden plot, where a honeybee was getting busy in the Bachelor’s Button:

I’m not a beekeeper or a melittologist, but I’m fascinated by these bees who are just living their lives, happily pollinating the world, keeping entire ecosystems running, blissfully unaware that their work is essential to the planet’s survival, completely ignorant of the rising wave of apocalyptic headlines.

The bees have a job. It is built into their beings, something they don’t have to discern or decide but simply know and do. Their work is set before them and they go about it without hesitation, without complaint. I assume.

I wish my work - our work - were as clear and simple as the pollinators’. I wish we all had purpose built into our beings, the gift of clarity about which tasks were essential and immediate, a field of flowers from which we knew to drink nectar and collect pollen, a hive of others who shake their butts to tell us where to go next.

I wish, in these days when the people in charge are destroying as much as they can, including innumerable precious human lives and all manner of hard-won systems of connection and support, that we knew, instinctively, what our jobs were, what our work is, how best to live in ways that will keep safe and alive as many of us as possible.

I’m holding out hope that we are like bees, that our jobs are just as obvious and just as simple. Maybe we also have that innate knowing and built-in instinct, the ability to follow a single, insistent urge and understanding toward our own essential work. Maybe, if we begin to divest ourselves from all the numbing agents, allow ourselves to leave behind the paralyzing influx of hot takes and run as far and as fast as we can from all the artificial forms of “intelligence,” we’ll be able to follow it again.

So much of our work is pretending to be useful, or propping up inhumane systems. So much of our time and energy and essence gets spent inside entirely ephemeral, made up realities. I’m wondering, this morning, what more I need to shrug off in order to hear, again, the work that is built into my being, the way of simply knowing and doing.

I’d like to live up to my name.