Bee Pastures, Factory-farmed Insects, a Parakeet and a Solar Eclipse

August 22nd, the day after the total solar eclipse and I am thinking about the fleeting moments of wonder to see something so extraordinary in the heavens.  Because it was cloud-covered in Albuquerque, we could view it briefly with our own eyes. So remarkable to stop and pause and be in the rare alignment of the earth, the moon and the sun.

It's all connected: the sun to the plants, the bees, all of the insects in nature, the ability as a human to witness all that is on this planet.  Like the eclipse, everything is always shifting, being born, coming into view and fading away.  I am reading a book just gifted to me by a friend-a collection of John Muir's words. One essay, Bee Pastures, is rich with a sense of miles of wildflowers, bees and insects in Yosemite Valley, California in April 1868:

When California was wild, it was one sweet bee garden throughout its entire length, north and south, and all the way across from the snowy Sierra to the ocean.

When I first saw this central garden, the most extensive and regular of all the bee pastures of the State, it seemed all one sheet of plant gold, hazy and vanishing in the distance, distinct as a new map along the foot-hills at my feet.

Descending the eastern slopes of the Coast Range through beds of gilias and lupines, and around many a breezy hillock and bush-crowned headland, I at length waded out into the midst of it.  All the ground was covered, not with grass and green leaves, but with radiant corollas, about ankle-deep next the foot-hills, knee-deep or more five or six miles out.  Here was bahia, madia , madaria, burrielia, chrysopsis....various shades of yellow, blending finely with purples of clarkia, orthocarpus, and...delicate petals were drinking the vital sunbeams without giving back any sparkling glow.


Can you imagine?  One sweet bee garden. It is almost like a fairy-tale to read his words and imagine what he witnessed before the worst of the industrial revolution, ranching, mining, clear-cutting forests and factory farming turned so many beatific fields to dust.

An art show opened in Albuquerque this weekend, it's a show connected in theme to these topics and includes artists considering bees, botanicals, pollination, insects and other related subjects.   One piece has been in my thoughts because of the media the artist chose to use: insects, real insects farmed in China. They are bred for death for collectors who want perfect specimens. I once killed a bird for art.  A blue parakeet which I purchased live, in a pet store in Kent, Ohio.  I was in my freshman year of college in 1972, seventeen or eighteen and I did not know this act of murder would haunt me for the rest of my life.  At the time, it seemed okay.  My professor gave an assignment for a competition in a 3D studio art class.  One on a list of requirements was "something that was once living."  Looking back, I am certain the idea was meant to inspire the use of a leaf, a tree branch, a feather, etc. Unfortunately, I took this quite literally and though I could not quite face the act of killing the parakeet personally, a friend Tony did the deed for me, contract for hire; I take full and total responsibility.

My piece, an assemblage in the manner of the artist, Joseph Cornell, was constructed with a cigar box painted with blue-green enamel and lined with royal blue cotton velveteen from remnants of a dress I wore to a high school prom. The metal prongs inside the box for holding cigars, I painted gold and placed the dead parakeet between them.  I remember the piece clearly forty-six years later.   I mounted a small classic 1950s image of Jesus from Sunday school, upside down, on the inside lid of the box.  It seems obvious to me now that I was an angry teenager, but at the time, the little coffin remained a subconscious expression of my inner turmoil.  The piece won the competition, but when my professor asked where I got the parakeet, things changed dramatically.  Word got around school that I had killed a bird for art and someone I didn't know came up to me in the cafeteria and told me off.  I didn't know how to respond.   

Catching a quick glimpse of the insects mounted on the gallery wall Saturday night brought it back to me again.  The large scale piece, floor to ceiling, fifteen to twenty feet in height, is covered with carefully pinned insects and intersecting circular drawings. Each exquisite insect is about three inches long and larger than our local hummingbirds. The installation is quite stunning in visual terms, at first glance one thinks of a geometric fabric pattern or tile work.   The artist purchased the many, perhaps hundreds of insects through an online source in China, bred for the world of collectors, science labs, schools and evidently, for artists as well.  They are somehow mounted alive so their wings, feet and bodies are in precise positions before they are chloroformed to death. Chloroform or trichloromethane is a colorless, volatile liquid solvent used to render someone unconscious.  The fact that they were living consciousness seems somehow irrelevant to the artist's work, she claims to be making this work to help humans get over their fears of bugs.

It is a strange world we live in, still beyond my comprehension how one can coexist with Mother Nature as John Muir lived his life and see ecological unity and yet clearly so much of humanity is ever detached. Knowing, I did something similar helps me to be more compassionate but disappointed that we have not fully become realized to the miracles that abound around us in the macrocosm and the microcosm of this solar system.  I long for the bee pastures of Muir's vision and sanity restored. Extermination of insects whether they are chloroformed or killed by the slower process of pesticide use just doesn't make sense. When we awaken and raise our consciousness, we begin to realize the interconnectedness of all life: the sun, the moon, all of the several million species on earth.

The Shift

Blue-black little clusters, some almost red and others pale green hang like miniature -bunches of grapes on the mulberry trees.  Those that are ripened and ready to be plucked drip off of the trees.  The ground is covered with them. They are sweet morsels of delight on my tongue.  Gifts from the forest. They stain my lips and fingers.  

Again, springtime rejoices, this wooded place is full with bounty.  Three small black feathers and one delicate orangish wing feather are offerings found along the trail. An unusually marked stick finds its way into my hands along with the feathers. These gifts do not come from looking, though observation is key, more from gratitude for this natural place.  This past summer, fall and winter the river was an immense sandbar. There I would go to sit and meditate in the mornings or late afternoons before sunset.  I traveled up and down the flat beach almost daily drawing medicine wheels with sticks in the sand.  Now it is a different environment, wet and lush. Last weekend I rafted on the river for four hours witness to the layers of canopy along the Rio Grande's banks and her glorious fullness.

A circular area where a fire raged some years ago is now covered with water four or five inches deep; I laugh when my cracked rubber boots fill up with the cool brown liquid as I try to wade through. New growth meets my vision, I count several young cottonwoods that have seeded themselves in the circle.  The charred remains of their parents lie in a floodplain now. The river is so high this year that it has overflowed and moved water onto the paths and lower areas all through the bosque.  Ducks float on the trails. I cannot navigate my way through to the five nests I found in April and I wonder if any birds have come back to them this vernal time.

After finding a dry spot and sitting under one of many fruit-bearing mulberry trees, I come home to find an email from a friend of a friend. She is inquiring as to how I made the transition from set and wardrobe designer/stylist many years ago in Boston to living as an artist and healing arts practitioner in Albuquerque.  Her question fuels an immediate response.  Perhaps she needs a practical answer but I am more inclined to the philosophical.  What makes one shift?  For me it was a long held yearning to paint. There are those moments in a lifetime when the river of desire overflows the banks and if we have a brave heart or are desperate enough to step into change, we can discover life anew.