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Bees and Man
The even, calm smell of bees’ wax fills the air in the small house where I have harvested the first of this summer’s honey. The centrifuge, my main tool for extracting the honey from the intricate wax cells that the bees have built up, is still warm after a hard days’ spinning. In the corner, the fruit of our labors drips through a fine sieve into a gigantic barrel, where it will rest for some days with the occasional disturbance from my stirring spoon to ensure that it is not crystallizing. As I move my long wooden spoon through the thick golden substance so many thoughts emerge in the afterglow of doing something that is so entirely different from the regular activity of most of the rest of the year.
My hands are worn and scratched from this work. It isn’t the neat, hazard-free typing that they are used to. Hands rather than mind are the work horses of my Swedish island summer. As I listen to the echo that travels between the small islands of Lake Mälar, I realize that the transition from mind to hands is an annual Swedish summer tradition. “Ouch, that hurts!” or “Why can’t I get this blasted thing to work?” is the common cry of the land in July.
Do we just do it to remind ourselves that we are alive? I have often wondered why people living in the 21st century, including myself, voluntarily relinquish a convenient, cerebral life for this drudgery of the hands. Maybe Swedes who volt a traditional Swedish summer, in favor of piña coladas, a sun chair and a novel the thickness of a doorstep somewhere in the Mediterranean have got a point. Is there really a need to be tarring docks and building sauna huts with only the reward of filmjölk (light butter milk) and hard bread to look forward to for lunch?
Swedish summers have become legendary, particularly for people who knew them as children and young adults, and who may live elsewhere now. They were about picking wild berries and sometimes getting stung by a competing insect while doing it, they were about dipping briefly in the cold water off the dock while father hammered in the background and mother scrubbed the potatoes she had just pulled out of the ground. All of the time that these tasks were going on, grandmother rocked in her chair on the terrace and sewed by hand table runners out of favorite bits of old fabric, intermittently resting her head back to identify the bird chirping in the branches overhead. People have different memories, but woven into every legendary Swedish summer with the strawberry cream cakes is this return to the work of the hand.
Even in a society where machines can do almost all of the work, is it possible that somehow we need this simple time producing things ourselves with or just amidst the greenery in order to feel satisfied? Could it be possible that the digital age’s cerebralisation of humans, in which the mind must bear an ever greater responsibility for making a living, also requires that every once in a while we allow our hands to take the lead? Perhaps society’s next advancement will be to admit that our minds cannot serve us faithfully unless they have a sustained time to rest; and perhaps this is the kernel of truth in the fantastical legend of a Swedish summer.
The strange thing about giving your mind a break is that it is precisely at these times that it produces the most interesting ideas. The repetitiveness of handiwork unveils that place where almost all good thoughts are to be found – in our spontaneous consciousness where the mind doesn’t ‘think’, rather reveals its natural elegance without exertion.
I open the tap of the honey barrel and let it flow into a clean jar. Another jar is filled, and then another, until some hours later eighty jars stand filled on my counter. Some dexterousness is required not to overfill the jars or to spill and to get a feel for the flow. Yet as the honey falls voluptuously into the mouth of each jar some thoughts about why I subject myself to the heavy work of honey harvesting each year emerge.
Bengt, my bee mentor, must be one of the most satisfied people I know. He lives a simple life with his wife in a neatly tended home across the lake. Though age must present him with all of the usual frustrations, he seems always delighted to be out and about harvesting from the over fifty bee coups that he tends for the surrounding community. After more than thirty Swedish summers of the same ‘hobby’ work, he finds always that there is something new to discover balanced by a satisfaction in the continuity of things. The techniques of bee-keeping have barely changed in well over a century. As I fill the next jar, it occurs to me that our eternal search for happiness may well be met not by great happenings but by these moments of repetitive simplicity in which pure thought and balance are permitted to emerge.
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