COMB

I’ve stumbled upon a number of serendipitous bee hives recently. A small one next to a farmer’s field in Bucerias, just a couple inches in diameter, with delicate hexagonal holes and thin crepe walls. Another heftier one that nestled satisfyingly to fill my hand, behind the cabin on Pigeon Lake. Then, whole rows of empty hives in the eavestroughs of the cottage in Muskoka, a kind of post-apocalyptic apartment complex vibe that took my uncle a precarious afternoon spent on a ladder to clear out. There is so much about bees that I don’t know, and a seemingly infinite complexity with which they design their hives, dictate colony roles, dance directions, and create vibrational bee-balls to nuke invading wasps. Why I’m discovering so many empty hives on the ground recently, I can only guess. Had the hive fallen from some unwelcome bird pecking action, then the bees abandoned ship? Had the hive grown too small to support a colony burgeoning with spring birth? Or do bees, like us, sometimes yearn for a change of space?

The connection between my physical homes -the places I cook, eat, sleep, bathe, and hunker down in when it’s raining to watch the world drip by- and the shape of my thoughts has never been more sharp. It’s gotten me thinking about the recipe of a space, the particular ingredients that I crave to make a shelter feel like a home. Challenging in these times, when a dining table has to double as an office desk, and the kitchen stands in place for every restaurant I’ve ever craved (and hooo boy, how cravings have brought colours to my mood during sheltering in place)! The well-worn paths through hallways that I pace with a phone tucked into the crook of my neck bring a new depth of intimacy to the relationship my feet have with my floors. My body has learnt new ways to interact with beds, couches, wooden floors, cool tiles, dust, grass and fuzzy carpet tassels. All meditations have taken place in a sprawled position, lounging has become a posture of choice. From this new, more horizontal perspective, I’ve gotten to dig deeper into the nature of energy, inertia, and the puppet strings I pull out in the company of others, and cast off in the confines of home. I could sit up straight, but the awareness in a slouch is not to be written off, a passive style of observation that can catch even more than a perpetually pert state.

All this is to say that my spaces and I -and yes, I am delightfully aware of my privilege, joy and all the lucky stars that have allowed me to embody multiple spaces in this time- have inevitably grown a lot closer. And I invite future instantiations of myself, who will no doubt stumble blindly into the streets with fevered aches for all my glorious loves and regular old humans, to take moments to breathe these walls in deeply.