"The bee ... transforms ... by a power of its own."
(quote by Leonardo da Vinci)
I'm sitting in the kitchen of my beach rental, listening to a bumblebee wear itself out trying to escape through the (enclosed) sky light. I've thrown socks at it, paper towels ... all very gently, trying to nudge it out of its myopic trap and toward sanctuary by way of the sliding glass door. I had left the screen open to catch the maximum beach breezes, but inadvertently, this was a red carpet for this poor creature to come into my kitchen, only to become disoriented and likely perish.
I will be a bee killer. Albeit inadvertently.
This bothers me. Lots of my dear readers will find this frivolous. "It's just a bee," they'd say. Or "it's just the way life goes." Unfortunately, this doesn't work with me. Bees resonate with me; I think the honey bee is likely my totem animal, and all bees trip my trigger as a result. (The "why's" of that totem connection warrants its own blog entry.) And so here I sit, fretting, vexed on behalf of this poor bee.
Also, perhaps unfortunately, I practice a Buddhist principle called ahimsa (at Wiki). {I find it a lot easier to practice this on innocent life than I do humans, for whatever that's worth ...} And so I've spent the last couple of hours try to coax the bee back to safety. "Don't give up ..." I whisper in its direction. "If you'll just come down here, I can help you."
The bee is a good metaphor for my life. I spend a lot of my time on this Earth fulfilling this same roll to friends and loved ones: "I can help you. Just let me."
And so I fulfill my life's mission, even with this bee: I stun it off it's precipice up above me, it bee-lines (ha) to the window, and I carefully trap it in a water pitcher with my most recent Newsweek magazine. (Is any sound more hair-raising the buzz of an angry bee???)
Walking carefully to the backyard, I place the amalgamated bee-magazine-pitcher onto the picnic table, and gently lift the pitcher.
And the bee flies away.