From the Editor: On Vocation

In the gray days of early spring, it seemed to my partner and me that the honeybees in our backyard hive had not survived the winter. We hadn’t seen them moving around very much even with flowers blooming all around. We each were privately kind of bummed out. Having heard that hives often collapse at this time of year didn’t help, as we’d hoped it wouldn’t happen to us.

The night before last, my partner noticed that the bees had survived. By morning they were acting very strangely by hovering around outside of the hive in large clusters. Not only had they survived, but the newborn spring bees were high enough in number to cause the hive to split. We had a swarm on our hands. We needed to get them into a new hive or risk losing half of them to an unknown location. If one of their scouts found a place to rebuild in our chimney or the eave of our roof, we would have an inconvenient and potentially costly situation on our hands.

The bees were making a sound I had never heard them make before, and they were moving in an urgent and driven way. They were called to move together as a group. I wanted to lead them into a safe new home, but I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. I was suddenly a co-conspirator with 30,000 units of a singular mind. The bees were swarmed on the side of the hive box, several bees deep, in a semi-circle. I had to sweep them with my gloved hand and a soft brush into an open box with frames below them. Moving my hand through the humming cluster felt electric and unnerving. This organized force of energy was craving to do something new. I had an idea of where to guide them and I hoped it would take. Our friends gave us a spare hive box and some frames from their garage.

When I first moved to Portland, I was living with my friend Nora through her grand-mother’s passing. Upon returning from the funeral in the Midwest, Nora looked me in the eyes and said “I’m going to work with the dead and the dying.” Her grandmother’s journey into the other world had become a vocational call. I remember the conviction in her voice and the solid foundation of truth that it came from.

Nora spent the majority of the pandemic working at a mortuary in San Lorenzo, California. The stories from this time in her life will follow me through the rest of mine. The initiation starting with her grandmother was a continuing revelation that led her to seek her degree in Chaplaincy at Starr King School for the Ministry. Nora is a queer animist witch, living in a largely Christian and conservative community on the shores of Lake Superior. Sometimes the rainbow flag on her name tag means being asked to leave a bedside at the hospital where she is a chaplain. Just as often that flag is a portal to connection with people who feel it means safety and freedom from judgment.

How do we know when the vocational call is for us? What are the signs that someone has settled into the work that they were meant to do in the world? In this issue of Western Friend we will meet people who have been called to their vocation, either through a conversion experience or a series of choices that felt right. Sometimes these choices were not easy to make. Sometimes these choices had knock-on effects that changed the course of the chooser’s life.

On nights after being on a boat, I fall asleep rocked by the sensations of the water, although I am on land. After interacting with the swarm, I fell asleep with visions of the way the bees moved through the air and vibrated in a cluster clinging to the side of their old home. I heard a master beekeeper say that she felt that your greatest asset in working with a hive is your intuition: you need to be able to feel into the needs of the bees. I think that’s true when it comes to a vocational call as well. Each step reveals the next one. Each choice to be of service, consistently over time, helps others exponentially in ways that the giver cannot fully understand.

I hope that the hive splitting is a sign of health and abundance. I hope we can feel into the needs of others and the group at large and act accordingly. Friends, I hope we harvest honey in the fall.