This bee was hard at work one day when I became its paparazzi, snapping its photo in my admiration for its beauty and hard work. I love bees and I love the way they teach us.
Lent inspires the question in me which asks what “enough” is. The season is a great time to ask the “enough” question in a society in which enough has morphed into so many variations on the themes of abundance and scarcity.
It is nearly spring and also a good time to clean things out – closets, regrets, garages, grudges, basements, old hurts. Letting go of things, be they old sweaters or old triggers is tricky business. We hold on to these things because we are getting something from keeping them. We would not keep an old empty can of tuna because we have no need of it. But we think we need to hold onto the things and feelings we grip because we think they have some value.
Holding a grudge or a grief, an old broken chair or a bolt of cloth we keep meaning ton use for curtains – we construct a value and a future image of their use. To hold grudges or griefs can keep us connected to people for whom real creativity in relationship is exchanged for cheap chains. Holding onto boxes of stuff, clothes not warn in years, boxes of files, regrets of things done and left undone – these all tend to mount up and the very hoarders we are stunned two see on television reality shows show up in our mirrors when we consider how much we keep around us needlessly – packing and moving and unpacking and moving again.
It is on my heart to begin the great exhale of the second phase of life. I want to let go of things and of thoughts. I want to let go of stuff and of anxious thoughts. I want to let go of the things I simply do not need and, at the same time cherish those things which i use every day with gratitude for their presence in my life – my pen, my sheets, my companion dog, my footie pajamas.
This bee keeps enough on his body – just enough. To be too weighted down would impair flight. To not be weighed down would be, well, disconnected to basic needs and desires. The balance is what is so valuable. Lent is a good time to look at our heart and our basement, our soul and our attic, our memory and our garage and ask what is enough and what needs to be left behind.
