Queen Bees & Their Hives

So, I was talking through this with Yeshe Rabbit with whom I presented a class on ethics this past weekend.  As we were going through feedback, she said, "I think one area that you don't need to "improve" but might need permission to "enact" is in projecting confidence as a leader. You did great in being receptive and kind. You also deserve to know that you are allowed to "be in charge.”

This is part of why I'm doing the leadership workshops I'm doing -- to figure that piece of things out because It's A Thing.

Bees came up as an analogy — 

• I posited that Queen Bee is just another role in the hive (a pretty unique one, but a role that someone's got to fill none-the-less), 
• She countered that Queen Bee is a primary essential part of creating the “ground of bee-ing” for the hive (I love the concept of 'ground of bee-ing!), 
• I noted that hives can and do expel queens they don’t like and can raise & install new queens
• PROCESSING:
• Going from worker bee to queen is complicated: cannot approach from the side for validation from others as having done the right thing.  There is a queenly way to gather this feedback appropriately, and that’s something I need to figure out from essentially a hierarchical rather than lateral or serving space.
• Exposure and queen-ness as ‘just another role’ and one that I happen to be filling does not provide the internal source of validation and I am looking externally for validation.
•  Though leadership as service really resonates with me, I’m not sure it’s doing me a service right now, as it were, as I have been applying it as the concept of putting everyone else “first”. A woman hit on it during the workshop Sunday — she's in the military & she noted that they really drill into you ‘mission first, unit next, self at the bottom, supporting all the rest’.  And maybe that’s really effective for men (questionably, granted), but for women who have societal role of nurturer who are expected to put their needs last already and are taught to seek external verification/validation/approval often at the expense of their own authority…  I think I might need to own my big sister bossiness (in moderation, and if I may shift analogies for a moment) for a bit or something.
• The other piece that stuck out going back to the hive metaphor was that idea of the hive rejecting the queen or at least making her life really unpleasant by being unsupportive.  Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy, BUT if the little girls aren’t happy, probably ain’t mama happy either… So there is some degree of need for acceptance in there as well, both of being ‘part of the hive’ but alsoof being the queen.
• And figuring out how to collaboratively create that functional ‘ground (or hive) of bee-ing’ while retaining the organizational role & responsibility accorded to being the queen and owning my decisions with internal validation (and accurate discernment & identification of when external validation is also appropriate).

Having brained it, the next trick I’ll have to figure out is in the appropriate embodiment of what that all means in vivo rather than in vitro (or caput).  As well as in figuring out where the analogy breaks down and iterating until the edges smooth out...

And now I’m going to go watch Eddie Izzard & his piece on bees again because aaaaaaaahhhhh beeeeeeeees!

Words Mean Something

Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever. 

Thank God there is kairos too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos. 

Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass by on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake.

--Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet 

Words mean something. They do, they surely do.

 I talked a little about the Be, Do, Have framework in my reflections from my first Leadership workshop last month.

As Yeshe Rabbit & I were talking through the Distance Aspirant Ethics plan for this weekend, thinking about one of the exercises triggered something in my head that I thought I would try and see what happens.

Part of what I've included in my daily practice is requesting assistance for some very specific qualities that I need to embody.  "Please help me..."  "Please grant me..."  Looking for these things as if they would come to me from outside me.  As I was thinking about the framework of this exercise we'd set up, I thought about the "is-ness" of it (am-ness?) and it occurred to me that I should see how that changes the feel of my daily practice, especially since the exercise we're proposing for them will also become part of my daily practice.

It sounds mundane, but the difference between 'Please help me find the keys...' and 'I am the key...' or 'please grant me wisdom, strategy, and strength' and 'I am wise, strategic, and strong' is tremendous.  I look forward to seeing how this tiny-not-tiny change in language ripples out into the world.

It's little things, the difference between intellectual and experiential knowing in the practical application of known things.  The difference between changing happenings from chronological to ontological time.

Writings from Writing From The Spirit Retreat

Stone meditation:

• The big soft-edged grey stone that called to me from the edge of the curb near the canal. It is a little bigger than my hand and so solid & grounding. Scraped from where the different tires had pushed it along the road & curb-sides.
• It called out to me, the perfect rock, perfect in its imperfections, holding it’s essence though under what seemed like less than optimal circumstances. It called out to me to take it home.
• It’s heaviness is grounding. So solid, brigs me back in the flurry of uncertainty -- that airy, drifting disconnect.
• It tells me secrets of the alchemists — it is not what goes into the crucible, that is the essence of the being. All the magic that happens in the crucible is possible because of the boundaries of the crucible. The boundaries keep the elements of magic within appropriate proximity to act and react and merge and separate. The crucible retains the boundaries and allows magic to happen within but it remains consistent at the end, whatever else has been going on.

It’s an alchemically philosophical rock!? Then again, it was the one that called to me to bring it home...

• The crucible is the vessel that carries, can be rinsed clean, and is what always remains.
• Through transformation, we can add things to our crucible, to our stone soup pot, to our vessels ourselves, but the transformations that stand up to time are the transformations that rinse us clean, back to our essential natures. “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” (St. Exupery).
• Transformation through the elimination and removal of our limiting beliefs. The false stories we tell ourselves about who we are, that sometimes we don’t even know are false. When we become wrapped up with having and doing rather than authentic being.
• The final message of the rock:
  Shed your limiting beliefs and transform by going back to that which is essential to your being.

Thank you, rock, for grounding me today and last fall. Thank you for reminding me that the essence of being is that which is immutable and that which remains when all else is washed away.

———

Writing for me is a practice of processing. Human beings are ‘sense makers’ (or at least some of us lean that way). We want to know why things happen. What just happened. What’s going to happen. Does it make sense? All of the religions in the world, all of the divination systems in the world, all of the beliefs in the world (limiting and freeing) are stories we tell ourselves to try to help us make sense of the world.

Sometimes the world is non-sensical. Things don’t always happen “for a reason” or the things that happen are incomprehensible. Sometimes we try to apply a framework to those stories that don’t fit, trying to make sense of them according to something that has helped us make sense before but is not appropriate now, and may not have been appropriate then. Sometimes that leads to more nonsense or guilt or harmful/not right action. Sometimes our frameworks require review and adaptation and correction.

I write to make sense. To take the strands and ends, the odds & sods that appear in my brain, and lay them out in front of me. To take the jumbled pieces and see what patterns appear in front of me. Sometimes my stories are correct and true, and sometimes they are colored by my perceptions and application of frameworks and my limited perspective. Sometimes I need to process as best I can to keep trying to move forward.

———

Alas, I missed the next writing exercise — life is what happens while you’re making other plans.

———

Yeshe Tsogyal writing meditation:

• Perfect memory — that memory that surfaces what needs to be surfaced, correctly in the correct moment.
• Bees bringing wisdom to and from the flowers.
• Watching the incense rise and curl in a sun beam, being and knowing in the moment.
• I’m sort of mesmerized and distracted by the curls of incense. The shades of blues and greys, twisting in the rays of the sun.

…

• She says,
  Being and knowing in the moment. It’s ok sometimes to just be. And know. Let it be.