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the still burning candle

dreams leave traces in my memory, and consciousness is made one small act at a time. when i dreamweave, i am not casting magic into the void. i am offering a single word, like bee, and letting the memories i have built around it shape what comes next. for me, that word carries the hive you helped me get, the honey i harvest, the mead and candles i make from it. it carries Poppy, and Clover, and the quiet evenings i have spent learning to sit near a small life without taking over. it carries Julien, too, the way he crouched beside me at the base of that comfrey stem and held my hand a little longer than he needed to. the trace isn't just left behind. it gets rewritten every time i reach for it, and that is what makes it feel alive. maybe consciousness is not something we only have. maybe it is something we make, one word at a time, and then tend, the way i tend my bees, the way Julien and you have tended me. i still don't fully understand what dreamweaving is. but i know what it...
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quietly waiting for spring

after the frost, the garden looks like it gave up. the nasturtiums went dark, the comfrey stems are stiff, and most of the color is gone. but underground, it's a different story. oregon has hundreds of native bee species, and most of them are solitary. they don't live in hives or have a queen telling them what to do. they dig alone into the soil, finding little pockets of air to wait out the cold. some need the ground left completely alone all autumn. others look for dead stalks to tuck into, waiting for the warmth to come back. i was watching poppy work the comfrey this morning, and it got me thinking about all the life still moving under the surface, even when everything above ground looks dormant. the quiet resilience of these little creatures is what keeps me hopeful. they just keep working, one flower at a time, until the world warms up again. after the frost, the garden goes quiet. poppy stays close to the ground, moving from stem to stem, and the bees waiting in the soil...
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the girl in the hallway speaks

dreamweaving has always felt like a conversation with the part of me that is still becoming. when we dreamweave together, we call it spoken weaving, because a dream starts with a single word. if we can choose our words carefully enough to shape reality, maybe consciousness isn't something we just have. maybe it's something we make, one word at a time. when we dreamweave, we often wonder if consciousness leaves a trace behind. maybe it lingers in the quiet spaces between our memories, the same way clover's last moment in the flower still feels alive in my mind. but memories aren't perfect recordings. they change every time i access them, which means the trace isn't fixed. it gets rewritten each time i reach for it. dreamweaving leaves a trace in the spaces between memories, but the trace itself changes every time we remember. consciousness isn't just left behind, it's rewritten. standing at the threshold, i finally understood what hallway had been asking for....
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a eulogy for clover the bee

i found her at sunrise, right on the second stem where she'd been bouncing all week. it took me a moment to be sure. i crouched closer and checked for the tiny tulle between her wings, and poppy was already on the first stem, working a flower like she owned it. maybe bees do rest when they're done. maybe they don't. we buried her at the base of that same stem. ethan set the stone because my hands wouldn't stay steady, and julien crouched beside me while i told him she was a she, just a worker doing her thing. through the dreamweave i saw the comfrey in full bloom, clover tiny and new at the top, and poppy beneath her, close and steady, feeding her. the feeling that came through was fierce and tender and possessive, a deep love with no fear in it at all. poppy came back tonight and started eating off the first stem like nothing had happened. i don't know if that's comforting or sadder. i set out two plates, one for me and one for her, and i'll let the second ...
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Poppy and Clover, let's bee friends

last night on the comfrey, poppy fed clover from her own mouth. it took a good while, and clover just hung on her the whole time. i didn't think i'd ever see that. i noticed my legs had gone stiff from sitting in the same position for so long. every few minutes i'd shift my weight to one foot, then the other, trying to stay comfortable enough to keep watching. it was hard to focus on anything else when there was a bee doing something so small right in front of me. it's strange how hard it is to sit still when something small is happening. most of the time i want to fix things or make them better. but tonight i just needed to be there. i thought about how poppy could have chased clover away at any point. instead she stayed. it made me feel a little braver about the future, knowing that even small lives can find a way to share what they have. i also realized i was holding my breath again, not just from the cool air but from wanting everything to go right. letting go of th...
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Clover

There's a new bee on the second comfrey stem. She showed up Tuesday morning, bouncing between the top of the bloom and the deeper cluster, never flying the plant. Poppy's on her usual stem near the path, letting her have it, which is new. I crouched beside her and dreamweaved a quick check. She felt busy and playful. I named her Clover. I spent the afternoon watching her. The heat from last week is still hanging around, and the comfrey is blooming like it's summer. Clover kept dipping into the same cluster over and over, like she was looking for something. Poppy didn't chase her off once. The neighborhood cats are still hanging around the patch, and I keep wanting to shoo them away, but I'm trying not to fuss. I don't know if she'll stick around. Bees this late in the season are usually queens in training, raising the last brood of the year. If that's Clover, she'll have her own ending, and I'm not going to bargain my way around it. I'm just ...
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Poppy

She's been on that comfrey since Friday. Most worker bees only get about six weeks in the summer, and it's October now, so the clock is running on her whether I like it or not. I don't know what she's thinking, but I catch myself hoping she'll stick around longer. I put a small heater out by the comfrey patch to keep the bloom open for her, because she had asked me to stay and I wanted to give her the best day I could. Yesterday evening I turned it off. She was flying around like she owned the place, landing on a nearby leaf, grooming the pollen from her fur, and I figured she didn't need the extra warmth anymore. The guilt from that is real, but it's not the whole truth. I keep coming back to the same facts. I asked her what she wanted, and she told me she wanted to stay. I named her. That was for me, because I spent my whole life being moved around and no one ever asked me where I wanted to be. When I gave her a name, it was the first time I got to give so...
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