From My Nature Journal: A Tribute. And a Tribute

I had a new old friend who died recently, and this post is a tribute to him and to something in the natural world he loved unlike anyone else I ever knew.

Walter was a colorful character with an interesting history, to say the least, and was full of stories. I dare not go into them here or I won’t get to my second tribute, which was actually his, but suffice it to say that I’ve not met many others who flew planes on ‘the other side’ in war against the United States. He and his dear wife Ingrid became good friends during a brief time I was their pastor a couple years ago. Oh, I did call him a new old friend, didn’t I? The recent nature of our friendship is the ‘new’ part. And the ‘old?’ Well, Walter was over ninety years of age. And he was dying.

The tenuous state of both his and his wife’s health was the thing that first brought Gail and me to meet him, but it was his honest and vulnerable questions about life and death, faith and doubt that caused me to quickly love the man. And I count it a great privilege to have been his friend as he struggled with his mortality.

His interests were vast. Like me, he was a naturalist and a man of strong Christian faith. Unlike me, he was also a very accomplished yet retired Boeing engineer, and, as already inferred, a pilot. Whether it was this thing of flight, which was his passion, that drew him to the husbandry of bees, I do not know. But a skilled beekeeper he also was, in spite of the fact that his greater Seattle home was surrounded by others for many miles around. At our first visit, I took little notice of the napkins he and his wife had set before us with our afternoon coffee – black, yellow, and covered with bees. Yet in subsequent visits not only would we tour his apiary, but our conversations somehow often became interlaced with lessons he had learned from his apiculture hobby; and I’d also find he and Ingrid had other bee-themed napkins with which to grace a table.

What stunned me was the

depth of Walter’s love…

Wow, did Walter know bees. He knew how they lived and died, how they behaved, how both the social and physical realities of their colony worked. And I came to find through listening to his stories that he also delighted in knowing his bees. When I took more than a casual interest in his accounts of queens he had known, in fact, had known well enough to recognize and name, he took a risk and shared with me a poem he had written when one of his colonies had died mysteriously and abruptly.  When he set the paper in my hands, he said, “Here it is. Some people might think I’m crazy.”

So, along with my tribute to my new old friend Walter, I share his tribute to his lost colony, a poem he named, “Bee Requiem.”

In painful sorrow, sad and mourning I see the ravages of death

Unnumbered little bodies, now just shells awaiting their return to a new cycle

In mother earth’s deep wonder wells

Maya, Mahrah and the others who circled in exploring paths

And walked on cheeks and head and ears, and sometimes down my neck

Into my bosom to feel the warmth and listen to my heart

As one brave creature entered my ear to see what’s in there

I, deeply touched, produced a tear, only to have another see fit to drink it,

Thereby translating me to yonder wonderland so dear

And so, the present seemed to vanish, relieving me from troubled thoughts and fears

Oh, blessed beings, how I miss you and wish you would be here to drink my tears

But, praise the Lord, the souls of all creation remain existing in His heart

And when my time has come I will again be with you

In perfect love and recognition, never ever to depart

                                                ~~ WEB, August 2008, Colony #4

I was stunned as I finished reading. It wasn’t so much about new insights I’d gained into bees and beekeeping, something about which as a naturalist I had known embarrassingly little. It wasn’t the quality of the poetry, of which I certainly could never be judge anyway. It wasn’t about some flashy spiritual sound byte that might look good on a cheesy nature calendar. And it wasn’t that I found Walter crazy, far from it. What stunned me was the depth of Walter’s simple love. In his beautiful tribute, I saw a man who deeply loved life, who achingly loved the natural world, even intimately loved creatures that had once caused me an anaphylactic reaction. And I also saw the answer to Walter’s doubt, in words he himself had written years before, words that contained all the seeds of assurance he might ever one day need. I came to tears through the reading. As did he, by the way.

So there are my two tributes, one to Walter, one to his bees.

Walter, I’ll miss you. Thanks for inspiring me with your love of God’s creation. And do you know what I’d like very much? Perhaps one day, in perfect love and recognition, we can meet again for coffee in yonder wonderland over bee-themed napkins.

~~ RGM, November 28, 2018

From My Nature Journal: Keeping the Main thing the Main Thing

It’s crazy what one can learn from a bee sting.

Yes, it happened to me yesterday, and it turned into a bit of an ordeal before it was all over. Gail and I were riding down a backwoods road on our four-wheeler here in the Ottawa National Forest of Michigan, and a wasp of some kind whacked me in my helmet, or I whacked it – er, no, more accurately, we whacked each other – and it then got stuck in my chinstrap, stinging me repeatedly on the cheek. Talk about a bee in my bonnet! (I thought they could only sting once, but found later that that’s only honeybees.) Yowza! Immediately, however, it seemed like no regular sting: I felt light-headed, my lips started to swell and my underarms started to itch like crazy (sorry, never thought I’d refer to armpits in my blog), and I seemed to recall there were lymph nodes there…

Now, I’d just had another bee sting three days before which played out as normal. You know the drill – minor swelling at the site, a single welt, gripe a bit yet not a big deal. But this reaction yesterday startled me, so we turned directly back to the cabin and within a few minutes I was able to slap an icepack on my mug and take some diphenhydramine (Benadryl) and acetaminophen (Tylenol). Still, the symptoms worsened, and I began breaking into hives and my throat and chest tightened. We quickly searched the Internet and found these all to be signs of a possible anaphylactic reaction, and we knew people could die from that! But how could this be? I’ve had bee stings all my life! Anyway, though the hospital was nearly an hour away, we thought it best, me begrudgingly, to get to the ER as quickly as possible. Soon after being hooked up to a heart monitor and getting an IV port installed in my arm, all in the event my condition deteriorated, the symptoms began to subside.

To make a long story short, it was a mild reaction as such things can go and we were home in several hours. Still, it was enough that I am now advised to carry an Epi-pen nearby at all times. I hate that idea. Life is complicated enough without having to think about that. But these things can get progressively worse, so I am trying to be grateful rather than regretful.

That’s just the backstory, however, and not the focus of my thoughts today. As usual, something else occurs to my spirit.

In talking with our Seattle son Jarrett about it this morning, who is a nurse, he described what all happened and what part epinephrine plays when it is needed. Epinephrine is nothing but adrenalin. No, actually, it’s the other way around – there is no such thing medically as adrenalin. Something we call adrenalin is produced by our bodies, as you likely know, to generate in us the capacity for the fight or flight reflex. Adrenalin is essentially made up of three chemicals: epinephrine, nor-epinephrine (sp?) and dopamine. So it is more rightly said that adrenalin is nearly nothing but epinephrine. But here’s the cool thing: the presence of these three chemicals slows down all immediately nonessential body functions, things like digestion, urination, and pain/nerve impulse, and revs up what is most essential at that key moment, the cardiovascular system. ‘Adrenalin’ dilates the lungs, increases blood pressure as well as heart and breathing rates, affecting that part of the brain responsible for these latter functions, all to provide maximum oxygen capacity and peak energy to fight or flee. Amazing. In the case of a person experiencing anaphylactic reaction, a time when lungs contract and air passages can swell shut, epinephrine maximizes the ability of the body to simply oxygenate itself. Also amazing.

This is not the first time our son has schooled us in the functions of this miracle machine we call our bodies, and it won’t be the last. These things are incredibly interesting to me.

How important it is that we be receptive enough

at such times to give the main thing the

opportunity to do its critical work…

And today it has gotten me thinking about the importance of keeping the main thing the main thing, of attending to the right things in the right opportune times. There are moments in our lives when something unique happens and God seems to throw open a window, when his presence can seem more palpable, and a ‘thin place’ between heaven and earth presents itself. I officiated a funeral recently, and shared with the family that the death of a loved one is such a time, a time when we can simply choose to stay only in our grief and turn in on ourselves, or additionally, also open ourselves in that brief season to what God has to teach us, or even for what God can be for us at such a time. These are the kinds of moments in our spirit lives when nonessential functions are slowed and the most critically important life functions are able to be enhanced for our ultimate larger benefit.

Like a shot of adrenalin during anaphylaxis, how important it is that we be receptive enough at such times to give the main thing the opportunity to do its critical work.

God, through the Prophet Isaiah, said to the people of Israel, “At an acceptable time I listened to you, in a day of salvation I helped you (Isaiah 49:8).” The Apostle Paul picks up that same text and expands on it in 2 Corinthians 6:1-2, “…We implore you also that you not receive the grace of God in vain. For God says, ‘At an acceptable time I listened to you, in a day of salvation I helped you.’” Paul concludes, “Behold, now is the acceptable time. Behold, now is the day of salvation.”

Read verses one through ten of that passage later today if you have the time. The whole excerpt is pretty awesome.

And by the way, I got stung again a week later and things went as they had in the past. Go figure…

~~ RGM, July 20, 2016