Month: February 2023

Jenna Butler, Revery: A Year of Bees

My PhD research tried to use walking as a way to come into relationship with the land—a watered-down, môniyâw-inflected version of the Cree ethical principle of wâhkôhtowin, or kinship. I walked in places that were not all that conducive to building that kind of relationship: the edges of a small prairie city, highways, grid roads. I’m sure I would’ve found it easier if I had walked on native grassland, or in the boreal forest, but both of those options would’ve meant making long drives, and I wanted to see what walking in this place, dominated by industrialized agriculture, might bring me. I tried my best, and on some walks I was able to feel something changing in the way I connected to the land. Walking was slowly taking me where I wanted to be.

But my experiments pale beside those of Jenna Butler, who has been living in an off-grid cabin in northern Alberta for more than a decade, raising bees and vegetables and developing a deep knowledge of her small corner of the world: its native flora and fauna, including its wild bees; the plants she grows for beauty and sustenance; and the bees living in her bee yard. She writes of her partnership with those bees, both the wild ones and the domesticated. “Our goal has always been to provide and sustain the best life possible for them out here in the forest and among the plants in our garden, under the vast expanse of northern sky,” she writes. But the learning that’s necessary to achieve that goal is unending. “The old adage once again proves true: The more I know, the more I don’t know,” Butler tells us. “That’s the paradox of working with the land in a sustainable way, learning its cycles and seasons, the length of time it takes to build up soil, ecosystems and resilient pollinator populations. The Earth is a constant teacher” (19). Its students can learn through humility or hardship—or they can ignore the Earth’s lessons and be part of the ecocidal course most of us have chosen to follow. 

The bees, in particular, are one of her teachers. Butler considers what it means for them to thrive, rather than just survive. “By keeping questions like these at the forefront of our minds and practices, we consciously and intentionally support the health of the surrounding ecosystems, and we promote the health and dignity of the bees themselves,” she states. “And by extending these ideas outward to the many millions of other beings with whom we share the planet, we practise a deep kind of lived humility for our space within a much larger, infinitely complicated collective” (33). She doesn’t use the word “relationship” to talk about her connection with the land, perhaps because it makes a grand claim that would contradict the principle of humility that is central to her life and work on the land, but I think that word would fit. Even so, her concern about the land and its inhabitants constitutes, I’m certain, a form of relationship with them. After all, she describes her climate grief as a form of love (109). Doesn’t love presuppose a relationship with the beloved?

I learned a lot about beekeeping and living on a small farm while reading this book, about what beekeepers do and who they are, but the biggest surprise for me was the discovery that bees, like other creatures, are sensitive to our emotional states. “I came to beekeeping as a way of learning how to handle my fear of pain, of learning how to survive with it,” she writes. “I still have bad days when something from the past is dredged up, and then I can’t go into the bee yard because I can’t control the spiral of pain and fear that those memories spur in me” (95). The guard bees will chase her from the bee yard on those days. The bees are completely honest, she tells us, and their honesty is a gift to her: they let her know that she has more work to do as a survivor (95). Even if Butler might argue with my description of her connection to the land as a relationship, I’m sure she would agree that she has a relationship to the bees. “I’ll never be able to see the bees as simply another sort of creature at the farm, or their honey as simply another product,” she states. “In the long journey of coming home to myself, I’ve come to need these bees as much as they need me” (96). That recognition of interdependence, of interconnection, is a form of healing (96).

Butler describes her life with the bees in lucid, straightforward prose. My beekeeping friends would enjoy this book, as would anyone seeking to walk with a lighter tread on the earth. And it makes me think about what I accomplished during my PhD work. What does my relationship with the land look like, compared to Butler’s? That’s a question I’ll be coming back to. I have an idea of what the answer will look like.

Works Cited

Butler, Jenna. Revery: A Year of Bees. Wolsak & Wynn, 2020.

Walking Home at Sunset

I was at work today. On a Sunday? Of course. Those lectures don’t write themselves. The marking doesn’t look after itself, either. I took yesterday off–I cleaned the bathroom and then had an afternoon nap–but yes, today I was back at it.

By the time I was finished, the sun was starting to set. It’s incredibly warm for February, and the chickadees seemed to be celebrating–although what sounded like songs of joy could have been alarm calls because I was standing beneath the spruce trees, listening. Because of the temperature, I saw a lot of pedestrians walking their dogs, and one lonely looking jackrabbit, eyeing the human and canine passersby warily.

I bought a pair of the boots with retractable cleats on Friday. They fit like Sorels, more or less, which means they aren’t really good for walking, because there’s not a lot of support. I’m more used to hiking boots, I suppose. But the cleats keep me from slipping on the ice. It’s a reasonable trade-off. Now I’ll be able to keep walking until the snow melts–and I won’t be complaining about slipping on ice in this blog any more. I’m sure you’re happy to hear it.

Les bottines souriantes

The path through the park presents a contrast to the city streets and sidewalks: it’s not covered in ice, or at least, not as much. I enjoyed being able to walk part of the way to work without being concerned about falling–or, rather, making a hard landing.

It was hard to hear the chickadees and chattering squirrels over the roar of the heating plant that serves the provincial legislature and associated buildings. Multiple plumes of smoke or steam were pouring out of the plant’s stacks to go along with the noise. I wondered what the racket and smoke were about. What was being burned? Important documents? Campaign promises? Political integrity? Who can say?

My friend Pat McPhillips suggests buying boots from a manufacturer in Quebec which puts a retractable metal cleat in the sole. I visited the company’s web site. It’s an ingenious idea; I think I’ll order a pair. If nothing else, they’ll keep me from complaining about icy sidewalks for the rest of the winter.