When Nature Comes Calling Part 2

There was another nature incident at my house.  One morning walking through the garage, I heard a strange noise.  It was not a big noise, just a little one; coming from among a stack of stored boxes and things. 

It was a rattlesnake - a very handsome one, too.

I would say I am not scared of them, but that I do have a healthy respect for them.

I've encountered them before, on the trails around Phoenix; I've even been that close to them before (about 1 1/2 feet away).  I've had them rattle at me before.  I've even captured one, using a snake catcher, from my yard and moved it into a nearby vacant area.

I've never had one in my interior living space before, however.

This one was tucked in between some boxes, well protected, very difficult to reach.  I decided to call the local herpetologists.  They came, and quickly and efficiently removed the snake.

Here's the part that keeps tugging at me.  Once the herpetology fellow had placed the snake safely in the container and we were just chatting, I heard a persistent meowing at the back door.  There was a cat out there that I had never seen before.  It was very friendly and very communicative.  I explained to it what was going on, and apologetically closed the door so it wouldn't come into the garage.  Never since have I seen that cat.

Like Gibbs on NCIS, I don't really believe in coincidences.  And, although I don't believe that all of nature is conspiring just to tell me something, I do believe that (a) I can learn from any situation, and often something deeper than initially appears; and (b) there is more to the way things work than I know.  I have no doubt that the simultaneous presence of the snake and the peculiar cat meant something, and was an opportunity for me to learn something about my connection to nature (yes, a link to another Sweet Medicine SunDance teaching).  And the beauty and strangeness of the moment is undeniable.

Leaving me to wonder - and in wonderment.  Though I can't say what it means, I can say that it was a moment of magic.

When Nature Comes Calling

The house in which I live suddenly started dripping honey. 

Turns out there was at least one, possibly several bee colonies/hives in the walls of the house.  The one removed today weighed over 100 lbs.  That's a lot of honey.

So we know these things:

• if we wanted to be beekeepers, we should have given them a place to live that worked for us, too
• if we didn't want to be beekeepers, we should have encouraged them to move out much sooner
• part of the reason we didn't was pure ignorance - we didn't know what they were actually up to, had never experienced a bee colony
• bees are incredibly good at what they do, and are masters at community cooperation, efficiency, and (within their scope) protection

In the process of dealing with this, we investigated bees and learned quite a bit about them (e.g., see the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center site), including how to deal with a bee attack as victim or rescuer; also generally more about what Africanized bees are and how they differ from European honeybees (which, in case ya didn't know, are also not native to this continent, which apparently got along ok without that style of bees for a long, long time). 

We also learned some choice bits about how we face the unknown, what specific kinds of fears come up. 

Not to mention learning how hundreds of live, angry bees sound, or how the floor looks with hundreds of dead bees on it.  And, not to be too mushy or sensitive, but also how it feels to know you are responsible for killing hundreds (thousands?) of creatures that were not intentionally causing you harm - but nevertheless were causing you harm.

Wouldn't it be great if we could communicate with them?  If we were so aligned with the world and all the other creatures that we could just have a little conference with them and say, hey, that's a really bad place for you to live.  How about this place over here instead? 

Sometimes the link between the everyday world and spirituality seems a little vague, a little misty; other times, visible but just not touchable.