THE LESSON OF THE BUMBLE BEE

This is a midweek repost from June 2022.
New posts come out every Sunday.

Watch this video for a few seconds. It's slowed down, so the birds in the background are singing in a lower than usual pitch, but it's still beautiful. I caught this footage the other day while taking what I call a mindfulness walk. My feet were bare, for full on connection to the earth. My steps were slow and deliberate. My awareness, on the here and now. No thoughts are allowed in. Just my senses focused on the world around me, where all is well and all is well and all is truly well.

I highly recommend mindfulness walks.

Today I was looking at the footage of the bumblebee so I could slow it down to better see its antics, and it hit me that the bumble bee lives exactly the way I aspire to live.

The bee follow sweetness, flying toward bright beautiful colors, sweet, Lucious smells, and feel-good vibrations that sing to it on a level deeper. The bee doesn't try to understand. It just follows the good feelings and senses and finds all that it needs.

The bee never doubts this system, this inner GPS where sweetness is the guide. It knows it works. It has always worked. The bee doesn't stop to worry about where the next sip of nectar is coming from. It doesn't worry about the world's problems. It is fully focused in each sweet moment of its life, no matter how long or short. It lives in the eternal now.

If we could believe in the natural, endless, infinite flow of our well-being as certainly as the bumblebee does, we could live just as freely. If we could follow the sweetness of our lives, relishing every bit of them and never worrying, we'd be happier. If we could really believe that following our bliss is always the most direct route to well-being, well-being would come more easily and be our experience more of the time.

But you know, we sometimes have trouble drumming up that kind of faith. The first step, I think, is to recognize and appreciate the well-being that already exists in our lives.

The lesson of the bumble bee is to smell the flowers of the bush we're on, and to drink them in fully, here and now. To just sip from one wonderful experience after another and let well-being expand within us and outward to the world.

The bumble bee savors each sip of life, and trusts his senses to guide him toward even more sweetness.