The Bomb

We resorted to The Bomb. I'm not proud of this, wondered at first why I would even post about it if I am not proud, especially having recently participated in a workshop in animal communication (which includes insect life). When I thought about it though, it is/was deeply a fear issue. A couple of years ago we discovered a massive bee hive in our garage. A very active part of our garage, not a nice little tucked-away corner way at the back. The sound that came out of the ground was frighteningly of movie quality. The exterminators approximated it at over 5,000 bees. That's a lot of bees. They also said our family had been lucky that one of us hadn't yet been swarmed. They provided some interesting facts like how that particular type of bee had an acute sense of smell and could tell just who was in the yard at any given moment - likely a factor in not being swarmed as they didn't feel overly threatened by us. Another interesting fact was how there are sentry bees stationed outside the hive and can sting over and over until they are crushed.

It must have been the memory of that fear that made me so twitzy when we discovered a wasp nest in the very same place of our garage. The very active part, as I have mentioned. We couldn't see the whole thing because it was behind a large road box but we could hear them and we could see them going in and out of a hole they had chewed in the side of the garage. My first instinct was to let them be, compromise our lives until the early winter and then just dispose of the nest. And then my fears started creating visuals of the nest growing and growing to enormous proportions and ultimately, one of us getting swarmed.

My second instinct was to call an exterminator. Having dished out over $800 to get rid of the bee hive, my third instinct said that maybe we could do it ourselves.

It was a foot in diameter and those little beggars had destroyed quite a portion of the wood base structure of the garage creating it.

I still feel unsettled about the destruction, a life is a life. I feel like I took a few steps back in my evolution. But it was a weird kind of day, starting off with putting my clothes on backwards. You would think I would notice but it took me a while. My relationships felt thwarted and for one reason or another I largely felt rejected. I tried to make space in my heart by working in the garden. I don't have a pristine perennial garden with each individual plant circled with mulch. I have the type that starts off looking like a bramble patch and quickly morphs into a jungle. So literally and metaphorically I thinned out some irises and day lilies, chopped back the peony, pulled the rampant anemones and the mint, well it is a shadow of its former self.

I wish I could say I felt better for it today but I don't. I miss my dog horribly. I imagined this summer to be much different than it is panning out. Maybe I am holding on to those non-existent idealistic images, comparing them to what is real. Yesterday I couldn't quite seem to grasp loving what is real and honestly I am not feeling any closer to it today. I'm praying for a shift in consciousness of a miraculous proportion.