Tag: color

“wrecks in peace”

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

A sloop of amber slips away
Upon an ether sea,
And wrecks in peace a purple tar,
The son of ecstasy.

~Emily Dickinson

Yesterday evening, grimed with sweat and smoke from an afternoon of picking up and installing new hives, I sat on the grass in front of the newly-homed colonies of honeybees as the half-moon hung overhead and the sunset splashed amber and purple across the western sky. I love these liminal times best, the moments when day is becoming evening and evening is becoming night. Bees, I think, are liminal creatures. They trace thin golden paths through the ether between life and death–they are so fragile individually, yet as a group they are strong. They persist.

There is something vital about a hive in a way that no other creatures can emulate. Bees hum, zoom, dive, buzz, sing and vibrate life, spilling it out in wild trajectories through the still air. They dance the winds, trace the edge of sight and possibility. They are so tiny, yet so wildly, fiercely, abundantly alive.

Yesterday afternoon, in the beeyard, I watched, rapt, as the beekeeper pointed out two-day-old larvae, four-day-old, six. And then he pointed to an opening cell and said, with all the excitement of a kid on Christmas morning at the top of the stairs, “Look!”

A brand-new adult bee was hatching from her cell, the front of her head just showing, wriggling with life. I have never seen that before. I cannot explain the power in that moment, that instant of transformation from shapeless grub to complex insect, from needy little soft squishy thing to shining, valiant warrior-girl. What will she become? Will she guard the hive? tend the babies? wait on her queen? How long will she live? Not long, doubtless. A worker bee’s life is short. And yet that brief existence will bolster the eternity of the hive (here’s hoping…beekeeping is notoriously tetchy).

It is in these liminal spaces, these in-between moments, whether the setting of the sun or the hatching of a bee, that magic resides. It is there for the finding, if you wait, if you look. Catch it, and you too will be wrecked by the peace of it, in the most beautiful way.

The mundane becomes magical

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

SHE sweeps with many-colored brooms,
And leaves the shreds behind;
Oh, housewife in the evening west,
Come back, and dust the pond!


You dropped a purple ravelling in,
You dropped an amber thread;
And now you’ve littered all the East
With duds of emerald!


And still she plies her spotted brooms,
And still the aprons fly,
Till brooms fade softly into stars—
And then I come away.

~emily dickinson

Prompt: Who is the “housewife in the evening west?” A goddess? a spirit? something else? There’s all kinds of magic here to play with.

Image via Pixabay

Hummingbird

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

A Route of Evanescence,
With a revolving Wheel –
A Resonance of Emerald
A Rush of Cochineal –
And every Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts it’s tumbled Head –
The Mail from Tunis – probably,
An easy Morning’s Ride –

~Emily dickinson

Last weekend, I put up the hummingbird feeder. It seemed a bit optimistic–the nights here can still dip below freezing in spring, and the danger of frost won’t pass until late May.

And then, a couple days later, after a long Monday, I was washing dishes at the kitchen sink when a flitter of movement caught my eye. I looked up to see a hummingbird at the feeder, deep emerald with a white band around its neck, and my heart surged.

I can’t explain what exactly it is about hummingbirds. They’re not particularly nice people–they will death-dive each other with their rapier-keen beaks, and they don’t discriminate by species or even size. There have been times when I thought I was going to end up with a hummingbird beak in my skull as I worked in the yard and a particularly feisty hummer decided I shouldn’t be there. They are fairly hideous to each other, refusing to yield even one spot at a four-spot feeder.

But they are pure magic. So tiny, so fierce, so incredibly alive. They are exactly what Dickinson says they are. And the sight of one can transform a long Monday from a slog into a place where magic lives.

Image via Pixabay