A Lesson In Being-ness

I sat down to write this week’s post only to find that the Internet was down. It’s not even raining or storming for a change. So rather than get myself all worked up, I did what I usually do to reign in my tendency to blow things out of proportion … I went outside. I find that a little time spent just standing outside with my fellow beings, be they plant or animal, will almost always bring me back to center.

This morning I stood and watched a bunch of tiny bees doing their thing in the garden. Have you ever taken the time to really watch bees at work? It is a humbling experience. Methodically, with a focus and an instinct passed down for thousands of generations, they move from flower to flower taking what they need and pollinating as they leave before moving on to the next bloom. In all the years I’ve been gardening, I’ve never seen bees fighting for position, or for the best flower, or for any other reason. Why? Because they’re bees, and they do what bees do. They are comfortable in their bee-ing-ness.

Birds spend their lives being birds and doing bird things like building nests, flying and finding food. Bees collect nectar, leave pollen behind, and make honey. A bluebird isn’t jealous of an eagle. A bee doesn’t obsess over being born a bee instead of a dragon fly. They are perfectly okay being who they are and doing what they do. It’s only we humans that aren’t content to just be. We obsess over how we look, what we have and what we want. We’re jealous of anyone who has something we don’t. In pondering this difference between humans and other living things it occurs to me that the reason non-human beings don’t behave the way we do is because they don’t know they can be anything else but what they are, and herein lies the answer for us. We do know that we can be something else.  What remains to be seen is whether we can choose to be our most authentic selves or copies of someone else. There is a great treasure in just “being” if we would only sit still long enough to connect to it.

As for me, I have been informed that our Internet will be down for several days while they make repairs to the wires outside. So I am writing this out long hand in anticipation of the day when I can post it, because I am a writer and that’s what writers do – they write. I am “being” me. Who are you being today?

And so it is.