My first beehive, our his and hers white beekeeper's suits, the bee gear (including this way cool smoker), and three gigantic tomes of bee literature and wisdom arrived in the mail recently, a birthday gift from my husband. I just attended a two-hour lecture An Introduction to Beekeeping, in which I was surprised--in the midst of all that technical talk about building hives, Colony Collapse Disorder, pesticides and big corporations, pollination, broods, biology, genetics, etc.--at the instructor's description of his deep spiritual experience with bees.

He said it in so many words, how these tiny winged creatures draw him closer to the divine. He spoke eloquently about watching his bees collecting the pollen from the plants he'd sown, and how when the combs were drawn and the honey was made, a good portion for the bees and some left over for him and his family, that he knew he too was a part of it all--of the soil and the sky and the sun, and something more. When he said that, when he became that open for just a minute, I was looking around the room to see if anyone else had just been rended through to the core by the same bolt of lightning. But if they were, I couldn't see it. And I doubt they could see mine, although I've been told that I can be pretty transparent at times.

I'd never thought of bees and transcendence.

Joseph Campbell talked a lot about being transparent to the transcendent as part of the process of waking up. What am I getting at here? I'm not sure where this is headed.

But I must tell you, I found myself sitting in absolute rapt attention in my seat in that drafty conference room with its low wattage lights as the instructor talked about the bees scouting out as far out as 12 miles away from their hive (pretty heroic for such little girls) to collect the pollen from a variety of sources and then bring it back to the hive to produce the golden honey. And the beekeeper's description and stories of the bees collecting pollen took my thoughts to the unlikeliest place. To somewhere I had no idea I'd go that night.

In that dimly lit room, bundled up in my snow boots and goosedown jacket, sipping tea from a styrofoam cup, I found myself thinking of Sophia, divine wisdom in the canonical Bible and the gnostic texts, and how she seeks and gathers up the sparks of the divine. Sophia's journey is nothing if heroic.

And her journey is mine.

On the Nativity of Our Lady.

The fragments of light still trapped in the material world are collectively the anima mundi, the Soul of the World.

We can not go to that perfect home until we find and bring back those sparks of light, our own human souls, which are trapped in the world. We must recover that pearl of consciousness that Sophia sowed in us in the beginning, for only through human consciousness can the redemption of all creation occur.

All I could see in my mind was this image of the bees buzzing to and fro, hovering over the flowers, seeking the precious pollen across such amazingly long distances, and bringing it back. Did you know that without bees, we'd die? Pollination is essential to our having a lot of the food we take for granted. The bees remind me of Sophia, who seeks the sparks, helping us to find the pearl of our own consciousness, without which there isn't a lot of life. Helping us to return to the place from which we came ... back to the beginning. Home.

I've experienced some staggering moments of gnosis when I'm with horses. And I think, my goodness, what will the bees spark? As if they haven't already, and I don't even have any of my own yet.

I tell you, I'll never look at a bee quite the same again after that lecture. I'm devouring the bee books. I've developed a taste for honey. And a longing for lush green grass in the wintertime. I dream of walking barefoot and of dripping honeycomb. I find myself opening the thick beekeeping volume with all the reverence of a holy book. I will be the gatherer and the gathered. And I will get stung.

I can't wait to get started.