At last night’s worship service that was part of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ, our preacher reminded us of the Adinkra symbols from Ghana that represent values revered in the culture there. Adinkra symbols are often represented in the bright Kente clothing worn by people of African descent around the world. The Adinkra symbol our preacher highlighted was Sankofa. Sankofa is a value that treasures the unity of all time. Like many other symbols and values, it can be trivialized by oversimplification. It might be interpreted by saying, “in order to understand our present and ensure our future, we must know our past.” Sankofa is expressed in the symbol of a mythic bird that flies forward while lookingbackbward. In the image, the bird carries an egg in its mouth as it moves forward without seeing where it is going. The egg symbolizes the future. It might be interpreted as the understanding that in order to move forward and secure the future, it is necessary both to know and honestly speak of the past while trusting an unknown future in the present.

I’m sure that this explanation falls far short of the deep meaning of the value, but it was a powerful illustration in a powerful sermon that I am not able to fully articulate in a single journal post. Part of that power was the critical reminder that often when we think of African-American history, we begin with the story of slavery. Slavery is, indeed, part of the history that needs to be taught with clarity and passion for truth-telling. However, it is not the beginning of African-American history. In reality, slavery was a point where the history of African-American people was stripped, entangled, and hidden through the brutal process of treating such a large number of people as less than human. In the process, many Americans fail to recognize that there is a rich cultural heritage going back thousand and thousands of years that is also part of the story of African people. The Adinkra symbols of Ghana are only part of that enormous story. Learning a bit of them reveals part of the story.

I connected with the sermon and the story of the bird that flies forward while simultaneously looking back and nurturing the future in part, because I have benefitted greatly from several Lakota elders who taught me bits of Lakota culture by sharing the seven cardinal virtues of the Lakota people. They reminded me and others that the story of indigenous people on this continent did not begin with settlement. It has origins far deeper than first contact with European peoples. One place where I learned a great deal about Lakota culture and values was a youth camp called Waohola that was held years ago. Waohola is sometimes translated as “respect.” As a cultural value it embodies respect for self, for family, for all of life as a unified community. The old are respected for their wisdom. The young are respected as the future. Lakota values teach that all people and all things are relatives. The phrase, Mitakuye Oyasin are the words spoken as one enters the sweat lodge or Inipi. “Everything is one.” “All of my relatives.” It is an expression of respect.

The sermon also reminded me of a powerful poem by Amanda Gorman titled “Pre-memory.” In that poem Gorman speaks of the process of tuning unarticulated memory into art. We carry within ourselves important history that shapes us regardless of whether or not we are conscious of that history. Memories must be explored, explained, and expressed in order to understand the fullness of their power. Gorman tells of research that illustrates that the children of Holocaust survivors carry within them deep memories of the trauma of the near genocide of their people. That trauma shapes them whether or not it is consciously known or articulated. Exploring and expressing that trauma can be a critical element in moving forward. Gorman, in her powerful poetic style, writes “Grief is the grenade that always goes off.”

It is a lesson that I am learning from the bees I observe in the hives I tend. Bees do not have brains. Inside of their tiny exoskeletons they are liquid. The closest thing they have to what we recognize as organs in humans are five structures that keep that liquid in constant circulation. Some have referred to this as bees having five hearts, but they are not hearts in the same way as the muscles in other creatures that contract to circulate blood through a system of vessels. The liquid insides of bees slosh and circulate. Bees do not remember in the same sense that humans do by accessing elements stored in our brains. Bees do, however, possess the ability to create queens who lay eggs and insure the future of the species. They have the ability to “remember” how to nurture eggs, to gather pollen and nectar, to create honey, to forage over large areas without wasting energy, and much more. When scientists removed all of the nurse bees from a colony, other bees from the colony, including guard bees and forager bees, became nurse bees. When they did their DNA was altered in patterns that could be recognized as the same DNA that previously was present only in nurse bees. Bees “remember” their responsibilities through their DNA.

We, however, share both that genetic memory and the power to remember through thought and storytelling. We remember with our brains and we remember with our bodies. Becoming conscious of the roots of our memories and faithfully reporting the truth of our history can be liberating and empowering. Like the bird in the Sankofa symbol, we move forward with full and honest understanding - and with respect for - the past.

I am not just the sum of experiences that have been accumulated since the day of my birth. I carry also the experiences of my parents and grandparents and their parents and grandparents. And collectively, we weave the community of the church from the heritage of all who are called together to do the work to which we are called.

I will carry with me the memory of that powerful sermon and mull it with the thousands of other powerful sermons that have shaped my life and my faith. Each invites me not to dwell in the past, but to move forward toward a future that is yet to be revealed. I do not need to see the future in order to move ahead, but I do need to remember the past while flying forward.

I’ve got a series of busy days ahead. Today is the beginning of the Annual Meeting of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ. For most of my life I have been active in the conference where I have lived and served. I began attending conference annual meetings when I was a high school student and continued to do so through my college and seminary education. As a pastor I felt that active participation in the conference, including serving on conference committees was part of my job. In the congregations I served, participation by lay people in conference gatherings increased during the years that I served. Now retired, our conference requires clergy to attend the annual conference as part of the requirements of maintaining our standing as ministers. This year, however, we will be attending online as opposed to in person because of many other busy activities in our lives. Today, in addition to the conference meeting, I have a doctor’s appointment that would be a huge inconvenience to reschedule. When I inquired, I learned that rescheduling would mean a minimum of a three month delay in seeing the doctor. While I am not dealing with an emergency, the delay would be an inconvenience for me.

In addition, I am booked on a 5 am flight on Sunday Morning that will take me to Cleveland, site of the national offices of our church, for a three-day retreat and development conference for a major new initiative that our church is making in resources for children in the church. This is part of a project that has been a lifelong passion of mine and I am honored to have been invited to participate.

Since we are human and have limited energy it makes sense for us to forego the two and a half hour commute to Seattle to attend the conference annual meeting in person. There are distinct disadvantages to attending online and we do not plan to make it our regular mode of participation but it is what we are able to do this year.

In preparation for the busy days ahead, I was packing for my trip to Cleveland last night. For most of my career, decisions about what to wear were not a challenge for me. Ministers wore white dress shirts, suits and ties. Later colored shirts became more common, but suits and ties remained the usual dress for professional activities for clergy. For much of my career I wore ties every day except days off from work. Times have changed, however. Our congregation is a much more casual place. There is one pastor at our church whom I have never see wear a tie and who wears jeans and t shirts most Sundays. The congregation also is generally dressed causally for gathering of the congregation. When I began to serve the congregation as an interim minister, the lead pastor commented that she had told her father, who is a similar age to me, that a suit was “too much.” “A sport coat might be OK, but ditch the suit and tie.” So I was careful not to wear suits and ties when I was serving the congregation. Most Sundays I wore long sleeve shirts with collars, but left my collar open and did not wear a jacket. I couldn’t quite bring myself to wear t shirts for worship, but I definitely dressed casually.

When I retired, however, I decided that I would give myself permission to be one of the “old” people in the church. On Sundays, I dress up for church even though almost no one else does. I have some nice suits and quite a collection of bright bow ties and I enjoy wearing them. I don’t worry about whether I fit in or am adopting the common fashion of others. I don’t have anyone I need to impress. I just dress the way I want to dress on Sundays. And for the meetings in Cleveland, where I’m fairly certain I will be the oldest participant, I decided to pack dress shirts and ties for each day. I know that I’ll be the only one to dress that way. It doesn’t bother me. I’m glad to be myself. I don’t have any need to not be the age that I am. And I don’t have anyone to impress.

One of the advantages of being a senior in a gathering like the one I will be attending is that I have memory of the past. I carry a fair amount of institutional memory for this gathering. Our task will be to design the process of producing a new set of educational curricula for the church. I will be the only participant who has actually served in a curricula development project in our church. In fact, I have served in several. I was an editor for the denomination’s first educational resource to be produced in a digital format. And I’ve written hundreds of lessons for paper resources. This new curriculum won’t be like anything we’ve done before. It will involve online learning, webinars, and digital resources. But a bit of experience is valuable enough to the project that I was invited to participate. I have no intention of trying to revive the past, but there are times when it helps to have a good rearview mirror when moving forward.

I recently read about a study conduced at the University of Nevada that compiled data from over 20 years of study on the practice of walking backwards. The research has been used to increase hamstring flexibility, strengthen back muscles, reduce lower back pain, protect athletes from injury, benefit suffers of osteoarthritis, and assist in stroke recovery. Range of motion in hip and knee joints is reduced when walking backwards, ankle joints are strengthened, and plantar flexion movement is increased.

People have touted the benefits of backward walking for a long time. During the 19th Century, the activity of “retro-walking” was an eccentric hobby. In the summer of 1915, 50-year
-old lPatrick Hamon walked backwards from San Francisco to New York City to win a wager of $20,000 - a huge sum at the time.

I have no intention of reversing the direction of travel for our church. But I do think that I can provide some benefits as we move into a bold new future by being able to remember the path that brought us to the point where we have found ourselves.

I suspect that most others will hardly notice how I’m dressed. I can be a temporary reminder of the past as they focus on imagining new paths for the future.

When we lived in South Dakota, I often paddled at Sheridan Lake, just a half dozen miles from our home. Each spring, I would eagerly await the arrival of a pair of Great Blue Herons who would nest near the lake and could be seen fishing in the shallows around the lake. I loved the sight of the giant birds. Herons are graceful in flight and at landing, but seem just a bit awkward launching into flight. Most years I would catch a glimpse at a hatchling sometime in August or September, but for the most part, I would see only the parents as I paddled. If I was careful to be quiet in my paddling and avoid approaching too close, I could get a good look at the birds without stirring them to flight. The squawk of a heron is a distinctive sound and I was generally not disappointed if they flew away and I got to hear their sound as they relocated to a different place on the lake. I enjoy paddling in the mornings when the herons would be fishing. They tend to stay close to the nest in the late afternoons and evenings, so if I paddled at that time of the day I usually wouldn’t see them.

Now we live in a place where there are Great Blue Herons year round. The birds who have lived in our neighborhood since long before settlement are slightly different from the herons I would see in South Dakota. Pacific Great Blue Herons are a subspecies different from inland herons and from the herons that are seen farther south in Washington. The herons here are a bit smaller in size. They also begin breeding earlier in the spring. The range of these birds is isolated by the mountains east of here. These herons can be seen from Prince William Sound south to the end of the Puget Sound near Olympia.

About a mile from our home is a very large heron rookery. The birds nest in the birch trees that give our bay its name. As early as mid-February they engage in courtship and pre-nesting. The eggs are laid from around the middle of April to mid-May. Right now the herons are taking time sitting on the eggs while they incubate. The chicks will hatch sometime before the end of May.

When conditions are calm and the tide is out, we will generally see 4 to 10 herons fishing along the shore on our daily walks to the bay. When there are strong winds or rough seas, the birds are more likely to fish along Tennent Creek. Tennent is a tidal creek with salt water flowing inland for at least three miles to a marshy area right next to the rookery. We cross the creek on our walk to the bay. As soon as the eggs hatch we will begin to see a lot more herons fishing during the day. In June and July as the chicks grow larger and demand more food we will often see dozens of herons spread out along the shore all the way around the bay. Some days there are so many that we lose count as they move around and we walk.

It is a privilege to have such distinctive neighbors and we enjoy watching them. As we approach the bay I start to scan the horizon for the birds and comment on their presence or absence each day. Sometime around the middle of August we will begin to see the year’s chicks beginning to fish alongside their parents after they have fledged. After they have learned to fly they still need to learn to catch their food.

Birch bay is rich with abundant sea life including salmon halibut and lingcod as well as clams, mussels and oysters. There is lots of food fairly easy for the herons to catch, which is necessary for the months when the brood are still in the nest and in need of a lot of food to support their rapid growth.

Our living room is adorned with art that represents the places we have lived. Along one wall we have a print of a Paul Goble painting of two Lakota and Mato Tipi and a Robert Wong photograph of a coyote. We have acquired a few items for the wall of our dining area that show our current home. There is a map of the Salish sea and another more detailed map of the San Juan Islands. Alongside the maps we have chosen a photograph taken by our friend Eva Bareis of a Heron in the trees at Birch Bay State Park. It is fascinating to me that the Robert Wong’s coyote always makes me think of South Dakota. After all we have coyotes here. We can hear them singing at night and I see them around. I’ve even seen a coyote in town in Ferndale. In a similar way, the picture of the Heron makes me think of this home even though I enjoyed seeing Great Blue Herons in South Dakota. I don’t know if my awareness is somehow heightened about certain non-human neighbors in different places or if my associations are the product of many experiences that blend together. When guests are in our home and comment about the pictures, I am quick to say that the coyote is in South Dakota and the Heron in the trees just down the road from our home here.

Like the Lakota people of the Dakotas, the Coast Salish people indigenous to this part of the world have ancient traditions of referring to the birds, fish, and animals as relatives. Their traditions of teaching the interconnectedness of all of life resonate with my own experiences. I think of the creatures including the birds at my feeders and the rabbits along the pathway as neighbors. In South Dakota I often commented on the deer and turkeys as my neighbors. I am grateful to live in a neighborhood that is rich with wild animals. I grew up in a family of aviators, so it isn’t a stretch for me to think of them as distant relatives.

We have two cherry trees in our back yard. One produces sweet cherries. The other produces much smaller and tart fruit. I know very little about fruit trees, but we have enjoyed the abundant harvest of the sweet cherry tree. Last year we filled our freezer with cherries and we still have a few left. One of the treats of this spring has been the cherry pies that Susan has made for special dinners. The frozen cherries make wonderful pie filling. The sweet cherry tree is the first of the two to blossom. The tiny white flowers fell to the ground and the leaves emerged before the other tree was fully covered with blossoms. This means that we get an extended time of having at least one flowering tree in our back yard.

I enjoy having fruit grown in our own yard to eat but there are many other benefits to the trees. One benefit that I didn’t envision before we moved here is the joy of springtime for our grandchildren. Last week when our grandchildren were over for a visit, I looked out the kitchen window to see our nine year old granddaughter dancing in the falling blossoms. Later she lay on the grass beneath the tree and allowed the white blossoms to fall on her. She came in from the yard with several blossoms clinging to her hair. She and her sister made tiny bouquets of blossoms that they took home to their mother. The trees provide a background for first class entertainment for me and there is no admission fee.

One of the things I enjoy about the blossoming trees is standing under them on a sunny day. The air above me literally hums with all of the bees that come to the tree in search of nectar. As a byproduct of their visits, pollen clings to their legs when they land and when the bees travel between the two trees, the pollination that is necessary for fruit production occurs. We have several different kinds of bees that visit our yard and I can identify some of them. As one who tends domestic honey bees, I recognize that some of the bees that visit our yard have come from domestic hives. They aren’t from my colonies, which are a couple of miles away at our son’s farm. I’m not sure where their home hives are located, but I’m happy to have them in my yard.

There is emerging evidence that suburban and urban homes are providing essential habitat for bees. The expanding monocultures of modern farming combined with extensive use of pesticides has resulted in a nearly catastrophic decline in the health of bees in some parts of the country. Honey bees that are transported as part of a focus on agricultural production are especially vulnerable to what has been called “colony collapse.” Truckloads of bee hives are driven across many states as the bees that pollinate almond trees in California are, in many cases, the same bees that pollinate alfalfa fields in Washington later in the summer.

Small scale keepers of colonies, like our tiny apiary with only four hives, provide a vastly different life for the bees that live in them. Our bees live through the cycle of the seasons, staying inside the hive living off of stores of honey in the winter and emerging to forage for nectar and pollen only when temperatures are above 50 degrees or so. Honey bees navigate by light and sight and are inactive in the dark of night.

Honeybees are only a small fraction of the bees that work to pollinate plants. Worldwide there are an estimated 20,000 distinct species of bees. Only a small fraction of those bees live in hives built by human hands. 70 percent of all bees are ground-dwelling, meaning that they lay eggs and tend larvae and pupae in holes in the ground as opposed to other locations. They are dependent upon patches of bare soil where they can access and dig in dirt. Of the 30 percent of bees that dwell in hollow stems or dead trees only tiny portion live in human made habitats.

People have been studying bees and learning about their lifecycles for hundreds of years. When people understood very little about bees, they began to seek the sweet honey that the bees store. Often harvesting honey involved destroying a colony of bees. Modern apiary practices come from generations of beekeepers who observed the bees, discovered and measured the amount of space they need to form their combs for brood and honey and construct hives to house the creatures. Most commercial bees are kept in Langstroth hives with perfect even spacing between frames holding the combs, which in modern hives are only partially formed of wax provided by the bees. The frames already have the honeycomb pattern in a plastic backing for the bees to use to create space for the brood. A minority of bee keepers use hives with only bars at the top of the boxes from which the bees form their comb. Those top bar hives also are based on carefully measured spaces to allow bees to form comb and navigate the distance between the combs to care for the developing new bees. There has to be enough space for the queen to move between the combs to lay the eggs.

Most bees, however, continue to thrive without human intervention in their cycles of reproduction. They are not dependent upon shelters provided by humans. Scott Black, executive director of the nonprofit Xerces Society advises people to become “lazy gardeners” in order to provide habitat for bees and other pollinating insects. Mow less, leave the stems of plants after they have dried out, allow sticks that fall from trees to remain on the ground, don’t pick up all of the fallen leaves. Not every square inch of your yard needs to be either paved or producing plants. A bit of bare earth will provide habitat for ground nesting bees. They will dig in on their own or move into abandoned dens left by small rodents and other animals.

Learning more about the creatures with whom we share this planet is one of the joys of this phase of my life. I feel honored to have a tiny bit of responsibility for just a few bees while I recognize that the health of our planet requires that we learn to live with the insects that surround us and help our food to grow.

We’ve had an interesting Earth Day weekend. On Saturday, the Green Team from our church, of which I am a part hosted, together with the Multi Faith Network for Climate Justice, a Sacred Earth Fair. I staffed a table at the event that was designed to educate people about backyard pollinators. We had activities for children, including coloring pages and an opportunity to make a mason bee habitat to take home. We had pollinator friendly seed packets, honey sticks, and other information. To my surprise, a lot of adults came to our booth with questions about raising honey bees. I ended up donning my bee suit and demonstrating the Warre Hive boxes I have made. We were just one of 18 different booths. In addition, there were workshop sessions, a panel discussion, and opening and closing ceremonies.

Saturday was a busy day for me because I had ordered two new queen bees with workers to install in our apiary. They arrived and were available for pickup on Saturday morning. By the time I got them into their new hives, it was time for me to head to the church to set up for the fair.

On Sunday we had a special Earth Day service at church. I read a poem that I had composed. Our choir sang an anthem based on words by Chief Seattle. The sermon was presented by Rev. Brooks, Berndt, Minister of Environmental Justice in the national setting of the United Church of Christ.

Last night we were back at the church for an Earth Day Blessing Service featuring Indigenous leaders from Hawaii, the Lummi Nation and the Nooksack Tribe. Speakers at the event represented Judaism, Islam, Tao, Hinduism, Bahá’, and Christianity. The service was advertised as an hour and half event, but I knew in the first ten minutes that it would take at least two hours. There is a different pace to an event that features that many speakers. Quite a few speakers needed to say more than the organizers had planned for them to say. It was well worth the investment of time. Connecting with others over concern for the future of our planet and restoring active hope that puts faith into action was a meaningful process.

All too often when we hear about the climate crisis or other issues of environmental concern we are confronted with a sort of prediction about doom. We hear that temperatures on our planet could rise so that the polar ice caps melt, coastal areas are flooded, wildfires make the air unbreathable and the planet becomes uninhabitable by humans. Sometimes the predictions of scientists and scholars present a kind of doomsday scenario. In the light of all of this it was uplifting for me to attend a series of events that focused on hope and offered real world suggestions about actions and commitments that we can make to protect the environment and to promote resiliency among our neighbors as together we strive to overcome the injustices of the effects of climate change.

Throughout the weekend we have had many opportunities to come together with other concerned people to understand that care for our planet is a value that is shared with those of other faiths and from different wisdom traditions. As has often been the case, our indigenous neighbors continue to lead us to concern for the balance of life and care for the earth and its environmental systems.

Concern for the planet is one of the motivating reasons why I have become a tender of bees. I provide care for the colonies in our apiary and have invested time and energy into promoting healthy pollinators for the orchard and flowers on our son’s farm. Along the way, I have learned a lot from the bees I tend. I have decided that the traditional term, “beekeeper,” isn’t really accurate. I don’t keep anything. I do, however, harvest some of the honey that the bees produce. And I help to protect not only the honey bees, but other species of bees. It is estimated that 600 to 700 species of bees are native to our state. In addition to the honey bees in our hive, there are alkali bees, blue orchard bees, western bumble bees, western leafcutter bees, fairy bees, green sweat bees, nomad bees, and mason bees on the farm. I have seen as many as three different species of bees all on the same lavender plant. The various species of bees seem to get along with each other well. Moving honey bees onto the farm does not seem to have displaced any of the native pollinators who also help with the orchard, flowers and food plants grown there.

A colony of bees is filled with tens of thousands of individuals. The queen is constantly laying eggs into individual cells where they become larvae, pupate, and emerge as adult bees. The bees tend the eggs and larvae, forage for nectar and pollen, guard the hive, in an ongoing cycle. The lifespan of an individual bee can be as short as 15 days in the summer, or as long as 200 days in the winter. The queen lives two or three years on average, but can live more than seven years. When her life nears its end the colony produces a new queen and drones to mate with her. During her life she can lay over 2,000 eggs per day. That is more than her own body weight in eggs every day. All of those eggs are fertilized in a single period early in her life. Bees made in free flight and a queen surrounded by all of her drones is an amazing sight.

Recently I was given a poem that seems to be a good expression of the hope that I have acquired from working with bees:

THIS SPRING
by James A. Pearson

How can I love this spring
when it’s pulling me
through my life faster
than any time before it?
When five separate dooms
are promised this decade
and here I am, just trying
to watch a bumblebee cling
to its first purple flower.
I cannot save the world.
But look how it trying,
once again, to save me.