Sunday Contemplation # 49 Bees, Honeycomb And The Patterns Of Trust

Image by Sydney Michalski. Sydney writes the Nature Moments newsletter here on Substack. Her work is stunning…I hope you will take a moment to also check out her website.

• This Week’s Quote

• A G’day

• This Sunday’s Contemplation

• A Guided Meditation

• Grateful For

• This Week’s Community Chat

• Upcoming Activities

This Week’s Quote

Trust is humanity’s most precious social glue. It’s what enables us to form relationships, to work together, to exchange value, and to feel safe. Without trust, society would crumble and human progress would stop.

Rachel Botsman — From "Who Can You Trust?" (2017)

A G’day

Hello Everyone:

I hope that your hearts are in good shape and that there are places of peace for you to be still in.

We have a beehive at our place. Had it for a few years now. When I am mowing in their vicinity I usually send them an inner message that says something like…”I am sorry about the noise, I won’t be long at this and I will leave you in peace”. Most of the time they remain calm and let me do my thing. Sometimes it seems they send out a scout to double check my intentions. One of those times I was not very focused and the scout dive bombed me several times. I felt certain he was saying…"now is not the right time…piss off”. What soul driving past would imagine the silly guy on the ride-on mower was in a conversation with bees?

The impetus for this week’s contemplation came from a beautiful article about bees, written here on Substack by Sydney Michalski. You can read her piece here.

I offer the following Sunday Contemplation for your consideration and I wish you the peace and resolve to meet this day.

Cheers,

This Sunday’s Contemplation

Bees, Honeycomb And The Patterns Of Trust.

Nature abounds. It abounds in patterns. There is a great deal we can learn from these patterns, if we just look closely enough.

People often speak about the wonder of bees. I won’t pretend to be an expert, but there are a couple of lessons, among many others, that I think bees teach us about trust.

Before honey bees make honey they create hexagonal honeycomb. Worker bees secrete wax from glands in their abdomen and build perfectly fashioned hexagons to prepare for future honey storage and all the essential activities of the hive, like brood cells, pollen storage, temperature regulation and apparently it is the platform where they do waggle dances to communicate about what they have found in their explorations outside the hive.

The hexagons they create are marvels of engineering. They maximise the area of storage with the least amount of wax required.

What does this have to do with trust?

To restate Rachel Botsman, trust is…”what enables us to form relationships, to work together, to exchange value, and to feel safe. Without trust, society would crumble and human progress would stop”.

The first environmental and social activity bees undertake is to build the structures to support their survival and their thriving. It is their natural activity.

Trust is the honeycomb of human connection. Without trust our connections breakdown. They literally crumble.

I won’t stretch the analogy to breaking, but the nature of bees speaks to me about two fundamental qualities of trust; interdependence and accountability.

Bees naturally understand their priorities, and their nature is the very expression of interdependence.

The fundamental illusion of the materialist view of human individualism is that we are not interdependent, or at least that we can get away with pretending we are isolated individuals. Nature’s lesson is simple and clear. We are not separate, cannot be separate and are accountable to each other for our very survival.

Learning to trust, and building trust into the structure of everything we do, is not optional. We need to pay close and conscious attention to it in every interaction, connection and relationship we make.

Yet, we build many relationships with an incidental assumption that trust will be created, or we substitute force for trust. The breakdown of so many connections we make suggest the incidental assumption of trust, or force, are profoundly unwise.

We do not have space here to catalogue the examples where the breakdown of trust is consequential. Here’s a few: the number of marriages that fail; businesses that crumble; institutions that no longer serve those they were meant to; the wars between tribes and nations etc etc ad nauseum.

It is in our nature to to seek trustworthiness. It is our natural state to recognise our interdependence with each other and with Nature. Our task is to reconnect with our natural state. If you have any doubt that trust is our natural state, watch your own reaction and the reaction of others when we don’t know who or what to trust. We are at best, defensive, at worst, irrational and violent. Where the structures of trust are clear, we feel safe, and naturally act with compassion and confidence.

Before you accuse me of stating the bloody obvious, and signing out of this post in despair that the obstacles to doing the bloody obvious in our dysfunctional world are too great, let me say this -

Our longing for trust is natural and foundational. We do not need to change our nature to build a better world, we need only reconnect with what is natural, and build the skills to express our nature more effectively.

As David Whyte says…for this we need to “start close in”. Start with becoming a trustworthy individual. Expand by practicing trust with the people most dear to us. Make trust the explicit driver of the cultures we build at work. There are natural expanding circles of trust that grow in the soil of the recognition of our natural state, our natural interdependence.

As my nineteen year old, no-idea-how-to-do-it-but-cool-with-the-words, hippie self would have said it…”be like bees man”!

Hold to your nature. Learn the skills. Do the work.

Bees don’t hide from their natural work. We no longer have the luxury of hiding what is most important for our survival.

______________________

I know there is much to say about the work of building trust. This is a broad stroke to make a beginning. I hope you might join me for more on what we can actually do to rebuild our patterns of trust in future newsletters.

Thank you for reading this. See you next week I hope.

I wish you peace.

A Guided Meditation

I have received quite a bit of feedback that a guided meditation connected to the topic of these contemplations has been appreciated. When appropriate I will provide one each week. This week’s guided meditation is called The Patterns Of Trust I will publish that recorded meditation in a couple of days.

Grateful For

I include this section because I found that when I read or hear about what others are grateful for, I tend to think more about what I am grateful for. Feel free to share what you are grateful for in the comments. I think it is a beautiful service to others.

In line with today’s theme, I am grateful for bees. They are humble and hard working. Our survival, our environment, our ecosystems, depend on them. They are the very definition of our interdependence. I honour them, thank them and bow in gratitude to them.

This Week’s Community Chat

The theme in the chat this week is:

In a human world where we appear to be losing track of trust, what provides you the safety to continue? What helps you?

Thank you.

Upcoming Activities

Please stay tuned.

Should you want to message me directly, please feel free to do so.