Of Bees and a Bucket of Water

I recently remembered an encounter I had with a bee when I was five years old, which resulted in my first inkling that I wanted to be a writer. Like most children growing up in warm climates, I walked around barefoot most of the time. I was mildly allergic to bees, so when I stepped on one, I couldn’t walk due to the pain and swelling. My mum’s remedy was to soak my foot in a bucket of ice cold water.

Photo by sebastien rosset on Unsplash

I still remember the scene – it was in my parents’ bedroom in the home where we lived just before they got divorced. I was feeling confined and rather sorry for myself, hoping the cold water would do its job so I could again move around. I can’t remember feeling much else, but like all children I must have been subconsciously aware of all the emotional undercurrents, the tears that were not being shed and the fears surrounding the end of a chapter. A thought popped into my head that I wanted to write a story about a bucket of water one day. I didn’t know the plot, but the emotional thread had something to do with a little girl who lost her way and found it back home again.

I dismissed the idea as silly almost immediately, but the thought stayed with me for a few more years even though I felt embarrassed at the mere memory. In my immediate reality, the world around me crumbled and was rebuilt as two separate worlds, both of which still formed part of my life. It wasn’t perfect (when is anything ever), but everyone involved got on with their lives and found some sort of resilience.

A few years down the line I was forced to deal with my personal darkness, because my subconscious mind urged me to do so. It is impossible to say how much of my anxiety was linked with wounds from childhood, but the road to better well-being was long, arduous and intermittent.
Although I expected the healing journey to help me return to “normal”, or rather, help turn me into a normal person, it wasn’t the case. Instead, I opened Pandora’s box and a plethora of monsters attacked me, but they eventually turned into allies. I discovered pieces of myself I had forgotten existed, or perhaps had never been aware of. Along with the archetypal realm of vivid, confusing and sometimes terrifying images, I also re-discovered my ability to love, something I felt I had lost. My dreams had been hiding in the same closet as my monsters. Through my fear of unleashing my shadows in the world, I had also been suppressing my gifts.

It may not be obvious what bees and a bucket of water have to do with healing and it wasn’t obvious to my five-year-old self either. But now that I have an understanding of symbols, I think it was the universe’s genius way of showing me something about my path in life. Time and again, whenever I was incapacitated due to physical illness, injury or emotional turmoil, creative expression was my great saviour. Water is symbolic of the unconscious, and through plunging into this realm and turning the archetypal images into stories, the poison in my system lost its potency. Through turning to the healing waters of my soul, also known as tears, my pain gained a purpose.

The incident came to mind again only recently, about three decades later, when I was reading about an encounter with bees of another author whose work I admire. The book is Supernatural and the author is Graham Hancock, who was born in Edinburgh where I currently live and the incident coincidentally happened in South Africa, where I was born. Hancock ventured into the Drakensberg mountains to find and examine ancient rock art. The hypothesis he puts forward in the book is that encounters with supernatural beings inspired the oldest forms of creative expression and indeed brought about the origins of civilisation and religious thought. While he was studying the ancient art, he became aware of a beehive, which was very dangerous considering he had had severe allergic reactions to bee stings in the past. When he was stung, he had no serious reaction, but he remembered that bees had spiritual significance in the mythology of the San people of Southern Africa. To him the experience was meaningful and may have led to insight into the inhabitants of other non-physical realms and our relationship to them.

Hancock’s story encouraged me to again look at the experience of inspiration my bee sting brought about when I was five years old. My journey to mend the wounds in my soul brought me in touch with the wounded healer archetype, a phenomenon that occurs across cultures where healers find their calling through an experience of physical or mental illness. Through plunging into the depths of their soul, they meet helpers in other realms, who assist them in healing others. My efforts to heal certainly opened doors to other realms and led me to learn about shamanic healing. In my case, healing and creativity go hand in hand.

As little as bees are, if the San people had it right, they could be the soul’s messengers even when they are threatening. At such a significant time in my young life, these tiny helpers came to whisper in my ear how I could move beyond pain to claim the power in my soul. When I had all but forgotten about my aspirations, they reminded me, through literature, what my original dreams were.

The universe is teeming with life and intelligence, expressed in the smallest and largest of ways. My story about a bucket of water is maybe not the original one I had in mind, but thirty years later I am writing it to honour the little girl’s dreams. Because regardless of how small and insignificant she felt, and often still does, the universe was in her as much as in everything else. Although she didn’t know it at the time, she was capable of wisdom.