Swarms Can Be Beautiful (excerpts from Esther Vincent Xueming)
This piece is shared as Invocation for our Winter Solstice edition, Envisioning Transformation. These fragments were abstracted from Esther Vincent Xueming’s brilliant, non-fiction writing on EcoTheoReview, HAMSA.
Swarms can be beautiful to behold, and swarming even described as a "majestic dance" by some. Traveling swarms may rest for a time while the scouts go out.
…
The bees were not to blame. My parents were not to blame. We could not know the bees were simply resting, waiting for news of their new home.
…
She falls softly and easily as if that was the most natural thing for a bee to do. I hold her with care in the palm of my hand, in spite of my fear…
I hold the bee and she holds me.
…
I wonder about this act of surrendering the self to another, this willingness to offer up one's life to another, for the survival of the other.
I wonder about the bees and how they offer up their lives and bodies the only way they know how—as pollinators connecting flower to flower, as creatures transforming nectar to honey.
…
I feel no fear.
…
She circles back to me as if in thanks, hovering for a split second, before flying out of my window and plain sight.
The bee and I, two unlikely kin…
…
Eyes closed, legs crossed, I follow the speaker’s instructions to imagine breathing from my body, from all the little pores on my skin, rather than with my lungs, to breathe with an awareness of the senses and feeling.
My body reacts almost instantly and starts to tingle. The energy moves and flows freely through my body, which is now open to the breath coming from all around me. So this is what it feels to breathe like a bee… This is what it means to be alive and live through the senses.
Thanks so much to Rev. Billy Tweedie and Travis Helms for introducting us to the Eco Theo Review, and to author Ester Vincent Xueming for creating this wonderful work and so many others.
Check out more of Esther’s work on EcoTheoReview. To read the full piece, we recommend ordering their Summer 2022 magazine. Esther Vincent Xueming is founder and editor of The Tiger Moth Review, author of Red Earth, co-editor of poetry anthologies, Poetry Moves and Little Things, and co-editor of Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore. Her essays are published in The Trumpeter, EcoTheo Collective, Sinking City Review and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. Presently, she is working on an anthology of Southeast Asian eco-writing. A literature educator, she is passionate about the entanglements in art, science, literature, spirituality and ecology. Esther is also an usui reiki master and can be found on IG @myrtlereikihealing or Twitter @EstherVincentXM.
