[Quotation from Rubeena.AK] “Be so individually developed that you love humanity irrespective of beliefs, background, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, traditions, colour, language, nationality, personality or or any other macro/micro differences. The more you are compassionate, peaceful and accepting towards yourself, the more you will be compassionate peaceful and accepting towards others. How we see others is a reflection of how we see our selves. We were born to blend in without giving up our individuality.”

When I see and hear a bee in flight, I can frame it in words in my thought as, bee, hive member, honey-gatherer, pollinator, dangerous, pain-bringer, endangered insect.

The way I see the bee without doubt equates to my perception of it through my thought associations.

I tend to exist as a pinball in play exists. My thoughts bounce me. My thinking “I” knocks against thought-pictures, and I’m bouncing off word-imprints from my sensory input all day.

Most of the time I relate to people in my immediate neighbourhood in superficial ways.

When I notice a person passing near, out of habit I am inclined to estimate the identity from a limited range of mainly visual cues, derived from my picture of the me I call myself.

What happens to my impression of the bee when my sensitivity to my own identity is low to vanishing point?

What happens when my preconception of the bee, and my decades long memories of bee instances are out of reach, not present at all?

This summer afternoon story goes like this.

I had started into wakefulness from my slumped pose seated in sunlight in the garden. In the absence of explicit assumptions about the bee, I heard its buzz, I did not see it.

I was on the rim between volcanic fire and magnetic sleep. I was distracted by the sound of a bee. Distracted only as far as to understand the buzz meant no threat to me. I also deduced the bee and its now receeding sound strake were not relevant to me at this moment.

My Bee >/< Me unitary moment occurred when the bee and I tacitly acknowledged each other’s presence in the afternoon.

I became aware of these things. First, I had woken up and registered the proximity of the bee. Second, I removed my attention from the bee. Third, I received with clarity the bee’s thought that I was irrelevant to its determined flight trajectory, exactly as I too had come swiftly to the same conclusion.

The point made by both the bee and I in that instant was that we were both aware of one another, and aware we were superfluous to each other’s needs.

There is a parallel here for people. We often glance in the direction of another person, only to acknowledge in the briefest non-engaged contact, our mutual disinterest.

This is an often repeated instance between strangers of assessment of threat or of potential purpose.

The fight or flight response at the most primitive amygdala level to detected movement goes, “I will eat it, or it will eat me”.

Street-wise risk assessment relies on the recognition of multiple commonalities, beginning with the plain fact we are both alive moving beings.

I felt a strong common shared sentience on an animal plane with the bee. I was in the presence of sentient life, life with a soul.

As the bee flew by, although I did not see it, I fully recognised it as a sentient being.

I actually received the bee saying, with dignity and self-assuredness, “I must go about my business; you about yours”.

The process of deduction we were simultaneously engaged in, the bee and I, was the equivalent of two humans who cross on a path.

One has business and purpose unrelated to the other, and, in the continuation of their separate paths, they explicitly and implicitly share in an automatic mutual recognition only available between two sentient beings!

It matters not to me, a few days on from my vision, whether I am still giving in to the temptation to imprint my image on the world outside my body or not.

For this briefest of brief union with the mind of a bee, I recognise a blessing beyond all reckoning.

~ Love’s grace is present EveryNow