It was a sunny day in mid-2020 on the heals (yes, HEALS) of an intimate partner breakup, after I’d unknowingly been living in mold for 4 years.

A bee stung me 3 times in a row, once on my neck and twice on my chest... or was it the other way around?

I’d been fiddling with my guitar, a second-hand gift from another ex-love, in the gardens in my backyard on day number who-the-eff-knows-what of quarantine.

She stung me on my way back inside, then hung out on the porch, seemingly to die.

I studied the lines and creases on her body, the way they rubbed her legs together and spread their wings.

“She is actually so beautiful,” I mused and wandered back inside to conjure poetic grief spells with calloused fingertips, as I reflected on our encounter.

This was the same year I learned that bees sometimes tuck their faces into flowers at night when they are feeling safe enough.

On my evening walks I’d often stop to admire their fuzzy little bee butts protruding from flowery faces along our fenceline, then tuck myself in for another sleepless Seattle night (heh).

The bees began speaking to me LONG before I understood their messages or medicine.

And I began processing through poetic expression long before I took my first intentional dose of bee medicine this month.

No, it’s not bee venom therapy yet, but ask me and I’ll tell ya what it is.

Your medicine can not always be found in a script or a protocol, and oftentimes appears as a literal pin prick (or three) during some of your darkest moments.

A portion of my medicine has always been poetry and poetic expression, for as long as I can remember…

Yeah yeah, I’ve followed the protocols and taken the scripts and all that, too. I’m a multi-faceted human who believes in health and healing on all levels, not just the physical.

I’m grateful for the docs and mind-body coaches, the somatic therapists and acupuncturists, the craniosacral and quantum healing practitioners, the artists and creatives, for the plant and animal messengers, for the earth and the cosmos, for the knowing deep in my bones and ancestral wisdom in my cells.

And I’m super duper grateful for the constance of poetic medium to help integrate and understand the unexpected potent remedies those little bee butt messengers delivered on sunny days and nights in 2020.

These are the types of sacred re-membering and re-collecting we do in the ALCHEMIZE container of Surrendirt to Community.

This is where you get to tend to literal and figurative wounds through creative expression, and ultimately come home to your gifts, to your medicine.

And you get to do this while lovingly held in both a 1:1 and community container.