The Muse nº2 podcast – Ariella Daly on the Void, bees, time, and how to live in tune with the natural world.
you can also listen on Spotify here.
In this episode, Ariella Daly joins me to talk about time, the void, and how we can live in harmony with the natural cycles that surround us.
Find Ariella here: https://www.honeybeewild.com/
You can read the full transcript below.
Olivia -
Hi, everyone. Welcome to The Muse, episode number two. We are here with Ariella Daly, who is a very dear teacher and mentor for me. And she is a teacher of natural beekeeping as well as sacred dreaming and I've known her for a couple of years now and took her beautiful beekeeping apprenticeship, and I'm just really honored to have her here. I will pass the mic to you, Ariella, to introduce yourself and talk a little bit about what do you do.
Ariella -
Thank you, Olivia. Thanks for having me on the call and the podcast. I'm just thinking about beekeeping with you back in the day over here in Sonoma County. So yes, we, let's see, we met through bees and beekeeping and dream work and I have been living in this region in Northern California for a number of years, keeping bees, working with the natural beekeeping and trying to really cultivate a deeper listening with the land of the bees, trying to teach and work in a way that is addressing issues of capitalism and colonialism in the way we care for the land and care for animals and deconstruct some of that. And then I also have a very strong spiritual practice around bees and the land and the earth. I've spent most of my life since I was about 15 studying pre-Christian ways and folk traditions and have woven a lot of that work and womb wisdom, womb shamanism, women's history and spirituality into my work. I've been an avid dreamer my whole life and I think that's been kind of the main vein around my spiritual work that's made it into the public view is working with dreams. I find that they are such a powerful way to communicate and connect with the more than human world.
Olivia -
Beautiful. Yeah, I think all of all of the pieces that you weave together are so potent and magical and I think you really embody, to me, just the teacher that has taken all of these threads and woven them together in such a meaningful way and it's it's really shifted my my view of spirituality in the world and how to interact with with nature and with our internal lives. So thank you.
Our theme this month for the Muse is time and the construct of time and a big concept that you introduced to me, but that I think weaves through all of your work, is the void and the magic dark. And I would love to hear you just talk a little bit about your definition of that and what that means to you. And we can start there.
Ariella -
Yeah, yeah I think it's important to approach something as vast as the void through our own personal lenses. So this is just my approach to it. There's a lot of different ways one might talk about the void. I have spent a tremendous amount of time working with the womb as a center of wisdom, much like we work with the heart as a spiritual center or the third eye as a spiritual center. And in this way, I see the void as metaphorically connected to the womb in the sense of creative energy, that the void is the place that everything comes from and returns to much like the earth. there is this sense of the great expansive creative potential, that the void is everything and nothing. And that when we connect with the infinite dark generative quality of the void, we can shift things in our lives. We can shift patterns in our lives. We can get more deeply in touch with creative energy, with solutions to things that seem insurmountable. There's something about the void that is deeply creative. And so when I when I think of the void, I often say the void of creation. And in this sense, I do equate it at times with the womb. Now there are other ways to work with it that isn't just centered on female anatomy, but it is for me particularly connected to the deep, dark, we could say feminine wisdom that can be accessed through all people and all things. Like I've said, I have a lot of what you could say is learning and academic background in studying women's spirituality and women's history. And if you look at ancient cultures, especially when I look at the ancient cultures connected to my ancestors and ancestral roots, you see again and again, this connection between the earth and the sacred feminine and space, the void, the expanse and the sacred feminine in the sense of it being an energy, not necessarily just of a woman. So it's something that's accessible to all genders, all expressions, but it's this sense of the fecund dark, the generative dark, the place that births and also receives death, the place that is full of potential and can can come through in nonlinear ways. So how do we connect to the void? We connect to the void through things like dreams and meditations and journey work. We're talking about shamanic journey work, art, all of these different ways that we might connect with that sense of the infinite. Yeah. That's one way to talk about it.
Olivia -
Thank you. Yeah, I would love to hear how you connect that concept, which feels so universal and also you know, centered in the human experience in some ways because we're the ones that can conceptualize it and and sort of digest it and create from it. I would love to hear how the bees are tied to this concept too and just the hive being maybe an emblem for that creative force moving through. I'm curious what your take on that is. And and also like the hive as a mirror for the womb, which I know you've you've talked about in your teaching.
Ariella Daly -
I think it's important. You highlighted something there that this is a human experience that we're talking about. And of course, womb is a mammalian experience. So it doesn't just have to be about the womb. It's about centering a concept that's so expansive in an embodied form, and there are ways to do that in all body types, in all body forms, whether they're human or animal, whether they're a plant, whether they're gendered in a particular way. What I think I'm getting at is this sense that from the dark, life emerges. When we look at something like a cave. A cave has been a place for initiatory, revelatory experiences for as long as we can remember because there's so some something about going into the dark and seeing in a different way.
And so when we put that lens, that very human lens on other things in the world, we see from the depths of the dark and the winter dark emerges spring, emerges new life. From the dark of an interior, such as a cave or a tree hollow, emerges bees. And the bees always emerge in the spring in Northern, in temperate climates. And so we have a situation of of observance, really. I always come back to what it is to just be an animal and a body. And this particular animal calls itself human, and it's observing other animals and other cycles and making meaning. We're here making meaning. That's what we're up to. And so when we look at the bees, we see we see part of a process externally, which is that from the dark, from this mysterious dark emerges life, the bees that tend to the flowers and that sort of thing. But furthermore, I often think, why did people associate the bees with the sacred feminine? it's It's very, very similar from the womb, from the dark, from the unseen emerges a child. And so we have these points of reference in terms of what the dark might be, and to take it away from being something scary and evil and move it back towards something nourishing and sacred and, dare I say, protective. You know, think about what that tree hollow does for the bees, what the cave does, what the belly does, what the womb does for the child. There's this protective quality. And then we see that again, when it comes to death, we go to the tombs, where, you know, the long burrow tombs and in Celtic Ireland and England, where we see these protective chambers that take us into the depths of the earth, where we lay the bones of our ancestors.
With bees, I think part of the mystery is the enigma of re-emergence. They seem to birth themselves. They seem to re-emerge out of the dark, and they re-emerge in this swirling pattern. They are, you know, flying and swirling in this way that is very evocative and is specifically reminiscent of the cosmos, of the stellar experience. So then you have this very earthly emergence mirrored as well by the bees being associated with stars and seeming to look like a number of stars flying around, in the daytime, of course. And so it's no wonder that there are certain stories that equate bees having come from the stars, having come out of the space, out of the cosmic void itself. We see it with the Pleiades, which rise in the spring and and herald the beginning of the fertile season and then set or start rising at night in the in the fall. I'm not getting this entirely right, but in any way the helical rising and the different times of rising depicting the beginning of spring and then the beginning of autumn and the descent back into the void, the womb and the underworld, the place of the ancestors, the place of death and reemergence.
So the bees, in terms of how we perceive them as humans, seem to have access to these various states of existence, these various states of being, the deep internal dark, and then the fertile, abundant, sunlit realms. Again, I'm speaking mostly in metaphor. A beehive, what's interesting about bees in the winter is, and well, really any time, is that there is constantly life occurring within the hive. We just can't see it. It's constantly moving and creating. And I think there is no real understanding or or real definitive moment of, how would you say, like when they begin and when they end? Because for one, you could say, well, does the hive die when the queen dies? But what if the what if they superseed? What if the bees raise a new queen? Because the old queen has gotten to the point where she's going to pass on. And I mean, I'm speaking specifically of, for instance, the wild bees, where we aren't manipulating the queens or queen genetics, they're going to raise a new queen. And so that bloodline of the old queen and all the drones that she mated with comes to an end, because she'll meet with many, many drones for many different patrilines, many different sub families. So she comes to an end, but what happens with everything she's left behind? She leaves behind all of her daughters and from those daughters, she births a daughter queen and that queen goes out and mates with a whole new set of drones and starts a new genetic line informed by her, the the female line mixed with new male, you know, it's all, it's just human too, we understand it, but it's just continuation, is this continuation of the hive that happens.
So we can't really mark when a hive begins and ends. Some people equate swarming, when the bees swarm in the spring and split into two colonies, as both a death and a birth, because the colony that was is no longer. They're regenerating themselves in a new way, but they're also birthing themselves. So it's just a really interesting sense. The bees give us a strange and interesting sense of cyclical time and cyclical existence, expansion and contraction without necessarily coming to an end. Of course, entire colonies do die, and that's one of the main areas of concern among beekeepers. But overall, the bees seem to have this cyclical experience. And even when a beehive dies completely, they've left their skeleton there. They've left the comb and the propolis. And, sure enough, usually by the following spring, another hive will move in to that whole location. So there's this sense of continuity with the bees that I find to be very comforting.
Olivia -
Yeah, that's what I was thinking about a lot leading up to this talk with you, that strikes me as so amazing, that theoretically a hive could exist from the beginning to the end of time and really that's what humans are doing too but we have a way of separating ourselves from ourselves and not quite seeing it. And also just the way a beehive has always been what it is now and it's not the bees aren't trying to evolve themselves to be something more progressed in the way that humans do in their society. It's really just this eternal way of being, tending to home and, yeah, of being in the world.
Ariella -
Yeah, I think that there's, you know, this is true of all wild creatures, but bees are interesting because we treat them as though they've been domesticated. And a domesticated creature, you know, a cat is not a lion. A dog is not a wolf. They have changed genetically. Bees have changed genetically, but not to the point where they aren't still feral, they aren't still wild. And that is particularly interesting because we've been living with them and messing with their genetics for a long time, and yet they still remain, at their essence, bees that can always return to living in the hollow or living in the tree. I find that to be very encouraging and very heartening for me that they've remained true to their essence.
And, you know, even within the hive itself, in one season, in one cycle, bees, like summer bees don't live more than 45 days. So a single bee's life is very short, and yet the colony itself is long and lasting, and they're always in service to that greater whole. We could be too, and I think there's a reason why humans have revered the bees and used them as models for society for so long, because it's a sense of cooperation and service for the greater good.
Olivia -
I'm a fan of Bill Plotkin. I don't know if you know his work?
Ariella -
I love this work. Yeah.
Olivia -
And one of his concepts that struck me so much when I first discovered him was the idea that if humans really were living in a soulful way and finding their calling in life - and that doesn't have to be a lofty calling but just, really, going deep to discover - what is my role to play in culture and in society, and instead of sort of just blindly participating in our capitalist culture that there would be this natural order like things would really fall into place and there wouldn't be, you know, we wouldn't be out of balance because we would all be tending the earth in a sacred way and in our own sacred roles. And I think that that is such a parallel to the bees and what they're up to.
Ariella
Yeah, he talks about living in an ego-centric society and what it would be like to live in an eco-centric society.
Olivia -
Mm hmm.
Ariella -
And that ego-centric society is so individualistic. And when when we relate to the world beyond ourselves - and not just beyond ourselves as individuals, but beyond ourselves as humans - so much more is possible. And I think even the idea of finding our purpose is so often human related, but purpose naturally evolves as we find our our sense of our sacred relationships. That's the relationships beyond just the human relationships, the relationships we have with the land, with the earth, with the trees, with the bees, whatever it is that truly informs our sense of being.
Olivia -
Hmm. Absolutely. Just feeling into that for a moment.
Yeah, I'm curious about, I guess, how time, how our concept of time as humans has sort of warped our view of, or our ability to be in true harmony and connection with the land and with our own rhythms. and You know, the seasons are such a sacred way of timekeeping, but there's a spaciousness in that and there's a sacredness in that. And I think we've come to a place where we are so dependent on this other concept of what time is, you know, days of the week and hours of the day and having to keep up with capitalism and our lives and making a living. And yeah, so I'm curious what your thoughts on time are, but also maybe how do you relate to land and the seasons and time in your own life? Like, how do you keep that as a central pillar for you?
Ariella -
Good questions. You know, I'm not going to be the first to talk about how time isn't linear, but we approach it as linear. Time is more cyclical, and I think time runs both ways. One of my very, very favorite songs out there is Joanna Newsom's song about time on her, I think the album is Divers. Time is a system. It's beautiful. And yeah, time runs both ways. I and think there's something about being a mother that really highlights that because there's something about reliving time through your child and reliving your childhood through your child, but also living into the future. It's a lot of heady concepts around time. I love a good time-related fiction or fantasy or sci-fi, it's a fun concept to play with. But it comes down to, for me, circles and cycles versus, you know, A to B to C to D. We find that in the healing process too, you know, it's always cycles of healing, layers of healing spiraling deeper into your healing process. That's why we come back around again and again to revisit the same thing. We're cycling through and meeting versions of ourselves that are ready for the next layer to be peeled off or to be mended. I see that so much in my personal healing journeys and of course the healing journeys of my friends and and students. Time is, gosh, it's a really interesting one right now, just because of being a mama and you recognizing the finite aspect of time and also the infinite qualities of time.
Well, last night my daughter was talking to me about, she's three, and she was asking me about death and worried about death and wanting to live forever and wanting to remember my father, her grandfather, my father who passed away two years ago, and having trouble remembering him. And I was talking to her in toddler talk about how things change, but the energy never dies. I think that that's a really good understanding of time, that the material aspect of the world changes - of course, I wasn't talking about material aspects to a three-year-old - the material form changes, but the energy never dissipates. Changes form, and I think, you know, time is... I'm not going to say anything all that profound, but you know time is perhaps the place that we experience forms changing within and there's nothing more beautiful than watching the seasons cycle for that. I think one of the most profound things you can do is actually become familiar with, not the seasons, but your seasons, as in like physically where you live. If you live in a place that, oh, even if you're visiting, just what are the seasons here? Because we have a pretty strong sense of spring, summer, fall, winter, and those look a specific way in our collective psyche. They are informed by primarily a construct of Northern European and perhaps Northeastern American views. Look at any kid's book out there. Really noticing this. All the kids' books: Spring is flowers. Fall is lots of beautiful red red leaves falling down. Winter is snow. That's it. And so when you live in a place that doesn't snow, for instance, in the fall or in the in the winter or a place that doesn't have lots of deciduous trees, what what is the actual cycle? What is the seasonal cycle? What's it like where you live? For me, and this is something that I've really had to work with over the last few years of moving away from a place that snows into a coastal climate, winter is the green season. And summer and late fall are the death season. They're the dying time. That's when there's less life going on. There's there's dryness. The water is low. There isn't as much activity activity in terms of growth. And and then in the winter, all the grasses turn green and flowers start to bloom. It's very confusing.
So what is your cycle? What is your season where you live? I think that that can really tune us into time. And then also our relationship to light and dark. We have in some ways been robbed of our relationship to the dark because of the never-ending lights of the city and also electricity. And God bless, spirits bless, the electricity, that we have it, that we can communicate the way we do here, that we can use it for keeping people healthy with medicine and hospitals and all of that, but at the same time, I miss the stars tremendously, viscerally. I miss the stars. I grew up in a place that has starlight, like a lot more starlight than it does now. It still has more starlight than here. And I would sleep outside from like probably the age of 13 on throughout the summer, until it was too cold in the in the winter and the fall. I would sleep on a deck and sleep under the stars. And so you went to bed because it was dark and the stars were out and it was time to go be with the stars. And I loved that. I would make myself keep my eyes open until I saw at least one shooting star and then I'd fall asleep. And I memorized constellations - before I knew the constellations, I made of my own. There's something about being with the cycles of dark being woken up by the full moon because you're sleeping outside and it's shining in your face, being woken up by the dawn because you're sleeping in relationship to the cycles. I've always loved that. And I dearly miss it living in a more urban area.
Olivia -
Yeah, I resonate so deeply with that. Yeah, just knowing the times in my life that I've lived more outside, basically, you know, in a yurt or a tent, there's nothing that brings you closer to a sense of home in yourself and in the experience of being an animal than that. And I do think it's really hard to access in a lot of places on the planet that are so human oriented.
Ariella -
Yeah, I think that that there's something about that that makes us more aware of mortality too and cycles and time and in a way that's not as scary. Maybe it's just peaceful. You know, we're always racing against time. We're always at odds with time, running out of time, and there's something about working with the land or being with the garden or being with the bees that requires you to be present to just be present to the moment, and that changes your relationship to time profoundly.
You can't rush the bees, never can. I mean, I guess you could. There's a lot of methods that people use to rush them. And then, you know, we need lots of protective gear and smoke and all the stuff. But to be with them is to is to slow down.
Olivia -
Well, we have a few minutes left. I would love to give you some time to talk about dreaming and if that relates to this in some way or whatever feels alive for you right now around that side of things, because you work with dreams in such a beautiful way that I've never experienced elsewhere. I would just love to hear you speak to that a little bit and maybe even collective dreaming in the way that you hold that too.
Ariella -
Yeah, I was thinking about dreams in relationship to to time, in our understanding of time. I approach dreams as a co-creative experience. And what I mean by that is that if we look at the world as most cultures throughout time have approached the world, except for a very recent modern era, we see an animate world, we see an animate earth, we see consciousness and the wind and the trees and the soil and the stones. And that means that we can interact with, we can be in relationship with the the world, the energy of things, the spirit of things. And the spirit of things that once were, and the spirit of things that might come into being. And our dreams are a place where reality itself isn't fixed. When we sleep, our logic centers get quiet and our imagination centers in our brain get turned up. So our logic of what's possible goes down in terms of, like, this makes sense. And our problem solving and our imagination parts of our brain get lit up. And so here we are looking at things from a more mutable perspective. The dream world is where we get to experience not only other possibilities, which can open our lives up to other possibilities, especially when we dream with intent towards something like that, but other possibilities of connection that can't happen necessarily in the waking world with all of our waking thoughts and intellect and ego. Our dream world is permeable. We live in a on a planet that is interwoven. You hear it again and again, the tapestry that is the the threads of life, the thread of life, the woven pattern of life. And we can dream into that weaving, especially collectively, we can work together towards towards dreaming of and for specific things, like dreaming of the wild waters, or dreaming of for the wild waters of the land, sorry, dreaming for the wild waters to see what messages they bring or to invite healing through our dreams. So dreams become a place where reality isn't fixed and therefore the possibilities of our lives can be shifted. We can start to actually affect change through intent in our dreams that then plays out in ordinary reality. And I would say that it potentially plays out in both directions, as in plays out in our upcoming experiences that we think of as the future, but also can help rewrite the past potentially well beyond our current experience of our life. So I've seen ancestral healing happen in dreams for people. I've seen layers of healing happen that had to take place in dreams first and then started to literally show up in their lives. And not prophetic dreams, but themes, things needing to get worked on, getting healed, getting transmuted through dreams that then have the ability to to unfold in ordinary reality. And I don't think it's done alone. I have seen again and again that dreams are where we meet spirit. We meet the spirit of the bees. We meet the spirit of a god or a goddess that's been held in the cultural memory for some time, has become an energy, a force that we can work with. We meet the the spirit of a grandmother or a grandparent. We've all, not all of us, many people have had the the dreams of a beloved pet or a beloved person who's been lost, who's passed away, and we viscerally feel visited. We experience them in a visceral way in dreams. What does time mean in that moment? What's real and what's not real? It's hard to say because when you wake up from one of those dreams, there is part of you that knows without a doubt that you just interacted with that person, their energy in that form, in the dreamscape.
So dreams become a place we can, through intention, through intentional dream work, potentially create greater harmony in life. And I don't mean that in some sort of woooo spiritual way, but truly in congruence with the living earth. I love collective dreaming because in that sense, you have a number of people all choosing to dream with the same dream intent. And when we apply intention towards our dreams, our dreams respond. And we can approach our dreams as if they have responded until we start to see the patterns and go, oh, wow, that does work. That is real. So if we are collectively dreaming, for instance, I do a Yuletide collective dreaming experience where for 12 nights of the winter time, the winter yule season, there's a different theme that we collectively dream on and anybody who wants to participate can and they can send in their dreams and share their dreams. But an example would be to dream with the ancestral mothers. Or another example might be to, I've already given the example of to dream with wild water or to dream with the the healing earth. What does the earth need us to know at this time? And so there can be ways that we collectively not only receive messages, but also - and this is what I find most profound - is to actually intend to dream ourselves into a healthier relationship, into a healed state, into a healthier relationship with the earth to affect the fabric of reality through our dreaming. And that is profound.
Olivia -
That is profound. And yeah, I will definitely link you in the notes so that people can find the collective dreaming space if they want to. Yeah, I mean, the sort of central theme of the Golden Thread is dreaming a new world into being. I personally tend to approach that more through collective prayer than collective dreaming. And maybe those are the same things in a way, like going into a meditative state and daydreaming something into and to being. But the thing that I love to ask as a closing is, what is the world that you are dreaming into being or that you imagine and your highest hopes for a more healed world? What is that, what is that place?
Ariella -
I think one of the things that drives me is the hope to have my work be something that helps people fall in love. I think to be enchanted by, to be enamored by, to be deeply in love with the earth, even if it's just aspects of it, even if your love affair is with the desert or with the bees or with, you go deeply into one thing and your experience of love explodes out in all horizons and all directions. I think it's that love affair, that's my hope, to remember, to remember that love and relationship, to remember the intimacy, the the animacy and the intimacy with the earth or with nature. That is, I feel like everything else follows suit.
If we can find that love and and also the grief that comes with it, to be with the grief of it, with what's happening and what's happened.. We have the solutions. We already have them. We have so many solutions for climate change, for climate disaster, for ways to live. That's not the issue. We're very intelligent. We've come up with so many ways. I think it's this almost like, and I really hesitate to use the word, but it's like a kind of like a spiritual crisis that all of the majority of the global West is in, where we've lost our sense of relationship and reciprocity with the land. And no one's going to get it back by just deciding like, yeah, reciprocity is a good word. We should do things that are good for the earth. It's got to come from a place of love and, dare I say, enchantment to be so, like childlike wonder to come back into that wonderment and enchantment with the world. That's my prayer because I know that from those places comes devotion and from devotion comes action. Yeah, there we go.
Olivia -
That's, yeah, thank you. That's beautiful and I think it is the key. You're right. So thank you for sharing that and thank you for all of the work that you do to to bring people into that love. It's really beautiful.
Ariella -
Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to speak here and share.
Olivia
Yes, of course. OK, well, on that note, I'm going to close us out as the dogs begin to bark. And thank you, Ariella.
Ariella Daly
You're welcome. Thank you.