Dec 9, 2021
Ariella is a beekeeper, writer, teacher, musician and mother living in Northern California. Her work with honey bees came through a lifelong interest in human connection with the non-human world. She is a graduate of the Lyceum, a European shamanic pathway with the bee and the serpent as its central motifs. Within this tradition, she is trained in the healing and seership modality known as the Pollen Method. Her work is a fusion of her love for the natural world and embodied, womb-centric practices.
Ariella seeks to foster a deeper relationship between humans and the natural world through honey bees, seeing the bee as a bridge species between our domestic lives and the wild, both within and around us. She is a lover of wild places, liminal spaces and the song of the land. She teaches shamanic dreamwork, natural beekeeping, and women's retreats all guided by the honeyed wisdom of the serpent and the bee.
You can find more about her work at www.honeybeewild.com and on instagram at beekeepinginskirts.
Below is the text of a beautiful post of hers I read from a recent Instagram post. You’ll see why I and many others are so enamored with her writings.
“It's not really about beekeeping. This love affair. This devotion to doing it better. To listening. To finding another route that gives and heals, instead of takes. We can call it beekeeping, because, surely, there are some tricks of the trade, some caring for the bees in their boxes that we can learn. But really, it's about your roots comingling with the mycelia. Really it's about your tears dripping into the river. Really it's about the moon dipping into your dreams and curling around a whispered tune you think you remember from long ago. It's not even about saving, unless the saving is you and you are the forest, and the forest is the sea, and the sea is the stars.⠀
⠀
What it's about, is Weaving. ⠀
Reweaving. Rewilding. Restoring. Revivifying. ⠀
It's about Listening. ⠀
Ear to the hive. Womb to the earth. ⠀
It's about Grief and Exaltation. ⠀
Sting in your heart, honey on your lips.⠀
It's about Remembering.”
References:
In our conversation we spoke about the work of mythologist Martin Shaw and specifically this trailer for his book Scatterlings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0T7UP1U1Ts
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57195435-scatterlings
And Ari also referred to the writings of Joanna Macy. I recommend any of her work (or my classes where we dive into it!) including Active Hope,
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13235686-active-hope
World as Lover World as Self, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/536524.World_as_Lover_World_as_Self
A Wild Love for the World. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51551987-a-wild-love-for-the-world
I also love this video with Joanna. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzmjF1jE2K0
I also referred to the book, Native Science, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1049116.Native_Science
You can find more about the Lyceum in which Ariella studied for a decade here: https://sacredtrust.org/workshops/pollen/