{"id":143,"date":"2016-01-30T04:08:32","date_gmt":"2016-01-30T11:08:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/inkswarm\/?p=143"},"modified":"2016-01-30T04:08:32","modified_gmt":"2016-01-30T11:08:32","slug":"some-new-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/inkswarm\/2016\/01\/30\/some-new-thoughts\/","title":{"rendered":"Some new thoughts …"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well … folks …<\/p>\n

it has been a while since I’ve posted on here. I’ve had four or five posts that I’d written and planned out and thought about … but when it came to actually posting them … I couldn’t. They were all so wooden. It may be partly the anxiety of this being my first opportunity to be a ‘writer-in-residence’ … or the anxiety of writing my ‘unedited’ thoughts … and mostly, I’ll be honest, my insecurity over how little I know about bees, pollinators and plants. All the posts I have planned have been my own attempts to force something … almost like I was trying to find real-life examples and squeeze them into some sort of sermon about the natural world. I felt like I was ‘pretending’ that I knew what I was talking about. None of it felt right or comfortable or helpful.<\/p>\n

I walked into this as someone who had no knowledge of what this project was trying to achieve, very little knowledge about bees … other than what I learned a few years ago when my sister and I planned on taking a course in Regina, SK on keeping honey bees & the stories my mother told me about Mr. Abrams … (her school teacher, who kept bees) … she worked for him at his apiary when she was a girl.<\/p>\n

I keep trying to come up with concise, intelligent, enticing … or funny … well crafted & grammatically correct blog posts. I’ve felt out of my element because I usually write about human relationships and human psychology, spirituality, and often, I’ll admit, the dark and difficult experiences of the human heart. The joy though, too. The joy and beauty of human love and compassion and struggle. And now I come to this. This amazing opportunity to write about this seriously cool and important project. But I knew nothing of bees. All writers feel like frauds (about 90% of the time if their humble, 60-75% if they’re not). I’ve never felt so inadequate as a writer as I have in the past few months while trying to write something intelligent and well crafted on this blog.<\/p>\n

So I’ve been reading and studying and thinking about bees, about conservation, about native plants and gardening … about the way the world is going … how my mother can walk down a grid road and name all the plants in the ditch … and how I can’t. How I have to look up what is recyclable and what isn’t online … what I should compost … what isn’t good for the soil etc. It is all daunting and overwhelming and I feel inadequate and embarrassed about how little I know. I’m supposedly ‘socially conscious’ (not that I really know what that means).<\/p>\n

But I’m probably not alone in that … that feeling of inadequacy. That desire to do something, to help, to be in tune with the natural environment. To help.<\/p>\n

So, I’ve decided that the best way I can write this blog is to do what I do best, to do what I do when I write poetry. To be brutally honest about things. About myself.<\/p>\n

I knew almost nothing about bees or pollinators or conservation when I was asked to be a part of this project. I had an interest, sure. I have worked for non-profits, arts orgs & community outreach stuff since I was in my teens. My brother is a conservation officer, my mother grew up on the land, my family had\/has gardens … I care about this stuff. I was obsessed with invasive species and the circumpolar north for most of my early twenties (just ask me about leafy spurge) … I’ve spent time living off-grid.<\/p>\n

I thought I knew more than the average bear.<\/p>\n

But the more I study bees and pollinators and native plants … I realize how little I know.<\/p>\n

Some things I’ve learned:<\/p>\n