Finding Warmth at the Core

Discover how the quiet strength of nature can guide us through the bustling Advent season. We promise you'll learn how embracing the rhythms of the natural world can ground you amidst holiday chaos and political noise. Celebrating our 100th episode, we explore the inspiring community effort of honeybees during winter, as depicted in Gail Boss's "All Creation Waits." These remarkable creatures show us the power of collective action as they work together to keep their hive warm. Let the story of the bees encourage you to find overlooked joys and rediscover the beauty in small, meaningful moments this season.

As we embark on this Advent journey together, each week brings a new tale from the wild to reflect nature's resilience and grace. With shorter, darker days upon us, I'll also be sharing glimpses of light from my daily life on Instagram, urging you to seek out and cherish your own sources of brightness.

To learn more, go to mycreateharmony.com

Chapters

• 0:01 Finding Stillness in Nature During Advent
• 7:44 Embracing Nature and Finding Light

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hey, there you are now listening to the Create Harmony podcast. In this place we spend time talking about those everyday joys and the abundant blessings that sometimes we forget about and they get overlooked. We set our rhythms with the rhythms of nature and we celebrate the changes that each season brings. So I'm your host, sally Burlington, and this is episode 100. Now we are getting close to the end of the calendar year and nearing Advent and, just like stores and businesses all around, we're going to jump ahead into some Advent content as we prepare our hearts for that season.

Speaker 1: 0:43

So usually Advent or the Christmas season is a noisy but very, very fun-filled time. There is much in the way of decoration and music and parties and choral singing and holiday performances and neighborhood get-togethers. You're going to probably have a lot on your calendar this time of year, and that is not to mention the list of to-dos to get all the shopping and the wrapping and the cooking and the decorating and all that wrapped up literally, and all that celebration is wonderful. However, I, during this time of year, I sometimes find it hard to recenter myself amidst all of this stimulation, and it's easy for me to get overstimulated, and particularly at the end of this election year where there was so much discussion, slash, debate about which side had the most wisdom. There's just a lot of noise and a lot of things that are, you know, sort of unsettling, and so, in response to that, we're going to shift our gaze to nature as a way of grounding ourselves, and we're going to use a book during this Advent season called All Creation Waits by Gail Boss. So the concept in this book is that, while all of our holiday hubbub is cranking up outside in nature, things are settling down into a more dormant rhythm. While the days are getting shorter, nature rests and becomes more quiet and, in addition, many creatures are out there working to, focusing on self-care to sustain themselves during the more bleak months, and so I thought this would be a great source of inspiration for us, just a great way for us to find a little, just a little sliver of that. The book is filled with stories of wildlife encounters that she's coming across. She's out in the woods walking during the holiday season and she comes across this wildlife, and each week we're going to hear a story about a different creature, and I hope that it serves as a way to center and ground you throughout all of that fun and busy celebrating. So throughout our advent content, we're going to be looking at one of each of these little stories and considering this creature and waiting alongside them. So I want to also share that. There's a note to the reader in here and I want this to. I want you to use this as some inspiration as to how to respond to this content.

Speaker 1: 3:17

As you listen, long, long before there were any written words, there were animals and all the rest of the teeming natural world. Creation is the earliest sacred text given to us. Like scripture, the natural world, too, opens up an infinite universe of meaning. Early wisdom seekers gave us a way of reading sacred text called Lectio Divina. It's a way that honors the richness of the text and the dignity of the reader Reading or listening. We simply ask what catches my attention? No one gets caught in quite the same way, what catches my attention? You're going to ask yourself that, as I'm going to read the animal stories, I'm going to read one story each week for several weeks coming and you're going to question what catches my attention and think about it for a while and see if that can help inform your Advent season.

Speaker 1: 4:23

Now our first story is about the honeybee, and it goes like this the snow doesn't yet cover the foot of my boot, so the walking's still easy among the hardwoods. I'm still easy among the hardwoods. I have my dog with me as a hearing aid. When I find a hollow oak tree, I call her and watch as she sniffs around it, hoping to see her stop and cock her head and stare intently at the trunk. If it were summer and if they were here, we both could hear the hum. Now, if they're here, I'm not sure even her smart, sharp ears could pick it up.

Speaker 1: 5:14

What's the sound of 20,000 honeybees shivering? If they're here, all females in a winter hive they're clustered together inside queen at the heart of their sisterhood. The fine, transparent wings they beat hard in summer's heat, a constant buzzing fan to keep the hive from cooking they hold now folded, still Tiny muscles to which those wings are attached are shivering. One honeybee shivering her flight muscles doesn't make much heat, but 20,000 huddled together shivering can keep the queen and the colony's honey supply at the core of their hive. A tropical 92 degrees Fahrenheit, even as blizzard winds inches away flail the trunk. This calls for carefully timed choreography. When the bees on the outside layer of the cluster feel their body temperature fall to near 42 degrees Fahrenheit, a cold that would paralyze them. They push inward toward the radiant center. The next outermost layer takes their sister's place backs to the cold. From edge to center, center to edge, inward and outward, they move One hypnotic looping dance. At the heart of the dance lies the queen. She is every bee's reason for living. Without a queen the colony would fall into chaos.

Speaker 1: 7:04

Nurse bees grooming her pass her scent back through the ranks. It tells all of the news of her health, which is their health. They smell that now in Advent she's laying no eggs. There is no brood to feed. Each beast senses that her one obligation is to give the smallest motion of her flight muscles to the collective work of keeping the queen and the colony's honey stores warm. The whole hive knows they will survive only if they shiver together.

Speaker 1: 7:44

Some of them in the shivering cluster will die of old age. Had they hatched in the flowering season, their labor for the hive survival, harvesting nectar and pollen from as many as 2,000 flowers a day, would have killed them in four weeks or less. Their wings worn to nubbins, but hatched on the cusp of winter, they may live six months. They will only know the dark eye, the press of their sisters' bodies. They will never fly, never fall into a flower. They will give their lives to shivering together in the dark.

Speaker 1: 8:21

The tiny, repetitive gestures of each added together a music beyond our hearing, sustaining a future for the community. So that's our first wilderness story during the Advent season and hopefully it's been a source of connection to nature for you today, and we will continue to examine a creature each week throughout this Advent season. In addition, another way we're going to ground ourselves during Advent is these days are darker and they're the darker months, shorter days of the year, so we're going to be focusing on sources of light and ways that light gets in. So I'm going to be posting on Instagram all the different ways that I see light and my daily rhythm and hope that will help you spotlight in your lives as well. So hopefully you'll come back next week to hear about a different creature in nature, and until next time, peace.