I had a new old
friend who died recently, and this post is a tribute to him and to something in
the natural world he loved unlike anyone else I ever knew.
Walter was a
colorful character with an interesting history, to say the least, and was full
of stories. I dare not go into them here or I won’t get to my second tribute,
which was actually his, but suffice it to say that I’ve not met many others who
flew planes on ‘the other side’ in war against the United States. He and his
dear wife Ingrid became good friends during a brief time I was their pastor a
couple years ago. Oh, I did call him a
new old friend, didn’t I? The recent nature of our friendship is the ‘new’
part. And the ‘old?’ Well, Walter was over ninety years of age. And he was
dying.
The tenuous state
of both his and his wife’s health was the thing that first brought Gail and me
to meet him, but it was his honest and vulnerable questions about life and
death, faith and doubt that caused me to quickly love the man. And I count it a
great privilege to have been his friend as he struggled with his mortality.
His interests
were vast. Like me, he was a naturalist and a man of strong Christian faith. Unlike
me, he was also a very accomplished yet retired Boeing engineer, and, as
already inferred, a pilot. Whether it was this thing of flight, which was his
passion, that drew him to the husbandry of bees, I do not know. But a skilled
beekeeper he also was, in spite of the fact that his greater Seattle home was
surrounded by others for many miles around. At our first visit, I took little
notice of the napkins he and his wife had set before us with our afternoon
coffee – black, yellow, and covered with bees. Yet in subsequent visits not
only would we tour his apiary, but our conversations somehow often became
interlaced with lessons he had learned from his apiculture hobby; and I’d also
find he and Ingrid had other bee-themed napkins with which to grace a table.
What stunned me was the
depth of Walter’s love…
Wow, did Walter
know bees. He knew how they lived and died, how they behaved, how both the
social and physical realities of their colony worked. And I came to find through
listening to his stories that he also delighted in knowing his bees. When I took more than a casual interest in his accounts
of queens he had known, in fact, had known well enough to recognize and name, he
took a risk and shared with me a poem he had written when one of his colonies
had died mysteriously and abruptly. When
he set the paper in my hands, he said, “Here it is. Some people might think I’m
crazy.”
So, along with my
tribute to my new old friend Walter, I share his tribute to his lost colony, a
poem he named, “Bee Requiem.”
In painful sorrow, sad and mourning I see
the ravages of death
Unnumbered little bodies, now just shells
awaiting their return to a new cycle
In mother earth’s deep wonder wells
Maya, Mahrah and the others who circled in
exploring paths
And walked on cheeks and head and ears,
and sometimes down my neck
Into my bosom to feel the warmth and
listen to my heart
As one brave creature entered my ear to
see what’s in there
I, deeply touched, produced a tear, only to
have another see fit to drink it,
Thereby translating me to yonder
wonderland so dear
And so, the present seemed to vanish,
relieving me from troubled thoughts and fears
Oh, blessed beings, how I miss you and
wish you would be here to drink my tears
But, praise the Lord, the souls of all creation
remain existing in His heart
And when my time has come I will again be
with you
In perfect love and recognition, never
ever to depart
~~
WEB, August 2008, Colony #4
I was stunned as
I finished reading. It wasn’t so much about new insights I’d gained into bees
and beekeeping, something about which as a naturalist I had known embarrassingly
little. It wasn’t the quality of the poetry, of which I certainly could never
be judge anyway. It wasn’t about some flashy spiritual sound byte that might
look good on a cheesy nature calendar. And it wasn’t that I found Walter crazy,
far from it. What stunned me was the depth of Walter’s simple love. In his
beautiful tribute, I saw a man who deeply loved life, who achingly loved the
natural world, even intimately loved creatures that had once caused me an
anaphylactic reaction. And I also saw the answer to Walter’s doubt, in words he
himself had written years before, words that contained all the seeds of
assurance he might ever one day need. I came to tears through the reading. As did
he, by the way.
So there are my
two tributes, one to Walter, one to his bees.
Walter, I’ll miss
you. Thanks for inspiring me with your love of God’s creation. And do you know
what I’d like very much? Perhaps one day, in perfect love and recognition, we
can meet again for coffee in yonder wonderland over bee-themed napkins.
~~ RGM, November 28, 2018
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