Work produces a sweet essence

One of the Melissa Garden’s founders is Barbara Schlumberger, who does process paintings for the site, and is involved with the modern extention of an ancient spiritual order from Afghanistan, called the Sarmoun (“The Bees”) Brotherhood and affiliated Sisterhood.

“There are many legends about Sarmoun-Dargauh ('Court of the Bees'), and one of them is this. True knowledge, it is asserted, exists as a positive commodity, like the honey of the bee. Like honey, it can be accumulated. From time to time in human history, however, it lies unused and starts to leak away. On those occasions the Sarmouni and their associates all over the world collect it and store it in a special receptacle. Then, when the time is ripe, they release it into the world again, through specially trained emissaries.”

This 1965 article by Desmond Martin explains a few more tantalizing drops about it.

Elsewhere on the web it is written: Sarmoun is a word meaning bee in Old Persian, and refers symbolically to the practice of the brotherhood of storing the honey of both the traditional wisdom and the supernatural energy or baraka (Barack?) enabling it to be understood, and sending this double nectar out into the world in times of great need. The word Sarmoun can also mean “those who are enlightened.” The Sarmouni are believed to have secret training centres hidden to this day in the most remote regions of Central Asia.

The Sarmouni are a universal family who operate on a metaphorically invisible level. As Idries Shah paraphrased from the sufi tradition:

"The Secret protects itself by virtue of its implausibility."

Process painting is intuitive painting, and I didn’t know very much about it until I searched around more. Oregon artist Robin Urton shows very clearly how she experienced this method of working in her blog, wherein her painting of a woman transforms into that of a bird, by turning it upside down, and continuing to work spontaneously.

This transformation appears to have shamanic undertones: setting free this magnificent bird out of a vague form of a woman—a bird that was always there, just hidden. It illustrates beautifully how more ripened, fully magical art can develop only with time and with attention kept focussed on allowing the obscured truth underneath to surface and break through.

The Melissa Garden

The Melissa Garden has a very inspiring site which shows the development and workings of a bio-organic honeybee sanctuary in California. The plans and the site have been co-created by listening and working with nature spirits, in the Findhorn tradition, as far as I can see.

“The Melissa Garden is a new project that began in the fall of 2007. It is being created to provide honeybees with a place to live natural lives, insulated from known stressors, and nourished in a beautiful setting. The garden is being thoughtfully designed and planted with botanicals that offer year-round nectar and pollen sources honeybees are known to favor.”

I love some of the details of the garden, including a door to a workshop, cut through with bee silhouettes, and the round bee skep (Weissenseifener Haengekorb). Plans for it can be bought, or you can occasionally take a workshop at the Melissa Garden on how to make one. The inner core is woven from reeds and grasses, as in old European skeps. The interior frames are in half-moon shapes, can be accessed from the top of the skep, and the bees are able to build their combs off them as they like.

The sanctuary leaders also brought in animal communicator Sharon Callahan to speak with the bees.

“The bees feel that a challenge for those at The Melissa Garden might be criticism from those doing things in more traditional way. Don’t worry about that. No matter how far out, bring in love and the element of fun, and they will be healthy. If you have a dream of a plexiglass castle, try it. The bees want to try whatever comes to us. It isn’t about finding the right hive or right shape. It is about acts of love. The love will heal the bees. Bees don’t want us to be afraid to be far out. We are on the leading edge. The farther out the better, as long as it is done with love.”

(Indeed, nearly every new beekeeper I know has had some struggles in trying to tend bees in a new, non-invasive way, while receiving or perceiving opposition from the so-called "traditional" way, which tends to treat bees like livestock. Read more about this talk, as well as another that Sharon posted on her site.)

Bringing the element of fun and love to the work reminds me immediately of Path of Pollen teacher and healer and 5 Rhythms dancer Kate Shela, whose elegant website shows where you can dance with her.

Interesting about the plexiglass house idea, because Canadian artist Aganetha Dyck has already made one! Dyck does collaborative art works with the bees, letting them add their wax and propolis to material items like shoes and drawings that she places in their hives. Her exhibitions smell of honey.

Comparing her work to that of surrealist Marcel Duchamp, in usual high-flown art history speak, Juan Antonio Ramirez reviewed a show featuring a a life-size wedding dress made of wax combs, saying, “Aganetha Dyck’s creation is, finally, a sweet feminine figure: a beehive-woman, emerging like a bright star in nocturnal obscurity, promising an endless ‘honeymoon’. From the mental and parodic undressing of Duchamp, we have passed with Aganetha Dyck to the total possession of the bride through an operation that is olfactory, visual, tactile, and gustatory. The total work of art."