a yellow jacket thru the window came

a yellow jacket thru the window came buzzing angrily into the home i share with my partner alex and our one cat.

they did not take kindly to us, unfortunately. they were quite upset to be inside anything, much less a home.

during the process of trying to remove this hornet, alex got stung on the neck. twice, in quick succession.

he says it was like being struck, bright and painful.

his body had jerked in response to the feeling.

this morning, his body had jerked when he shot .25 ml of testosterone into the upper third of his right thigh, but that was this morning. this is now, and there is a hurt to tend to-

Baking soda and honey, mixed with a spoon and slathered on the sting. It soothes and cools. Supposedly pulls the venom out, too. My mother taught it to me.

It’s been years since I last encountered the angry end of a wasp, but i remember.

after a glorious day at the neighborhood pool with friends abundant and plentiful, i nearly swallowed one. hold on- i haven’t gotten to the metaphor yet- i nearly swallowed a wasp and the only thing worse to a lonely child than leaving the party is ruining the whole thing right before you go.

and that hurts me, pierced through the chest.

transverberation.

transverberation is a catholic term often associated with St. Teresa of Avalia, who, in her Book of Life, describes her experience of holy ecstasy as an angel plunging a “large golden dart” which was on fire into St. Teresa’s body, and pulling all of her insides out with it in the next motion.

“The pain was so great that it made me moan, and the sweetness this greatest pain caused me was so superabundant that there is no desire capable of taking it away...”

Thus, transverberae means to be pierced, to pierce through.

as needle pierces the thigh. as wasp stinger pierces skin of the neck.

something arrives in the meanwhile.

the bee is a psychopomp, i’m told.

messengers.

in ancient greece they’re associated with divination. divination? i do that, or i try to, squabbling weakly with my own negative thought patterns until something makes sense.

sometimes i wonder if i think about things too much. sometimes i dont wonder that at all, i know i am.

other times, i let the quiet certitude of faith float through my skull, and i trust that what i learn now will come up later. if its on the quiz, i’ll need it for the test.

life compounds.

life adds up, and adds up, and then it loops back around to zero again, and we start anew, but not really.. the world after we die is forever changed by our brief presence. if we weren’t here, they couldn’t stand there, in front of us, as themselves and not us. we define what happens in the future with every action today. it’s that’s simple.

look, if you don’t believe me- Ask your doctor. 9 out of 10 doctors know the prognosis isn’t good. it turns out faith healing only works if you believe it will. the way the doctor gives you your diagnosis is reflected in your ability to recover from it.

so when my doctor said my brain functioned like a net, and that my adhd was like a giant hole in that net, i started losing things.

this isn’t to say i never lost anything before this moment. it is more about the awareness that came, not from a place of love or acceptance, but from its absence instead. i am a person who loses things.

I lost my phone. I lost my shoes. I lost my books. last august i lost my grandfather.

life compounds.

there’s a sort of, modern fixation on bees. One of the more commonly told myths around beekeeping is the practice of “telling the bees” when a member of the family is born- or passes on.

I don’t think I told anyone.

i think i made a single post, a week later.

the day he died i asked myself to look for beauty. i asked: where is there beauty?

the rest of the page is blank.

there’s a wasp nest at my mom’s house. it’s big. I think it’s empty or, dying, at least. Nests only tend to last a single season and well its already september. temperatures cooling babes!

but i saw when it was active, and the nest was a different shape.

i didn’t know they moved like that. i didn’t know they did that sort of thing.

it was kind of beautiful to think about, on the other side of the window.

things change all the time.

every day is remade, brand new in front of us. you’ve literally never done today before, did you realize? did you know?

listen, i’m not here to preach, i’ll get off my soap box soon enough.
but isn’t that kinda beautiful?

you know, the first time i learned what the word “Transgender” meant, i was remade anew.

i remember it, the sun slanting through the windows of my bedroom. I looked up and saw, unfolding endlessly before me, the paths of my life represented through dust motes floating in space, illuminated by the sun.

everything was different after that.

transitions of any kind require a releasing sort of motion, as well as a certain movement into. if i want to move forward, i have to release the idea of my life i had before i knew better. if i want to move forward, i have to move myself. if i want to engage, i must engage with.

“you have to move,” Rilke says.

in Magic of the Ordinary, Rabbi Gershon Winkler says, “...What most obstructs any attempts at healing is the patient’s skepticism that it will work.”

Think of the placebo effect. why does that happen? it’s certainly not the medicine, so why does it work?

“Placebo has the same effect as...medication because it opens the person’s mind to possibility...” Winkler continues. “It isn’t the Placebo itself that accomplishes this, but the act or ritual of accepting it, of swallowing it.” (p.104)

isn’t that defeat? my mother asks me, hands on the steering wheel as she drives me to her house. isn’t that like giving up?

well, no. acceptance is not defeat. acceptance is more of an action than a result. you have to accept something before you can move on. if you don’t learn to recognize where you currently are, how will you recognize what is to come when it gets here? you can accept that you feel defeated.

so you feel defeated. What then?

like a strike of lightning, the cicada bursts from shell, fully formed and new.

the cicada has been there the whole time, too.

just sitting there.

it reminds me of one of my providers telling me that thinking is cognitive work.

hear me out, i thought i was just sitting there the whole time! just sitting!

turns out that’s something called “processing” and that it is “necessary” for healthy functioning.

who knew!!!!

and then the moment comes, all that working up to something becoming, well, something and its beautiful, its piercing right through you, sunlight shafts through the window like a yellow bee.

it’s beautiful, of course,

and it stings.

thanks for reading

love, reuven

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