The Great Conversation: Bees, Trees, Sky Rivers, and the Art of Listening

Listen Here

This morning, the Tree of Serendipity chose Song of Increase by Jacqueline Freeman.

Or perhaps I should say it opened the conversation.

I carried the book into my little sanctuary inside the treehouse—my refuge, my listening place—and allowed it to fall open as it wished.

Page 88.

There I found myself in Chapter IV:

“The Song of the World: The Communion of Bees and Flowers.”

Of course.

There are moments when life seems to arrange itself with such exquisite timing that explaining it feels almost beside the point.

We can simply notice.

And listen.

Freeman begins this part of the book with the bees—not merely as gatherers of nectar and pollen, but as participants in a vastly larger community.

She writes of bees and flowers, plants and minerals, soil and roots. She describes the landscape as alive with relationship and communication: each participant affecting another, each carrying something onward.

And as I read, I kept thinking:

This is the great conversation.

The Song of Increase

Jacqueline Freeman is a farmer, beekeeper, and author whose Song of Increase asks us to reconsider our relationship with honeybees.

Rather than approaching a hive primarily through the question, What can we obtain from it?, Freeman invites us toward another question:

What happens when we listen?

Her approach is intentionally bee-centered. She writes from years of observation as well as experiences she understands as direct communication with bees. Her book therefore moves freely between beekeeping, ecology, spirituality, intuition, and the mysterious inner life of the hive.

I love this about the book.

We don't have to make every form of knowing identical in order to allow them into conversation.

Science can tell us what has been measured.

Observation can tell us what we have noticed.

Tradition can carry knowledge across generations.

And wonder can keep the door open.

Freeman also acknowledges the influence of philosopher and scientist Rudolf Steiner, whose agricultural lectures in 1924 helped give rise to what became known as biodynamic agriculture.

Steiner invited farmers to perceive the farm not as a collection of separate commodities but as something closer to a living organism—a community of soil, plants, animals, people, weather, seasons, and larger rhythms.

A century later, that invitation still feels wonderfully radical:

Look at the whole.

The Dandelion Is Doing Something

One passage especially delighted me.

Freeman describes dandelions as little miners.

Their deep taproots reach downward into layers of soil and bring minerals toward the surface. Eventually the leaves and flowers die back and decompose, returning those materials to the upper soil.

What we casually call a weed may therefore be participating in the restoration and transformation of a place.

I find that beautiful.

Perhaps the dandelion isn't an interruption.

Perhaps it is responding.

Perhaps before deciding what belongs and what doesn't, we might become curious about what is happening.

What is this plant doing here?

What conditions invited it?

What is it participating in?

And then an even larger question arises:

What if the landscape is not scenery at all?

What if it is activity?

Relationship.

Exchange.

Conversation.

And Then There Are the Bees

The bees move through this world carrying pollen between flowers.

From the human perspective we call this pollination, and its ecological importance is immense.

Freeman asks us to imagine something more intimate as well: that the bee is moving through a living field of information.

Flower to flower.

Plant to plant.

Garden to garden.

Nothing entirely unto itself.

That image stayed with me because it feels remarkably similar to what happens in our own lives.

We meet someone.

A sentence is spoken.

A book opens.

A bird calls.

A stranger tells us the meaning of his tattoo.

Someone preparing to be married at sunrise appears on a mountain.

A bee lands on a flower.

Something is carried from one being to another.

And the world changes—perhaps only one degree.

But it changes.

The Mother Tree and the Rivers in the Sky

My thoughts traveled from Freeman's bees to another great being I have been contemplating: the magnificent sumaúma, one of the great emergent trees of the Amazon.

Sometimes called a mother tree, the sumaúma rises above much of the surrounding forest canopy, its enormous presence joining earth and sky.

And here the poetry of interconnectedness meets something science can actually measure.

Trees draw water from the soil and release water vapor through their leaves in transpiration. Across the Amazon, this contributes to enormous movements of atmospheric moisture—part of what have become popularly known as “flying rivers” or “rivers in the sky.”

Research on the Amazonian water cycle has found that large emergent canopy trees can contribute disproportionately to forest transpiration, particularly during dry periods, and that the forest recycles enormous quantities of water back into the atmosphere.

The tree drinks from the earth.

The tree releases into the sky.

The sky carries the water.

The water becomes rain.

The rain returns to the forest.

And suddenly the boundary of the tree becomes difficult to locate.

Where does the tree end?

At its bark?

At the furthest root?

At the leaf?

At the vapor leaving its stomata?

At the cloud forming overhead?

At the rain falling hundreds or thousands of miles away?

Maybe a tree is much larger than the shape we see.

Perhaps we are, too.

The Tree of Serendipity

This is why I love my Tree of Serendipity.

I reach for a book without deciding beforehand what I need to hear.

Sometimes I randomly choose the book. Sometimes I allow the pages themselves to choose where I begin.

It is a tiny practice of relinquishing certainty.

A way of saying:

I am listening.

And then I pay attention.

Not because I believe every coincidence contains a secret coded message intended specifically for me.

Something gentler than that.

I simply find that when I soften my insistence on knowing what I am looking for, I begin to notice what is already here.

The world becomes interesting again.

A sentence speaks to another sentence.

A bee leads to a flower.

A flower leads underground to minerals.

Minerals lead to roots.

Roots lead to trees.

Trees lead into the atmosphere.

The atmosphere becomes a river.

And somehow I find myself included in all of it.

Participation

Perhaps this is the part that touches me most.

Freeman writes of listening to the plants in her garden and realizing that she, too, is included in the conversation.

Yes.

That.

We are included.

We are not standing outside nature studying something called “the environment.”

We breathe what trees release.

Plants receive what we exhale.

Our food becomes our bodies.

Minerals become plants, plants become animals, leaves become soil, water becomes cloud and rain and river and blood and breath.

Bee.

Flower.

Dandelion.

Sumaúma.

Cloud.

Human.

Not identical.

Not separate.

Participants.

And perhaps this is one reason listening matters so much.

When the mind grows quieter, when the eyes soften and the ears open, we begin noticing relationships that were present all along.

The conversation wasn't waiting for us to begin it.

It was already happening.

The invitation is simply to join.

To walk outside with fewer conclusions.

To look.

To listen.

To wonder.

And perhaps today, wherever you are, allow one small thing to catch your attention.

A weed growing through a crack.

A bee disappearing into a blossom.

A cloud gathering over the horizon.

A tree moving water invisibly between earth and sky.

Stay there for a moment.

Loiter longer.

You may discover that you aren't merely observing the world.

You are already inside its song.

And the song is still increasing.

A few threads to follow

Jacqueline Freeman's Song of Increase: Listening to the Wisdom of Honeybees for Kinder Beekeeping and a Better World offers a relational, bee-centered approach to honeybees and explores Freeman's experiences of communication with them.

Rudolf Steiner's 1924 Agriculture Course—eight lectures and accompanying discussions—is widely regarded as the foundation of biodynamic agriculture and explores farming through relationships among soil, plants, animals, substances, and wider natural forces.

Modern research on Amazonian hydrology provides a beautiful scientific companion to the image of the “great conversation”: studies show that Amazon forests return immense quantities of water to the atmosphere through evapotranspiration, and that large emergent trees can play an especially important role in that cycling.

Perhaps Freeman's bees, Steiner's farm, the sumaúma, the dandelion, and the Tree of Serendipity are all pointing us toward the same simple invitation:

Pay attention.

Life is speaking.

And we are part of the conversation.