"The sound has texture."
It expressed something very real to me; yet there is not power in words to portray the exact feeling. All the objects of nature have their spiritual dimensions also for those who dwell much in the Unseen. These unusual children see the material object merely as an outpost for a challenging mystery; while, to the material mind, the outpost is all, and the lavish adjectives and expressions of the former are deplored as gush or affectation. As a matter of splendid truth, the most marked and potent of all adjectives and expressions are pitifully inadequate to express the lustre and radiance which begins at the point where three dimensions end.
The Valley Road Girl came into the Study one day, saying that this chapel book should be called The Hive. We all thought it a wonderful name to work toward, yet the unfolding of possibilities has been steadily interesting since that day.
The inner sanctuaries of occult literature commend the students to look to the bees. The pattern of much that man has still to unfold from his own soul, for his personal and communal uplift, is already expressed in the hive. There is a period of larva, and a period of wings to each cycle. Such matters call to those of spiritual discernment. One feels on the verge of great revelations for humanity, beyond the thing called death, as he studies this miniature model of a great democracy.
The most fascinating love episode I ever read was the Nuptial Flight in Maeterlinck's Life of the Bee. The majesty of winging to the sun, the falling back of the weaker-winged suitors, the commanding isolation of sun and sky, fusion under the mighty beat of the wings of the queen, the broken body of the male, the mother's return to the shadow and the labour of the generative wheel—magically, it all opened a vista to the great renunciations, the great passions and aspirations ahead for the human soul, great fusions of the future, marriages truly made in heaven, the inevitable trinity of all matings—the drama of love and death.
For her one high noon flight in June, the queen toils through years. She brings back from that superb instant the swarming cities of the future. On and on, she unfolds her fecundity in the dark, a prodigious and Herculean labour; from the human standpoint a task of intolerable pain and monotony. The queen's labour is scarcely more difficult than the tasks assigned to the hosts of workers, which appear to be denied any separate episode of emancipation. Yet, equally with the queen, they share the communal spirit; and no one who has stood among the hives at the end of a long summer day, and heard the song of bounty and deep-hearted content, can deny the peace that dwells among the myriad of skilled artisans, each with his perfectly appointed task.
Bees appear to remember the light, while working at the opposite side of the wheel. Men, as yet, are detached, lost in the heresies of self and strife. Only a few visionaries have peered beyond the petty reach of the optic nerve, to perceive that this, which we make so much of, is but the hell-portion; that this appearance of ours in pounds is a mere dressing up in materials of earth to endure the dark and low vibration of the wheel's most downward sweep. These few visionaries, always singing the joy of the other arcs of the cycle, somehow keep the dream alive,—the dream that appears already to be the essential blessedness and magic of life in the hive.
All mysticism seeks to teach us this single point which the bees seem to have learned so well—to transcend time and space in labour; to put off the sense of separation and strife, to hearken to the soul's own song of equality and sufficing days. We must be pushed to the last reaches of pain before we learn this secret. We have to penetrate the darkness before we earn this flash which swings wide the portals of joy.
Joy is the most potent thing in the universe. The bee-queen mother weaves race after race of progeny out of the incredible dynamics of an instant's joy. Each cell that she fills with life is a living fragment of her nuptial feast. Fusion is ecstasy, parturition is pain. The many become one; that is heaven. The one becomes many again; that is earth and hell. Integration and diffusion—the same story told in the hives and ant-hills, in the strolling winds and swinging seas, in the hearts and marts of men, in matings everywhere.