The bee in the window

 I used to subscribe to Resurgence magazine — which is beautiful as well as interesting, and I took it for some years. I liked the articles and the pictures, but also read the small ads with interest; and month by month there used to be one in the section advertising holiday accommodation which always stopped my eye. It said, "Bed only in a quiet street". And every time I read it my soul responded wit a definite "Amen".

In seeking out family dwellings, I have always looked for somewhere we could live without a car — because our income has always been precarious and small, and cars confer scant blessing upon the wellbeing of creation. So I chose places where the grocery stores and post office and bus routes, and everything else necessary for the routines of life, were easily accessed on foot. The magic combination, to my mind, is a quiet residential street off a main highway with a conglomeration of commercial premises on it. So the amenities are nearby but the road is peaceful and secluded. Which describes well the street we live in now.

The end of our road has been blocked off because otherwise it would run straight into a big crossroad with a complicated nexus of traffic lights.

At the top of our road, just past the way down to the park that passes the doctors' surgery, is a shop that used to be a store selling carpet and rugs and vinyl flooring, but has now become an outlet for overstocked groceries and kitchen sundries. It has a generous car park at the back, and at the front a little forecourt where they put out stands of bedding plants. The front and half the side of the shop are glazed with large plate glass windows, and the big front doors stand open to welcome in customers all through the hours the shop is open, in this warm, summery season.

I have never been in to this shop since it changed hands — though we did get several carpets there in years gone by.

Today I been down to the town centre on the bus, to buy some salad and fruit and cream and sourdough bread, and was returning home toward the end of the afternoon.

I passed the shop at the end of our road, with its bedding plants stacked in the front yard and its doors wide open, and saw that inside, bumping fruitlessly against the big windows, was the most enormous bumble bee.

I felt so worried about it. I wanted it to be outside, and be free.

I don't have much energy, and I find encounters with people difficult. I was tired, and my foot was hurting. I thought about retracing my steps and going in to the shop to speak to the shop owners, ask them to catch the bee gently in a glass and release it outside. But you can't always tell how people will respond to insects, can you? I was worried they'd freak out about it, or tell me they'd set it free and then secretly kill it when I wasn't looking. And I was tired and my foot hurt and I wanted to be home. So apart from praying for the bee and asking Jesus to help it find its way out, and asking him to send an angel for it, and asking St Melangell and St Paisos to intercede for it, I didn't do anything.

I felt wretched and guilty and sad and sorry and worried. Poor little thing.

I thought about the choices we make and the fixes we get into — how much time we spend bashing uselessly against unyielding obstacles when there is a massive doorway to freedom standing open wide three feet away. I thought about how we all need someone to help us and show us the way and set us free, and how I am not that for so many people and wasn't that for the poor trapped bee.

I hope it got out. I hope no one killed it. 

And I still honestly don't know if it was better to leave the bee to figure things out on its own, or if I should have gone in and done something about it. Every path, every decision, every choice at every fork in the road, brings its own unfolding consequences — for ourselves and for others, including bees — but we cannot always predict them, or manage the onward flow of situations according to the way we imagined.

May all living beings be at ease. May all living beings be free.