HEAD FIRST

The creation myth of the San People in the Kalahari Desert begins with insects and animals. The first human appears when a bee carries a mantis across a wide river. The exhausted bee leaves the mantis on a floating flower after planting a seed in its body. The seed grows into the first human. I don’t know if the adult San folk try to convince their children that the tale is absolutely true the way many Christians insist that the creation myth in Genesis is real history to be believed exactly as the Bible says it happened. I like the bee story and I like the one from Genesis that says God is a being much like us who sometimes is lonely and walks in a garden in the cool part of the day... and that in a garden once upon a time long ago he decided he would do something about the loneliness by making a creature much like himself. I like both the stories. We spoil ours when we insist that it is an accurate account of how people came into being. In fact, we spoil most of the Bible’s stories by insisting they are accurate history. How wonderfully rich and useful all the stories can be when we are permitted to admit that they are myths which teach us important things about ourselves.

I like the Kalahari people’s myth because all kinds of things can be said to children about the importance of work. As a matter of fact, bees are hard workers; but in the San story bees get tired the way people get tired, and they have to decide what to do when they are so tired they can’t go on. The bee that carried a mantis (impossible in a non-mythic world the way taking a rib out of a man and fashioning a woman with it is preposterous...) got tired and stopped midway across the river but did something important before it died from exhaustion. It planted the seed in the mantis body, a seed which grows into something very important... a person. The bee doesn’t live long enough to see the good thing it had done, but that’s not the important part of the story.

I thought about the Kalahari myth today as I was photographing a yellow hibiscus at the same time a bee was gathering pollen, and I couldn’t help but notice that the bee didn’t timidly back into the center of the flower but went right in head first. I went away wishing I could show my photograph to some children and talk with them about the importance of work... the importance of going about work in the right way. I’ll bet they would have all kinds of things to say about bees and about how much we learn from them... about the fact that bees obviously know how properly to be part of a group. I know they would say it is important to be able to work alone knowing the work is good for everybody. Take a look at my hibiscus and my bee. You’ll see what I mean.