Banished Angels
Monthly Newsletter | June 2024
The monthly newsletters are an amalgamation of musings and two poems (one by another poet and one by me, as per a practice introduced to my master’s cohort by poet Alice Oswald).
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Dear friends,
This week I became a bee mama! And I’m bursting to tell you all about it. I’ve wanted my own hive for such a long time. But never quite lived anywhere long enough to even entertain the idea.
But a friend of ours was giving his hive away, and I just couldn’t pass up this opportunity. These bees are native Australian bush bees!
Known by the Gubbi Gubbi aboriginal people of this area as Gaiya, they are stingless, teeny tiny (all but 4mm) and inky black all over. Just like the European honeybee, they make honey, but they only produce about half a litre a year. It’s very rare to find and deeply medicinal, their tangy eucalyptus taste catapulting the imagination straight to the earliest times on this land. Back to Dreamtime.
My partner and I drove over to Andy’s after sundown, to ensure the last of the foragers had made their way home. And after a cup of tea and a teaspoon of their honey, the men carefully lugged the hive into the back of our ute.
A gifted carpenter, Andy crafted this hive out of a rich red Burmese wood. Amazingly, he built it around the log he found the colony in, so that the hive he constructed acts as a type of fort around their natural hive. It’s the most beautiful image… an example of how we can be stewards not keepers.
The next morning, we were like children at Christmas. Poking our heads round into the clearing we’d set up for them in the garden to see if they had come out yet. They waited until about 7am, when the sun was a bit warmer, and I was there when the first bee flew out.
I ran back into the house to get Leon, and we spent the next long while transfixed. Watching them as they poked their little heads out into their new home. I uttered words of welcome amidst the odd squeal of excitement.
They seem to have settled in just fine. Bustling with activity, their back legs heavy with pollen from wild bush flowers.
And yet, alongside my excitement, I feel an impossible paradox between this bright joy and the heartbreak that grates against it every time I remember Palestine.
The grief is immobilising.
My attention feels completely split down the middle between pain and beauty.
Because the week we got our bees is the week Israel bombed the refugee camp in Rafah.
The world saw - for the first time for many of us - images of dismembered babies. The evening of the first bomb I sat in the soil, wet and muddy from an earlier storm, stunned.
How many of us had seen what the insides of a baby looked like before last week? An image like that will change us forever. There’s no going back from it really.
Personally, I’m finding it impossible to navigate how to live against the backdrop of genocide.
And so every morning I come and sit with the bees. I tell them of this maddening sorrow. And in this way, I hope that it won’t infect every other aspect of my life. That my mornings with them will ensure I keep close to Beauty; that the bees will renew my loyalty to Her.
After all, the Great Mother Goddess of our earliest ancestors was the Lady of both Life and Death. In Mesopotamia she was known as Inanna, Goddess of Attraction and Repulsion, and in Greece she was separated into different goddesses, love assigned to Aphrodite and war to Athena. But once, they were one and the same.
‘Let everything happen to you,’ wrote Rilke, ‘beauty and terror.’
And he continues: ‘For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.'
My mornings with the bees have become a prayer, their hive a chapel.
I don’t think I realised quite how sharply I’ve been longing for them.
Leon built a little wooden bench that we’ve placed by the entrance, in the patched shade of a young guava tree that’s just started to bare fruit. I’m sitting here now. Freshly brewed coffee with a spoon of honey from the apiary down in Sydney where I’ve been going to work on some projects I’m excited to announce soon; the hound of Gundabooka loyally at my foot, his fur warm with morning sun.
Yellow-tailed black cockatoos are more present than ever. Their shrill cries breaking the usual hum of the bush and startling it into silence as they glide past, usually three of them, like stingrays in the sky. They are holy to some aboriginal peoples here, their appearance deemed highly auspicious.
It really is in the natural world that I find most comfort now. I have written about the great consolation of nature before, when the ground invasion of Gaza first began, when Aron Bushnell set himself on fire, and now when refugee camps are savagely bombed.
The background we must situate ourselves in is stark. But situate ourselves in it we must. We can’t pretend it’s not happening and go on with life as normal. Doing so would be the worst kind of delusion.
I have written about the importance of bearing witness. Not as a passive act but as a total discipline.
It is impossible.
We might find ourselves numbing out for a time, and that’s okay. But then we must at all costs bring ourselves back to total presence with this butchery. To bear witness to the human condition that has made it possible for this carnage to happen in the first place.
That it is possible for a people to live enclosed behind an 8-meter wall manned by checkpoints and watch towers tells us everything we need to know about just how far our angels have fallen.
As I write this, a kookaburra has landed on a branch some 10 feet in front of me. His blue feathers catching the light reflections on the large banana leaves after last night’s heavy rains.
When I first read the headlines on October 7th, I immediately sensed what the consequence would be. I knew the attack would be used as an excuse to retaliate and occupy what remains of Occupied Palestine once and for all. After Gaza, it will be the West Bank. In fact, they’re already going in. Accounts of night-time kidnapping, the arming of Israeli settlers and looking the other way when they attack shepherds, farmers and bus drivers…
Israel’s Finance Minister (and terrorist) Bezalel Smotrich issued a murderous threat to the residents of the Occupied West Bank two days ago, saying ‘We will turn you into ruined towns as we are doing now in the Gaza Strip.’1
It’s all just too much. Because we are all human and we all have our thousand and one stories playing in the background of our lives . Our hurts, our ambitions, our conflicts, our deepest longings, our unfinished projects and incomplete conversations, all the things that feel unresolved in our hearts…
My grandmother’s cousin said to me once, “Human beings are so fragile, Gabriela.”
And I often remember it. With all the worlds playing within us at once, how can we possibly have the capacity to fight this? The beast responsible for the butchery?
‘The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being,’ wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’2
World religions have attempted to separate the forces of good and evil for millennia.
During my last visit to the apiary in Sydney, when I was picked up at the airport, the French beekeeper Hugo got talking about all the symbols used around the world to ward off the devil. As though the devil were something outside of us.
But if we look at the image deeper, horseshoes on doors, etc, if the home is the body, what we’re saying is we’re warding off the parts of us that we don’t like. That aren’t bright and shiny. Banishing them to the lesser places.
Maybe the problem is that we’ve exiled so much of ourselves away.
And in banishing our demons, we banish our angels too.
Don’t get me wrong, angels appear all over religious iconography in depictions of impossible innocence in immortalised gold leaf. But they have become enshrined. Confined. Untouchable and exiled from the places of worldly things. We have set them apart. And we are now so very, very far away from them.
I think Shakespeare was onto this when he wrote in the Tempest, ‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here.’
The consequence of banishing the truth of our own capacity for destruction and assigning it to outer beings - be it canonical demons or politicians - is that we also exile the brightest parts of us.
I don’t think we can access our angels unless we let our demons sit on our other shoulder.
Acknowledging that we all have the capacity for chaos. That perhaps our political views were once such that we thought Israel was a good idea. Perhaps we had very little knowledge about the 75 year apartheid system there and had never spoken to a Palestinian. Never heard the Palestinian story. Until now.
Now, finally, the world’s eye is turned straight towards it.
I would feel such frustration trying to convince people in the West, especially when I was living in the US, that Palestinians aren’t terrorists. That in Ramallah, in the Occupied West Bank, there is a swimming pool where teenage Palestinians go to tan and flirt on the weekends. That the same music young bucks listen to speeding through the streets of Brooklyn is boomed out of fast cars in Nablus. And that when I asked Palestinians my age (at the time twenty-one) what they most wished for in Palestine, the most common response was just to be able to access the beach.
Israel has the coast line (other than in Gaza) and Palestinians need to apply for a permit to go to the sea…
Perhaps in our turn towards Palestine, facing the impossible grief and our moral imperative head on, our culture is finally beginning to integrate its demons.
And perhaps, ultimately, this will restore a temple in our hearts for the angels that have flown away.
Poetry Offering
Song of a Man Who Has Come Through
D. H. Lawrence
Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me! ...
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we
shall find the Hesperides...
What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them. Admit them.As I was reading this, another poem comes to mind so I’ll share it too. I have a song-version of this poem that I wrote and shared about a year ago somewhere on this archive. So here it is-
My Sweet, Crushed Angel Hafiz You have not danced so badly, my dear, trying to hold hands with the Beautiful One. You have waltzed with great style, my sweet, crushed angel, to have ever neared God’s heart at all. Our Partner is notoriously difficult to follow, and even His best musicians are not always easy to hear. So what if the music has stopped for a while. So what if the price of admission to the Divine is out of reach tonight. So what, my sweetheart, if you lack the ante to gamble for real love. The mind and the body are famous for holding the heart ransom, but Hafiz knows the Beloved’s eternal habits. Have patience, for He will not be able to resist your longings and charms for long. You have not danced so badly, my dear, trying to kiss the Magnificent One. You have actually waltzed with tremendous style, my sweet, O my sweet, crushed angel.
And this last one is one of mine.
The Black Bees
They are dark these ones
Not bright like the sun
but the thick black of monthly blood
and grape-stained fingers,
their bodies irises in the all-seeing-eye
of their colony, the black
centre of it all.
Sitting beside them I am small again
illiterate of the things that really matter.
And the wet rolling pulse of dark earth
throbs beneath me
with an impossible longing.Upcoming Online Events
Please note, all these events can be attended live or via recording.
Firstly, a reminder that the next cohort of the Bee Priestesses program begins in September. The applications are now rolling. And the Earlybird rate ended on Saturday. But if you’re reading this as a subscriber, and wish to apply for the Earlybird rate, I will extend it for you until mid week. Please email me at hello@gabrielagutierrez.net to let me you you’re a Substack Subscriber and would like the last minute access to the Earlybird rate.
Here are the details of the program: The Bee Priestesses
This Thursday, 6th of June | Women’s New Moon Rite | 8-9:30pm UK
June 21st | Solstice Oracular Guidance
June 30th | Dismemberment Ceremony | 8-9:30pm UK
I also have some new openings for 1:1 mentorship sessions. Please see my website for the next openings.
Hidden Palestine News Channel
From The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956
Beautiful and thought-provoking as usual. May encounters with natural magnificence bring us some solace in these dark times.