Against every choice of destruction, there is always the choice of creation.
This is the message of Poet Audre Lorde, as she draws on bees to describe the alternative to destruction. Her poem describes young boys throwing stones at swarming bees. A boy gets stung by a bee, and consequently, school guards destroy the hive. Afterward, a girl observed that the bees were not making trouble. Instead of destroying the hive, the children could've studied honey-making instead.

The Bees and the symphony of life

“Construction and destruction alike satisfy the will to power, but construction is more difficult as a rule, and therefore gives more satisfaction to the person who can achieve it."

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

writing

Reading & Writing

problemsolving

Problem Solving

communication

Communication

<ul><li><a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/">Home </a> </li><li><a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/about/">About </a> </li><li><a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/contact/">Contact </a> </li><li><a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/donate/">donating = loving </a> </li><li><a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/newsletter/">newsletter </a> </li><li>View Full Site </li> </ul>

Every week for more than 13 years, I have been pouring tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings , which remains free (and ad-free) and is made possible by patronage. It takes me hundreds of hours a month to research and compose, and thousands of dollars to sustain. If you find any joy and solace in this labor of love, please consider becoming a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good lunch. Your support really matters.

You can also become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount:

Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7

Need to cancel a recurring donation? <a href="/cancel-recurring-donation/">Go here </a>.

Brain Pickings has a free Sunday digest of the week's most interesting and inspiring articles across art, science, philosophy, creativity, children's books, and other strands of our search for truth, beauty, and meaning. Here's an <a href="http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&amp;id=de29ba37e7&amp;e=b2dbad0745">example </a>. Like? Claim yours:

Also: Because Brain Pickings is in its twelfth year and because I write primarily about ideas of a timeless character, I have decided to plunge into my vast archive every Wednesday and choose from the thousands of essays one worth resurfacing and resavoring. Subscribe to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below — it is separate from the standard Sunday digest of new pieces:

<a href="/newsletter/"> Newsletter </a>

<a href="https://www.facebook.com/brainpickings.mariapopova"> Facebook </a>

<a href="https://twitter.com/brainpicker"> Twitter </a>

<a href="https://instagram.com/brainpicker/"> Instagram </a>

<a href="http://explore.brainpickings.org/"> Tumblr </a>

Antidotes to Fear of Death: Astrophysicist Janna Levin Reads Astronomer and Poet Rebecca Elson’s Stunning Cosmic Salve for Our Creaturely Tremblings of Heart

How Kepler Invented Science Fiction and Defended His Mother in a Witchcraft Trial While Revolutionizing Our Understanding of the Universe

13 Life-Learnings from 13 Years of Brain Pickings

Emily Dickinson’s Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert

Rebecca Solnit’s Lovely Letter to Children About How Books Solace, Empower, and Transform Us

Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives

In Praise of the Telescopic Perspective: A Reflection on Living Through Turbulent Times

A Stoic’s Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca on the Antidote to Anxiety

The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel

The Writing of “Silent Spring”: Rachel Carson and the Culture-Shifting Courage to Speak Inconvenient Truth to Power

Timeless Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers

A Rap on Race: Margaret Mead and James Baldwin’s Rare Conversation on Forgiveness and the Difference Between Guilt and Responsibility

The Science of Stress and How Our Emotions Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and Disease

Mary Oliver on What Attention Really Means and Her Moving Elegy for Her Soul Mate

Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times, Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and What Victory Really Means for Movements of Social Change

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

Famous Writers' Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity, Visualized

7 Life-Learnings from 7 Years of Brain Pickings, Illustrated

Anaïs Nin on Love, Hand-Lettered by Debbie Millman

Anaïs Nin on Real Love, Illustrated by Debbie Millman

Susan Sontag on Love: Illustrated Diary Excerpts

Susan Sontag on Art: Illustrated Diary Excerpts

Albert Camus on Happiness and Love, Illustrated by Wendy MacNaughton

The Silent Music of the Mind: Remembering Oliver Sacks

Grammy Award-Winning Jazz Vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant Reads Audre Lorde’s Poignant Poem “The Bees”

A fierce anthem for the alternative to destruction.

Bees hum the essential harmonics in the symphony of life — crucial pollinators responsible for our planet’s diversity, responsible for the flourishing of the entire food chain, <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/07/14/bumbebees-glouson/">responsible even for Earth’s resplendent colors </a>. It is hardly a wonder that they have long moved poets, those essential harmonizers of human life, to rapture and reverie. Emily Dickinson reverenced <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/universe-in-verse">“their velvet masonry,” </a>Walt Whitman their “their perpetual rich mellow boom” and “great glistening swelling bodies,” and Ross Gay their murmured assurance, <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/12/01/ross-gay-book-of-delights/">“saying everything is possible.” </a>

And yet these tiny, tenacious creatures, older than us by millions and millions of years, now face the very real possibility of demise by colony collapse disorder — a direct consequence of the destructive choices we have made as a species. It is a terrifying thought, the possibility that the honey our ancestors took from them to tuck into the tombs of Egypt — a substance so miraculous that its deliciousness remains unspoiled by the passage of millennia — might outlast the entire species that makes the miracle.

It took another of humanity’s great poets to insist that against every choice of destruction, there is always the choice of creation; that against the extractionist, there is always the generative, against the exclusionary, always the inclusionary and the generous.

Half a century after Bertrand Russell observed that <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/02/21/education-and-the-good-life-bertrand-russell/">“construction and destruction alike satisfy the will to power, but construction is more difficult as a rule, and therefore gives more satisfaction to the person who can achieve it,” </a>Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934–November 17, 1992) — a human miracle who catalogued herself as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” and who became Poet Laureate of New York in the final year of her tragically truncated life — draws on these miraculous creatures for a delicate and powerful illustration of this counterbalance in her poem “The Bees,” originally written in 1974 and posthumously included the excellent anthology <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Black-Nature-Centuries-African-American/dp/0820334316/?tag=braipick-20">Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry </a>(<a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/black-nature-four-centuries-of-african-american-nature-poetry/oclc/731270248&amp;referer=brief_results">public library </a>) pollinated by poet and essayist Camille T. Dungy.

At the fourth annual <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/the-universe-in-verse/">Universe in Verse </a>, Grammy Award-winning jazz vocalist <a href="http://www.cecilemclorinsalvant.com/">Cécile McLorin Salvant </a>— whose unexampled one-woman orchestral storytelling masterpiece <a href="https://www.jazz.org/events/t-9052/Cecile-McLorin-Salvant/">Ogresse </a>, a lyrical meditation on race, otherness, belonging, and becoming, is one of the most original and breathtaking works of art I’ve ever seen — brought Lorde’s poem to life in a spare, stunning reading:

THE BEES by Audre Lorde

In the street outside a school what the children learn possesses them. Little boys yell as they stone a flock of bees trying to swarm between the lunchroom window and an iron grate. The boys sling furious rocks smashing the windows. The bees, buzzing their anger, are slow to attack. Then one boy is stung into quicker destruction and the school guards come long wooden sticks held out before them they advance upon the hive beating the almost finished rooms of wax apart mashing the new tunnels in while fresh honey drips down their broomsticks and the little boy feet becoming expert in destruction trample the remaining and bewildered bees into the earth.

Curious and apart four little girls look on in fascination learning a secret lesson and trying to understand their own destruction. One girl cries out “Hey, the bees weren’t making any trouble!” and she steps across the feebly buzzing ruins to peer up at the empty, grated nook “We could have studied honey-making!”

For a conceptually kindred forgotten treasure, reach back across the epochs to George Sand’s <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/11/27/george-sand-the-mysterious-tale-of-gentle-jack-and-lord-bumblebee/">only children’s book </a>— a bee-inspired parable about choosing generosity and kindness over cynicism and destruction — then join me in supporting Cécile’s soulful art <a href="https://www.patreon.com/CecileMcLorinSalvant">on Patreon </a>and revisit Lorde on <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/04/02/audre-lorde-burst-of-light-kinship-difference/">kinship across difference and the importance of unity in movements for social justice </a>, <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/02/16/audre-lorde-academy-of-american-poets-nea/">the indivisibility of identity </a>, and <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/05/20/audre-lorde-silence-visibility/">the courage to break silence </a>.

For more highlights from <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/the-universe-in-verse/">The Universe in Verse </a>, savor James Baldwin’s <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/05/21/nothing-is-fixed-james-baldwin-morley-music/">humanistic-scientific meditation on light and time set to song </a>, astronaut Leland Melvin reading <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/04/26/leland-melvin-reads-pablo-neruda-chilean-forest/">Pablo Neruda’s love letter to the forest </a>, astrophysicist Janna Levin reading <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/04/10/antidotes-to-fear-of-death-rebecca-elson/">“Antidotes to Fear of Death” </a>by astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson, Marie Howe’s poignant poem about our inter-belonging in an <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/04/23/singularity-marie-howe-animated/">animated short film </a>, and a <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/05/27/thrush-song-paola-prestini-universe-in-verse/">breathtaking choral tribute to Rachel Carson’s courage </a>by the Young People’s Chorus of New York City and composer Paola Prestini.

Brain Pickings - An inventory of the meaningful life.

The Bees and the symphony of life

BERTRAND RUSSELL

CURATED BY

Related collections

More like this