To Begin Again

Summer - Week 28 - On Second Chances and What Remains

In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures — and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul.

There is a small blue tit on my windowsill this early morning, her yellow-green breast bright against the glass. I had gotten out of bed to watch a little gathering of these birds, drawn by their singing and chattering to each other in the early light. But then this one, tiny and different from the others, flew to the windowsill and sat like a precious messenger, holding my attention. There was something about her presence that spoke to me of spirit and persistence, of showing up even when you're small, even when the world seems vast and uncertain.

It seems fitting that she should appear on this particular morning, when I have been thinking so much about courage and beginning again.

Watching her, I am reminded of Nikita Gill's poem “A Reminder from Smaller Beings” - those lines about the bird whose every nest has been destroyed, the spider whose every thread has been broken, yet who try again despite it all. Perhaps this little one is still finding her wings, still learning the art of flight, but she has already mastered something far more essential - the strength to keep trying, to answer the call to begin again.

This week, I began keeping bees again.

The words feel strange in my mouth, like speaking a language I thought I had forgotten. Three hives sit in my garden now, their wooden bodies warm in the afternoon sun, their inhabitants humming with the kind of purpose I had almost convinced myself I would never feel again. It has been months since I last wrote those words - I am a beekeeper - months since I believed them to be true.

The last time we spoke of this, in May, I was broken. Not just my body, though that too bore the weight of stings and healing, but something deeper. My spirit, perhaps. My trust in my own capacity to tend living things, to be worthy of their dependence.

The hives had turned aggressive, my gentle companions transformed into something I no longer recognized, something that filled me with a fear so profound it made me question whether I was meant to nurture anything at all. I had thought I was brave. I had thought I was strong. The bees taught me I was neither, and in that teaching, I lost more than honey and wax, I lost the quiet confidence that had once guided my hands around fragile things.

The decision to destroy the hives brought back a familiar ache, one I thought I had learned to carry more lightly. After my riding accident, when my horse became dangerous to me. Not through any fault of his own, but because fear had changed the language between us, I had faced this same impossible choice. Finding him a new home had nearly broken me. The guilt of giving up on a creature who had once trusted me completely, the questioning of whether I was ever truly meant to tend living things at all. Now, years later, with the bees, that old wound reopened, but this time there was no gentle rehoming, no second chance for them elsewhere. The finality of it, the weight of that decision, cut even deeper. Perhaps I was not the caretaker I believed myself to be. Perhaps love was not enough.

Yet here I am again, my hands once more sticky with propolis, my ears attuned to the ancient music of the hive. The paradox of trying again is this: we return not because we have forgotten our failures, but because we have learned to carry them differently. The fear is still there, a low hum beneath my ribs, but it no longer drowns out everything else.

When I broke my back, I thought too that many things might end. The horses, certainly. How could I continue to love creatures whose very presence demanded a body I was no longer sure I possessed? I remember lying in that hospital bed, staring at the ceiling tiles, sobbing and wondering if healing meant learning to live without the things that had once defined me. The smell of hay and leather, the weight of a saddle, the trust between rider and horse - would these, too, break along with me?

For a time, it seemed they would. There were months of believing that some losses are simply too complete to recover from. But the body remembers what the mind forgets, and so does the heart. Healing is not the erasure of damage but the integration of it. What I learned is that love doesn't die with loss, it waits, patient and stubborn, for us to be ready to begin again. They are still my life, these magnificent creatures who ask for nothing but presence and give everything in return. Without them, I would be incomplete - not because I am weak, but because love carves hollows in us that only the beloved can fill.

The question haunts me still though: what compels us to try again? Is it instinct, that ancient programming that drives the bird to build, the spider to spin, the bee to return to the hive? Or is it something more conscious, more deliberate? A choice made not in spite of fear but because of it?

I think of the spider, her web destroyed for the hundredth time, and I wonder if she pauses in her rebuilding. Does she remember the previous failures? Does she feel the weight of futility, the whisper that says why bother? Or does she simply begin again because beginning is what she knows how to do, because creation is the only response she has to destruction?

Perhaps we are not so different, we humans and these smaller beings. Perhaps the compulsion to try again is not weakness but wisdom. The deep knowing that we are not meant to remain broken, that our failures are not endings but commas in a longer sentence we are still learning to write. To love again, to trust again, to tend again despite our trembling hands.

Today three hives in my garden hum with new life, and I find myself listening to their song with different ears. These are not the same bees that taught me fear, just as I am not the same person who once believed that broken meant finished. We are all of us trying again, in our own ways, rebuilding what was lost with materials we did not know we possessed.

And my garden feels alive again, not because I have erased what happened before, but because I have learned to let it be part of the story.

There is courage in the trying, yes, but there is also something else. Something that feels less like bravery and more like faith. Faith that we are more resilient than we know, that our capacity for beginning again is infinite, that the bird will always return to the windowsill, the spider will always spin her web, and we will always find our way back to the things that make us whole.

The bees are teaching me this now, in their patient way. That trying again is not about returning to what was, but about creating something new from what remains. That the honey we make from this second chance will taste different - richer, perhaps, for having been seasoned with loss.

And so I tend my hives, I gentle my horses, I watch the little bird find her wings. We are all of us trying again, broken and whole at the same time, carrying our scars and our hope in equal measure.

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—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let's experience nature's gifts together.

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane