We met to do our traditional June service – built around images of bees and honey – and also to acknowledge the grief we all carry, surrounded as we are by violence and loss.

You can find today’s liturgy here: Fringes June 2022. We use the folk tradition of “telling the bees” in order to maintain connections between humans and the natural world – you can find out more about that here.

In our continuing learning about bees, we focused on the issue of native bees vs. honey bees, especially the idea that “saving the bees” means protecting imported honeybees rather than our native bees. Read this article about the trouble with beekeeping, and spend some time learning about bees native to your area. Here’s an article on some of the native bees of Pennsylvania. One of the bees featured today is the perplexing bumblebee, a species whose name is beyond endearing. See more photos of this bumble!

For torah study we used several different teachings on grief and how important it is. Excerpts from the texts are in the liturgy. You can read more if you’re interested:

Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu: Why Prolonged Grief Shouldn’t Be Considered a Mental Illness – Especially During a Pandemic

The Mikonenet Tradition of Sacred Grief Workers