In honor of this new moon edge of spring, and inspired by the nostalgia and sense of ennui that can come from the season of one’s birthday (my 34th just passed last weekend, rung in by bells and a choir at Buckfast Abbey, a very old heart-woven hawthorn up on Dartmoor, two white ponies, daffodils and my beautiful mother) I want to make some long overdue notes about the book which inspired the epithet of this Substack—What the Bee Knows: Reflections on Myth, Symbol and Story by novelist and mythologist P.L. Travers.
When I was 16, my mother gave me a battered little copy of the then out-of-print classic. It was an old paperback, a kind of milky violet color, with lovely smelling, densely-typed pages. My mother knows me well and has always had an eye for just the right present, but this was one of the most apt gifts she ever gave me. I devoured it like it was the water on an island I had spent my whole life up until that point trying to find. I read and re-read it until the already battered pages were soft as cloth. Travers’ essays about fairytales and myth, most of them originally published in Parabola magazine, brought them to life, luminously, not as separate from me but as part of myself, as she knew them to be part of herself. Her words felt uncannily of my heart. I felt them singing back to me some mystery entire that I had always loved beyond reason or articulation.