I saved the image onto my desktop and stared at it at hourly intervals for about a week, then printed it, and brought it to a tattoo shop last Tuesday. I was so bloody nervous going in there and almost couldn't breathe when I left the place with an appointment in my hand for that following Friday. Oh those 3 days were some of the longest I've waited through. My Friday morning stomach was calm, but my bladder wasn't. I must have peed 7 times in the last half hour before I left home. By the time I got there I was all twisted up in funny places. I met with the artist, whose first re-drawing wasn't exactly what I wanted so I waited almost another hour on a sofa while he re-redrew, flipping through magazine of "Inked Girls" thinking oh she's sexy, oh I'm so nervous, that's cool, oh I'm so terrified, and listening to Icky Thump on repeat. 45 minutes of jittering intestines, a racing heart, itching, twitching, sweating, 'Icky Thump, who'd a thunk?'— it's only forever! He got it right the second time around and I had no time left to wait. I made my way to the bench and noticed a 'Defend Hawaii' sticker on a cabinet. I had to smile, laugh, inquire about it, and then it instantly calmed me down. [Icky Thump] Who'd a thunk that a sticker from Hawaii's aggressive sovereignty movement would make its way onto a locker in a tattoo shop on a side street of Södermalm, Stockholm, Sweden, and who'd a thunk that that would calm me down?
Thomas, as the artist was called, prepped my back, applied pressure with his hand and asked, "Are you ready." "As ready as I could ever be, sir!" The machine started to buzz and before even commenting on the pain, I spoke: "Hey, it sounds like a bee!" Thomas responded, "Wow, it's cool that you say that in a positive way, because most people groan 'Oh noo, it sounds like a bee!'"
Other parts hurt too of course, but then I found that the endorphin rush quickly numbed everything and the painting even felt good at some points. After an hour and a half, however, the endorphin receptors were a bit shocked and I couldn't keep up, so it just hurt like a bloody beast. I let my mind drift off with the buzzing, imagining that I was in a beautiful fruit orchard, a permaculture landscape with those brilliant architects and creators of a never-spoiling substance zooming around joyfully from flower to flower. Thomas applied the last touches and then came the most amazing three words I think my ears have ever absorbed, "You're all done!"
Later that evening I went out to Järna because that's where I go when I need to connect with myself or just chill the f*ck out! There was a last-friday evening in the Culture Center and I met a few people who I knew. It was exactly what I needed, an evening in a Waldorfy, hippy, happy, positive vibes, loose pants, smiling people, kids, beeswax smelling kind of night. Organic beer, and great people who were thrilled to hear about my bee. I met farmers and people returning from their meditative explorations in India, students, volunteers, parents, kids, friends, Waldorf teachers and somebody from Hawaii... Just the kind of support that I needed to be reassured that I didn't just do something crazy. Adrenaline has a funny way of making you feel really terrible about yourself, so it was very good to fight that chemical cloud and find myself again.
My sister freaked out. "JULIA! I thought it was gonna be a small bee! Mom is going to KILL YOU!" Yeah, that's not the nicest thing to hear.... but whatever. My bee is my beeswax and I don't give a flying flytrap about what anybody else thinks. It's something that nobody can ever take away from me. Finally, something that's me regardless of what country I'm from, what color my hair or skin is, what language I speak, or what my fucking last name is.
I am just gonna go right out and say it: I struggle with a severe identity crisis. Not when it comes to the internal, true me, myself and I, but on the superficial front. I know exactly who I am and what I stand for, and I am completely at peace with that me, but when it comes to "civilized,"categorizing creations like identification cards with terms such as "Country of Origin," "Nationality," and the worst one yet, "Name," I want to evaporate from the planet and just die already. I hate those fill-in-able blanks, and questions, I hate that people think that they're important, and I hate that I've been raised to think that they're important and thereby feel completely baseless and like a floating, mutant, unclassifiable, broken cell. I'm just a human being. A human bee-ing. No names, countries, languages, colors or family members can define me but why won't the rest of the world realize that and just let me be? I just want to be. I want to be me, Julia; sans last name, sans country of origin, sans native language. I just want to be. I want to BEE. BE. BEE. BE....
On an activistic note, if the bees vanished from the earth, so would 1/3 of our food production. And unless we're going to submit to a diet based on fish, seafood and seaweed, we have got to stop this genocide. We can't eat concrete or plastic. As albert Einstein once said,
"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."
Maybe that's my path, to be a beekeeper... this past summer I was sitting up in a birch tree pondering that very thought. Here's a poem from that day and those musings:
High up in the loveliest birch, I sat
an hour, perhaps two,
and counted the knots in the rope swing below
where children once played.
Where did my childhood go?
For so long it seems I forgot to play,
and now I'm grown up,
at least that's what they say,
and I'm supposed to do something remarkable.
"Change the world," they said.
"Invent something important,"
"solve the problems of tomorrow."
But what about today?
Oh, if only I could just grow
like this birch, with a thousand arms,
waving its leaves in the evening glow;
and that would be my only purpose.
What if I became a beekeeper,
someone to appreciate the little things,
tiny stripes and glassy wings,
isn't that remarkable too?
I sat, Hugging the birch,
pleading it to whisper the answer in my ear,
"Go ahead, my dear."
I clung to its branches tighter,
until the white bark crumbled
and birch-dust powdered my upper arm.
I noticed the wrinkles in its axillary branches.
An old birch, a remarkable one.
Tell me, Birch,
what am I to do?
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