Bee Stings And Gratitude

Best Google Images find ever.
Today at the beach, I got stung on the right foot by a bee.
I won’t lie: the shit hurt.
It was also marvelous.
I used to get this feeling as a kid, enthroned in a big blue plastic armchair in a small white plastic office guarded by tepid watercolor cows wearing dainty yellow ribbons around their throats. Blood test time. (I had half a lifetime’s worth of bloodwork done before the age of 10.) Despite the creepy environs and foreboding application of the tourniquet, when the moment arrived for the big jab I would watch in fascination as they stuck in the needle and sucked out the sample, thick and luxurious, like red chocolate milk. It was something close to magic.
It’s amazing how often we allow the sensation of pain to dominate our interpretation of rich, multi-faceted experiences. But if we can make a little room around our discomfort, we start to notice all the wondrous or lucky aspects of uneasy incidents.
Here’s a short list from this afternoon’s hymenopteran encounter.
1. The bugger stung me and not my friend beside me, who is severely allergic and would have had to rush to the emergency room.
2. Watching your own foot turn purple is totally engrossing.
3. Opportunity to test that theory about scraping the stinger out with a credit card. (More or less successful)
4. Watching your own foot swell is totally engrossing.
5. Ideal placement of the sting on the foot (i.e. not on the sole, and free from flip-flop irritation).
6. Watching the swelling subside is totally engrossing.
7. Great conversation starter: gender and pain tolerance; the species evolution of defense mechanisms and “protective reputations;” and that time at circus camp when a counselor got stung in the mouth by yellowjackets — twice in two weeks.
8. Did I mention that observing a bee sting can be totally engrossing?
9. Impetus to learn about bee sting therapy: “A folk remedy for treating arthritis, back pain and rheumatism for 3,000 years in China.”
10. At least one of us is still living. RIP, little guy.
Happy adventures, y’all — here’s to the magic of misfortunes.
If you could keep your heart in wonder
At the daily miracles of your life,
Your pain would seem no less wondrous than your joy…
–Khalil Gibran, The Prophet
I share your fascination with pain—in the dentist’s chair 4 days this week. Ow!! But lot’s of time to contemplate my cud. Chewing it hurts too much.
Ps Since you were probably on the nude beach, the little critter did you a favor by stinging your foot.
Enjoy the last days in sunny Barca.
Zhuangzi (3rd c. BCE), trans. Burton Watson
oh, the footnote (17) is:
Wonderful story, thanks Momin. I especially love Master Yu’s sense of humor in being “all crookedy like this.” Right now I’m working with an awesome 78-year-old minister who’s developed Parkinson’s, and she’s all bent over to her left side. She jokes about it a lot, and that makes the changing process actually sort of marvelous.