Triangles, Triangulation, Triads... three things, three ideas, three people in relation to each other. Dyads turning into Triads. Dynamic tension and creativity, possibilities within boundaries, and new frontiers...
Three things...I now have three hives of bees. As soon as I finish this blog post, I'll head out to the farm to see how they are doing. Two hives are of one style; the third is different. I will compare the three throughout the season. I'm eager to see how they interact with each other. There is strength in numbers, and I'm hopeful that if there are any problems I can combine and recombine the three into new possibilities (possibili-bees?).
Three ideas.... Talking with a friend yesterday, he kept posing either/or questions, seemingly like he predecided the answers for me. I kept having to rephrase the question into one I could answer. This is my example of the dynamic tension between twos and threes--he was pulling the conversation in one direction--either or--and I wanted to insert my own perspective--the third. I'm sure there is a musical connection here, too--the one and the five of a triad, with the third (major or minor?) determining more meaning.
Three people, third wheel, the other "other", three examples of three triads... Two friends plus a new friend equals jealousy, comparison. Potential for more fun, but also for toxic triangulation, positioning, gossiping. A stable pair, with a third wheel, disrupts balance, brings attention to the stability. The other "other", the grass is greener; I see more with him because I saw with him.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Sigh of relief
good news... I got my test results, and they were "negative" which is positive. Negative for cancer. Huge sigh of relief.
Monday, June 13, 2011
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Bee update and more 6/12/2011
Checked on the hive established at John and Trudi Kretsingers' on Thursday. They are so super mellow, and seemingly without queen. My mind has been trying to work out what it means...perhaps the old queen absconded with a bunch of bees and they are raising out a new queen. I didn't even wear gloves or my bee suit.
The raised knobby cells look like drone cells or queen cells. I'm hoping queen cells.
Another bee photo...I'm in Taos this weekend for the wedding of Brian Rauscher and Justin Wheeler at El Monte Sagrado. Here are some happy honey bees on lavender at this fabulous resort. The weather is beautiful, warm, breezy. The flowers are blooming. An excellent setting for this happy event.
And more bee news this week: Jen Johnson, sometime bee partner of mine, moved two of our four hives to the Kretsinger farm for me yesterday. We started beekeeping together in 2009, but it was difficult to share responsibilities and decision making. I'm thinking our challenges were similar to how a beehive can only have one queen. :)
And a tangential health update... Wednesday I had a biopsy of a very small dot on my cervix. I should have results tomorrow and will give an update here. I'm feeling good, upbeat, hopeful that the results will be good, and even if they're not as good, I'm upbeat, hopeful about the next course of action based on the results.
The raised knobby cells look like drone cells or queen cells. I'm hoping queen cells.
Another bee photo...I'm in Taos this weekend for the wedding of Brian Rauscher and Justin Wheeler at El Monte Sagrado. Here are some happy honey bees on lavender at this fabulous resort. The weather is beautiful, warm, breezy. The flowers are blooming. An excellent setting for this happy event.
And more bee news this week: Jen Johnson, sometime bee partner of mine, moved two of our four hives to the Kretsinger farm for me yesterday. We started beekeeping together in 2009, but it was difficult to share responsibilities and decision making. I'm thinking our challenges were similar to how a beehive can only have one queen. :)
And a tangential health update... Wednesday I had a biopsy of a very small dot on my cervix. I should have results tomorrow and will give an update here. I'm feeling good, upbeat, hopeful that the results will be good, and even if they're not as good, I'm upbeat, hopeful about the next course of action based on the results.
Monday, June 6, 2011
Magnifying your Brilliance
I met a marketing person at a beekeeping class in Crestone, CO, this weekend who saw her work as "magnifying others' brilliance." Awesomeness.
As I left the office today, I said to my colleague, Jamie, "Not only do we get to make our own dreams come true, but we get to help others make their dreams come true. How cool is that?"
Things are getting busy. I've got some travel coming up in the next several months: Taos, Denver, New York, Green River, UT, Atlanta, Milwaukee/Oconomowoc. There are multiple situations that are potentially in a state of simultaneous meltdown at work, which may or may not work themselves out without my intervention. Good things are happening, too: grant money flowing in, love affirmations, creative collaborations, work created, students learning, bees humming.
I'm feeling that as I get more busy, I want to write more. It helps me think, helps me be. I am thrilled when I can think my way through a problem to a solution, and I can think of two situations where my solution help may have a real impact on other peoples' lives.
I'm also loving on myself. At the bee workshop, I saw this beautiful Kenya-style top-frame hive. It looks like a musical instrument to me. It is now mine.
As I left the office today, I said to my colleague, Jamie, "Not only do we get to make our own dreams come true, but we get to help others make their dreams come true. How cool is that?"
Things are getting busy. I've got some travel coming up in the next several months: Taos, Denver, New York, Green River, UT, Atlanta, Milwaukee/Oconomowoc. There are multiple situations that are potentially in a state of simultaneous meltdown at work, which may or may not work themselves out without my intervention. Good things are happening, too: grant money flowing in, love affirmations, creative collaborations, work created, students learning, bees humming.
I'm feeling that as I get more busy, I want to write more. It helps me think, helps me be. I am thrilled when I can think my way through a problem to a solution, and I can think of two situations where my solution help may have a real impact on other peoples' lives.
I'm also loving on myself. At the bee workshop, I saw this beautiful Kenya-style top-frame hive. It looks like a musical instrument to me. It is now mine.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Make it easy to say yes.
Similar to my post about 'thank you' versus 'I'm sorry'...
When asking for things, I find it helpful to literally phrase the question in such a way as to make it easy for the person I'm asking to say yes. That is to say, if I can do legwork ahead of time, find the reasons why it is a benefit to support my plan, how the money spent will actually save money in the long run, etc, then I feel like I have a better chance of persuading my reader to agree and accept my proposed solution as the default solution. Of course, he/she can propose a counter-solution, which I welcome, but which also requires them to exert effort through research, time, energy.
An example: we have a new instructor teaching reading and writing this fall at ASC. Kris, my awesome coworker, recently realized that no one probably has talked to her about what textbooks to order for the Fall. Ordering textbooks can be a time consuming pain, especially the first time one teaches a class. I suggested Kris email her with the following: "Hi Lillian, I'm about to order my textbooks for fall [insert titles/ISBNs] and was wondering if you would like me to order enough for your sections as well?"
What I love about this approach is that we are more likely to get the textbook order done quickly. Often decisions are delayed because they take a block of time to concentrate, or the decision maker doesn't know where to start, or it isn't his/her first priority. Lillian will be traveling for the month of June. By giving her an already prepared default plan, an email to which she can simply reply "oh, thanks, that would be great!", we can get her books ordered and help her check that task off her to-do list, a task she hadn't even added to the list yet.
How can we solve other peoples' problems while solving our own?
When asking for things, I find it helpful to literally phrase the question in such a way as to make it easy for the person I'm asking to say yes. That is to say, if I can do legwork ahead of time, find the reasons why it is a benefit to support my plan, how the money spent will actually save money in the long run, etc, then I feel like I have a better chance of persuading my reader to agree and accept my proposed solution as the default solution. Of course, he/she can propose a counter-solution, which I welcome, but which also requires them to exert effort through research, time, energy.
An example: we have a new instructor teaching reading and writing this fall at ASC. Kris, my awesome coworker, recently realized that no one probably has talked to her about what textbooks to order for the Fall. Ordering textbooks can be a time consuming pain, especially the first time one teaches a class. I suggested Kris email her with the following: "Hi Lillian, I'm about to order my textbooks for fall [insert titles/ISBNs] and was wondering if you would like me to order enough for your sections as well?"
What I love about this approach is that we are more likely to get the textbook order done quickly. Often decisions are delayed because they take a block of time to concentrate, or the decision maker doesn't know where to start, or it isn't his/her first priority. Lillian will be traveling for the month of June. By giving her an already prepared default plan, an email to which she can simply reply "oh, thanks, that would be great!", we can get her books ordered and help her check that task off her to-do list, a task she hadn't even added to the list yet.
How can we solve other peoples' problems while solving our own?
Bee update May 27, 2011
Friday evening I checked on the bees at KW Farms. I was worried because I had called Trudi a few times to ask about the bees and she hadn't returned my calls. I know farmers in May are very busy, so that was understandable that she wouldn't have a moment to make a phone call. She did get a chance to call me Friday morning, but said she hadn't seen any bees on her new flowers that she planted. I prepared myself for the worst, which is to say, I prepared myself to find an empty hive box.
A few minutes after Trudi's call, I received another call, this one from my doctor with results from some lab tests earlier in the week. She wanted me to come in for more tests and transferred me to the scheduler.
How are these two phone calls related? I will attempt to explain how my attitude towards these bees and towards my health are related.
But I'll contextualize it with yet another digression.
Card making. Two years ago, I started making greeting cards with my friend Ellen and some other ladies. This hobby drives me crazy and yet teaches me patience. I sit with these women, gluing bits of paper together, lining up stamps to be centered and straight. And then I silently curse at myself when the bits of paper get crinkled, or the stamp is off-center and crooked. I glare at my creation, thinking how a kindergartner might have done a better job. Then we pass around examples of our work, and the ladies comment on the beautiful color combinations I chose, or the neat way I did X, which they had never seen before.
My point is that I have a tendency to focus on the negative first, to critically analyze, before appreciating the whole, or seeing the good parts of the big picture.
I did this behavior when I first opened the hive. Here is what I saw:
So, yes, there are bees, but very few bees. Damn, I thought. They're dying. They're weak. Bothe Kretsinger, Trudi and John's son, was with me so I talked in a stream-of-consciousness way as we examined the hive. (I may very well have talked to myself had I been alone, I'm not afraid to admit). As I talked through my anxiety, my fears, I started to realize a few things, started to observe the positive things going on in this hive. For one, the bees were putting away some honey. This is an excellent sign. There are flowers from which they are foraging. A second positive observation was that they were mellow, "queenright" as beekeepers say, meaning that they weren't freaking out/spazzy because the wasn't a laying queen sending out the right pheromones.
Once I started to see the positives, I started thinking from a positive frame of reference. I did some math. Since I installed the bees on May 7th, no eggs could have been laid prior to that date. It had only been 20 days, and worker bee gestation is about 21 days. So, the very first bee eggs laid would just be hatching later this week, while the worker bees who navigated the swarm process would have had to have been older, fully mature-winged bees, meaning they were nearing the end of their life cycle, and starting to die. It would make sense that there would be a window of time, this week specifically, when good things were happening in the hive (wax production, honey production, thousands of eggs being laid and tended to) with a general decrease in the overall number of bees and bee activity.
As I drove off from the farm, I wept. I was so happy to see these bees, so afraid that they were dead or dying, so focused on the negative that I forgot to look to the positive, to the things going well. I worry too much. I put too much emphasis on the success or failure of every hive, that it means *I* am a success or failure. And since I have this tendency to see the negative first, I forget about the successes of these three weeks of life, and instead focused on imminent death, the things I should have, might have, could have, done to make things better for the bees.
So, back to the test results. It's good that I see my doctor every year, that I take good care of myself. It's good to have follow up tests, and do whatever will be necessary. These are the positives, from which I can base a positive frame of reference for whatever will come next.
A few minutes after Trudi's call, I received another call, this one from my doctor with results from some lab tests earlier in the week. She wanted me to come in for more tests and transferred me to the scheduler.
How are these two phone calls related? I will attempt to explain how my attitude towards these bees and towards my health are related.
But I'll contextualize it with yet another digression.
Card making. Two years ago, I started making greeting cards with my friend Ellen and some other ladies. This hobby drives me crazy and yet teaches me patience. I sit with these women, gluing bits of paper together, lining up stamps to be centered and straight. And then I silently curse at myself when the bits of paper get crinkled, or the stamp is off-center and crooked. I glare at my creation, thinking how a kindergartner might have done a better job. Then we pass around examples of our work, and the ladies comment on the beautiful color combinations I chose, or the neat way I did X, which they had never seen before.
My point is that I have a tendency to focus on the negative first, to critically analyze, before appreciating the whole, or seeing the good parts of the big picture.
I did this behavior when I first opened the hive. Here is what I saw:
Once I started to see the positives, I started thinking from a positive frame of reference. I did some math. Since I installed the bees on May 7th, no eggs could have been laid prior to that date. It had only been 20 days, and worker bee gestation is about 21 days. So, the very first bee eggs laid would just be hatching later this week, while the worker bees who navigated the swarm process would have had to have been older, fully mature-winged bees, meaning they were nearing the end of their life cycle, and starting to die. It would make sense that there would be a window of time, this week specifically, when good things were happening in the hive (wax production, honey production, thousands of eggs being laid and tended to) with a general decrease in the overall number of bees and bee activity.
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| Bothe with the bees |
So, back to the test results. It's good that I see my doctor every year, that I take good care of myself. It's good to have follow up tests, and do whatever will be necessary. These are the positives, from which I can base a positive frame of reference for whatever will come next.
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