Did you ever notice how just a tiny adjustment or shift can make a big difference in your life?

On a freezing cold morning, sitting in an ever so slight ray of sun through a window, glancing on your back, the chill begins to thaw…

A partner snoring on his back, keeping you awake, when gently poked, will roll over on his side, stop the sound and allow you to finally catch a whole night of sleep.

For some, it’s just about as simple as getting up and putting clothes on to face another day.

Or a conscious small shift in an old thought pattern, making a dark mood lift and the whole day look brighter.

Recently a friend posted a wonderful thing on Facebook. A comic strip celebrating how the small, seemingly inconsequential moments in a relationship are really what build the foundation. Take a look at the beauty of mundane moments captured in comics..http://www.upworthy.com/24-relationship-comics-that-illustrate-the-beauty-in-the-mundane-moments?g=2&c=ufb1

Bees teach me about incremental, small steps. Paying attention to tiny details. Mundane truths. They are all about this. Tending to that small stuff. Daily.

My M.O. is often about getting the biggest and best results by throwing alot of resources in one direction. I like to see things change. Transformation.

But bees are more subtle. They are tiny. The scale of what is best for them is often much different than my giant size requires. To think like a bee takes a regular readjustment in my brain.

I’ve been known to overwhelm my bees with honey, in my eagerness to make sure they don’t starve this winter. If they need a little, then, by gum, 10 times as much should be better. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out so well. The colony had reduced, death likely due to varroa mite infestation,  and couldn’t absorb all that nectar of the gods. They were flooded and the honey dripped everywhere. Now they are plagued by ants.

When I finally opened the door, one warm day recently, the pile up of bees inside made my heart sink. But suddenly, as I freed the door, a bee here and a bee there began to dart out and soar above the hive. Finally freed from their tomb of death

These days, they hang out on the front stoop of their hive on any warmish day, sunning themselves in little gangs. I wonder what the news is from the hive. Are these the sole survivors? Is the queen alive? A hive can become as small as a fist and still survive. But they’ve gotta be tough. We shall see in a few months when I open the hive…

Meanwhile, life has returned, merely by opening the door and sweeping out the dead bees. I’ve moved the hive into the full sun, so they can catch as many rays as possible, since the sun is like mecca for honeybees. It reorients them and warms up their cold blooded little invertebrate bodies. Maybe they will live after all.

And I continue to try to learn the lessons of increments. Small steps. Tiny adjustments. Learning gratitude for the mundane and daily moments, even as I live into this vocational transition in my life. No external job or frame of reference for my ego.

In these crazy times, when so much in the world around seems out of whack, it helps to stay tuned to the mightiness of the small in the humble honeybee.