About the Bee…

By Kristy Klein Davis

Two summers ago, I tore everything out of the flower beds in front of my house. A late-night, National Geographic-inspired Google spree left me a little obsessed with pollinators. So I planted coneflower and mountain mint and milkweed and a collection of other things I was assured the bees and butterflies would love.

They did.

By the second summer, the front yard was alive. Bees everywhere. Butterflies. Birds picking through seed heads. Plants bloomed and died and reseeded themselves in places I hadn’t put them. Some took over. Others quietly disappeared. This summer, more things have changed (we have a fox!), and I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time watching my little ecosystem do whatever it is going to do, much of it without any help from me.

At the same time, I’ve been wrestling with a very different question about what it means to be effective. Somehow, I keep coming back to the bees.

A bee has work to do. She moves from flower to flower, gathering what she needs and carrying something to the next one in the process. Her work matters enormously to the life around her. But she isn’t responsible for the garden.

If we have a dry spell, the bee cannot make it rain. If the soil becomes inhospitable, the bee cannot adjust the acidity. If I get a wild hair and tear out half the plants, the bee cannot “work harder” to replace what I’ve taken away. And the reverse is also true. If the garden flourishes, it would be equally strange for the bee to take credit for the whole thing. The garden thrives because all of it exists together.

That feels obvious when I look out my window. Less so when I think about how we understand our own work. There is something comforting about the idea that effectiveness can be made objective.

Decide what we want to accomplish → determine how we’ll measure it → do the work →  see whether the number moves.

We want to know that our work mattered and that we used our resources well. If I’m honest, I think we also want to believe that if we do the right things, the right things will happen.

But the things many of us care most about — health, trust, belonging, community — don’t happen in isolation. They emerge from people and policies and institutions and relationships and histories and choices, interacting in ways we can sometimes see but often can’t. A policy changes. A relationship forms. A hospital stays open. A neighbor drives someone to an appointment. Someone hears something that changes their mind. Funding disappears. A family steps in. A door opens.

Something changes. Who gets “credit” for the change?

The people and communities we care about are not the products of our interventions; they have lives that are already in motion. They love people. They lose people. They get irritated with their children. They stub their toes. They eat a really juicy plum over the kitchen sink. They worry about money. They laugh. They build relationships and end them. They inherit histories. They change their minds. They have terrible Tuesdays and perfectly ordinary Thursdays. They are changed by conversations we will never hear and by people whose names will never appear in our reports.

They are not waiting for us to create their lives.

We enter the story somewhere in the middle and, if we’re lucky, perhaps we bring something important to it. Resources. A relationship. A new possibility. A policy change that alters what is possible. Sometimes our small piece may change the direction of the story considerably.

But it is still their story.

There is humility in remembering that.

We have work that is ours to do and we should do it extraordinarily well. We should pay attention to what happens, learn from it, and change when what we’re doing isn’t useful. But we don’t get to claim the garden. And when something enormous is removed from the ecosystem, we don’t become responsible for replacing it simply because we’re still there.

The bee keeps doing the work that is hers to do, in relationship with everything around her.

Maybe that’s the part of effectiveness I’ve been struggling to name. I’ve been returning to Victoria Safford’s beautiful essay, “The Small Work in the Great Work,” which draws on an idea from theologian Matthew Fox. How do we take our small work seriously without mistaking it for the Great Work? How do we hold ourselves responsible for what is ours without imagining that the whole belongs to us?

There is something both humbling and liberating in accepting that we are not responsible for everything. We are responsible for something. Perhaps the work is to know the difference.