My life so far: 29,220 days and counting.

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Remember the Reader’s Zoom this Saturday April 11!  CLICK HERE to copy zoom link or to sign in on Saturday morning. Dialogue and discussion with Colleen O’Brien, author of Baited, a thriller based in Glacier National Park. We will talk about Nature and Place as characters in our stories. Starts @ 9:00 AM/Pacific US time—you can do the math.

And on April 16, 2026, I turn 29,220 days old. You can do the math. It means I was conceived on a hot August day with the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the trauma of WWII, floating molecules in the breath of my young parents. It means I was born on a spring morning in Montana when millions of my grandfather’s bees were hurling themselves from hives to clover buds and war crimes trials were starting up in Europe and Japan.

These 29,220 days are the time blocks that built my life. I have awakened in any number of moods on these days. I have wasted days, raced unthinkingly through hours as though life was an endless Instagram scroll. I have been brought to my knees with grief and awe, flung myself passionately into love and writing and work. I have made mistakes, bad choices, unwittingly caused harm, and wished I could roll back time. I am walking a yellow brick road with most of the bricks behind me and a decade that curves into terrain unknown.

And here I am, turning 80 years old.

I enter this birthday with profound gratitude. Still here. Still healthy and cogent. Living with a beloved partner and

Ann & me among the 8 million protesting.

held within—and contributing to—a loving community. And I have the stamina to keep practicing my passion for stories, for writing, for creating spaces where stories can be respectfully shared.

 I’m starting a Substack column called Backstories, because at 80 most of my stories are back there, trailing behind me, swirling around me, awaiting articulation into the unimaginably huge conversation humanity is having at this time.

Standing on this threshold, I have the audacity to pray for 3,650 more days. Another 1/8 of life and, in my aging body and eldering years, I vow to live ever more consciously. I not only want my remaining days to count, I want to literally count them. I want to see each sunrise as a copper coin and to deposit that penny at sunset into a pottery jar marked “Prayers for Change.” Or maybe I can construct a calendar filling one wall where I cross off each day, noting some gratitude, no matter the internal weather of my emotions or the terrors of the wider world.

I am old enough now to know the preciousness of time. I step into this decade with a sense of accomplishment and a sense of purpose. And on the day I depart—whenever and however that comes— I want my last word to be “Thank you.”

April 17—my first day of being eighty.

I received this as a gift and no designation of who it might be from. Whoever you are, thank you. I will plant many more words in this vase.

If you want to help me celebrate, the best gift you can give me is to go online and deposit good reviews for any of my books! They don’t have to be long or intricate, a few words to encourage the next reader. “I read Seven Whispers 20 years ago and it’s still on my bedside table…”  Or, “Life’s Companion is my favorite journal writing friend and teacher.” Or, “My book club loved The Beekeeper’s Question. Don’t miss this story!”

All these titles are on Bookshop,  Amazon, and in BookClubs.com. Please love on Alyssa’s amazing audio in Audible or Libro or Spotify–wherever you have downloaded it. You can recommend it on Instagram and follow me @ChristinaBeeTrue and on Facebook as The Beekeeper’s Question by Christina Baldwin.

And Thank YOU for being part of my journey and letting me be part of yours.

Pray for PEACE. Pray for JUSTICE. Pray for the children whose days are just starting that they may live in a new world we insist into being!

Place as a Character in Stories

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Next READERS’ ZOOM on APRIL 11, 9:00 AM Pacific.  See details at end of post.

The Body knows where it belongs. There seems some configuration in nature between the dropped fawn and the grassy knoll that receives it, between the river and the salmon that returns from the sea, between the bee and flower and darkened geometry of the hive. And even in my human blinders, I have experienced this for myself.

I was born in Deaconess Hospital in Great Falls, Montana and carried home to the rural homestead where my grandparents had homesteaded thirty-six years earlier. I was the second generation of Baldwins born on that homestead edging a tiny town. The first photograph of me I am four months old, July, my christening day. I am on a little blanket on the grass, torso sprawled, head lifted (cobra pose they call it in my senior yoga class).

Belly on the ground, on ground that still calls me, ground that holds my grandparents, parents, various aunts and uncles in the Sun River Cemetery. The Blackfeet here count ancestors going back ten thousand years. It will take me half a century to begin to reckon with the thievery that made this place a place I thought I belonged.

from Wikipedia

It was when I went to Europe, particularly into the English countryside, walking among the standing stones of Avebury, I had a different sensation of belonging. The ground came up through the soles of my feet, shaking me like lightening. I was filled with a kind of Earthy energetic programming. Though my Enlish ancestors immigrated to America in the late 1700’s, I immediately thought: this is what ancestral linkage feels like! This is what Native Americans feel when they walk the land we call Montana. The land they call Niitawahsin.

When I wrote The Beekeeper’s Question, the story demanded I “go home” to love and reckon with the place of my birth. Though fictional, the characters, the vocations, the struggles, the social issues all stream out of the place I come from. And everything happens in place, under the buttes, in the dry winds, the weather, the ways Montana shapes people’s characters.

Last fall I discovered Colleen O’Brien’s book, Baited, a mystery/thriller based in Glacier National Park and the small town of East Glacier, inside the borders of the Blackfeet Reservation. I enjoyed it both for the storyline and for O’Brien’s amazing use of place. Well—she lives there. She’s taught at Blackfeet Community College in Browning. She’s well acquainted with the Park, the rangers, the Blackfeet, the tensions of then and now. She stocks Beekeeper’s Question in her store, Glacier Park Trading. Seemed like a match.

We connected recently and decided to share the next READERS’ ZOOM on APRIL 11 (9:00 AM Pacific—check your timezone) to talk about PLACE as a character.  I am an author born in Montana who has always been a visitor and not a resident. Colleen is an author born elsewhere, now a resident. The books are our debut novels after careers in nonfiction. Should be fun. Click on the live link, above. Put on your cowboy hat and join us.

Saving the World: Saving the Stories

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Niece, nephew, and sister.

We have work to do to save what we most value in our world.  Well, we try. Keep trying. Keep reaching for each other. Managing our griefs. Across America people are activated. We will not stop. And we invite those who are wondering/wavering to join in. For decades of my life Minneapolis was my home. I know these streets, this weather, and the kind of people Minnesotans are. My family that still lives there is on the streets. Again. After George Floyd. After Melissa Hortman. After Annunciation Catholic School. Now, Renee Nicole Good.

On January 11, Simon Rosenberg, in Hopium Chronicles wrote:  “The world is deeply unsettled now. We don’t know how all this is going to turn out. We could lose, or we could win. But we will not win unless we understand the nature of the conflict we now find ourselves in and organize ourselves to win it. 

“To do this our Democratic leaders and all of us must far more consciously see themselves not just as legislators or party leaders or grassroots activists but as actors in a global battle for freedom and democracy. We must come to see ourselves as heirs to the American Revolution and the Post WWII Four Freedoms global system that made freedom – not dominion – the founding organizing principle of our country and the world, and recognize that it is our obligation, our responsibility, to lead this global fight – as we have for 250 years. We must be warriors for the middle class and working people, AND proud American patriots fighting for freedom and democracy here and everywhere – for our Founders declared that our inalienable rights included not just the “pursuit of happiness” but “life” and “liberty” too. And we must summon the power of those great American patriots who came before – Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, Dr. King – and other global freedom fighters – Churchill, Gandhi, Mandela – to inspire us in the years to come.”

Norman Rockwell illustration of the Four Freedoms

While writing The Beekeeper’s Question, I kept asking: “What have they/then got to teach us/now?” A lot, it appears.  I continue leading conversations about the values, theology, and moral code implicit in the story and in the country at that time. In his State of the Union Address on January 6, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt, laid out his vision of global human rights and the need for America to step onto the world stage and take up moral and military leadership in a world falling into fascism. (Remember that WWII started in Europe in September 1939, and by 1941, Hitler occupied the continent, leaving Britain to flight on its own while Churchill pleaded with the US to get involved.) When the US did enter the war eleven months later, it did so to carry out Roosevelt’s vision. And when the Cooper family listened to the radio, and dealt with the challenges of their community, they were informed and inspired by the Fireside Chats broadcast by their president. They were given the courage to do what must be done to wage the battle for freedom and democracy.

And here we are, dangerously abandoning the structures that have held some kind of global order together all the lifetimes of those of us alive on the planet. We find ourselves in a multi-faced “war” of myriad conflicts and bloody battlegrounds and “we don’t know how all this is going to turn out.”

At a library author panel last November, a women in the audience announced, “I want you to know I carry The Beekeeper’s Question in my car. Whenever I am in the ferry line or a waiting room, I read a few pages. I need them with me. They give me courage.” What a marvelous moment—to know the story is fulfilling my intention for it in the world.

The history of WWII has pretty much been written, but the stories continue to rise. In recent conversation with Alyssa Keene, the novel’s marvelous audio narrator, she used the word “blueprint;” that the actions, bravery, willingness to risk of people who lived during WWII provide a model for our own actions, bravery, and willingness to risk now. Alyssa has completed writing the first draft of her grandfather’s experiences being rescued by the French resistance and secretly passed to safety, so another blueprint is coming.  And things that were lost or disregarded keep coming to light.

Last summer, a tiny ad appeared on the local e-list: “1940s postage stamps, anybody want them?”

I do.

A little collection I could paste into signed copies of The Beekeeper’s Question, alongside letters I had made up between the characters of the separated newlyweds. Maire was writing from Montana where she’s gone to live with her father-in-law. Her soldier man, Franklin, was billeted in Northern Ireland and then fighting in the North Africa campaign. Letters—crossing the Atlantic in a mismatched timeline, crumpled into mailbags, riding the bowels of ship conveys (40% sinking rate in the early years of the war,) communication missing or repeated or uncertain of reception. This was how it was—the best that ordinary people could do. Sure, I’ll take those stamps.

I arrived to find this woman clearing out her garage, getting ready to move. I tell her why I want the stamps, offer her a copy of the book. We chat about that long-gone era of our parents’ generation. “There’s this box,” she says,  “War letters between my parents. My father’s Army memorabilia, photos, ration books, military instructions for an occupying Army. I don’t know what to with it all.” My eyes got large. “You want it?”

I do.

The box is sitting in my backyard office. I haven’t read the letters or tried to organize them by date (all those helpful stamps with postmarked dates were cut off and dumped into a little plastic bag, so the chronology of the envelopes is gone). I have sorted out some interesting booklets (see photo) and asked if Molly Guptill Manning, who wrote the acclaimed, When Books Went to War, and who curates the exhibit “The Best Read Army in the World,” if she wants them. I’ll find an archive that wants the letters.

I reached out to my friend and sister/writer, Gretchen Staebler, for advice. She has a published memoir about her years dedicated to caring for her mother (who died at age 100) and living in the house of her childhood—including everything her parents had ever saved. Including their World War II correspondence, and her father’s family’s war correspondence—a boxed cache of over 1500 letters. Eventually, she edited the letters into a privately published volume. She let me read some to help set the tone of letters between Maire and Franklin. We remain in a long dialogue about what impact the letters had in the moments of their exchange, in the lineage of a family, and where these might be deposited for a future we cannot imagine to find and explore.

Gretchen appeared with me on the January 17, readers zoom to talk about letter writing in the 1940s, the work of cataloguing and archiving, and how the realness of these exchanges reaches through time. 

Story in the Week Between Time

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NEWS for BEEKEEPER’S QUESTION READERS: Next Zoom call, January 17, 9:00 Pacific, etc. ZOOM LINK–CLICK HERE. Focusing on words from home: the importance of letters, pocket books, and the military press.  Now also available, CLICK HERE FOR November’s interview with Alyssa Keene, narrator of the audio edition.

 

The celebratory days are waning: Solstice, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa. Here in the North, it’s raining or snowing and the still imperceptible “return of the light” inches forward one more minute of sunrise at a time. The furnace is doing yoga breathing, recirculating warmth in my quiet house. We’re eating leftovers and cookies. I didn’t get cards out… Anticipation, which fueled the first three weeks of December, floats in the corners like stale incense.This liminal space is tiring. I  want life to tidy up.

Sometimes I cannot sleep unless I get up and write in my journal.

Sometimes I cannot write because the days are so packed with experiences, I cannot process one thing before another piles on top of it.

Sometimes I cannot process my personal life because I am overwhelmed by our collective lives and the trauma that accumulates in actual and vicarious ways.

Sometimes I sit by a small lamp in the otherwise darkened house and cry a river of emotional debris.

Ann and Vivi

Then I make a cup of calming tea, give thanks for the roof over my head, for the return of electricity after a two-day outage, for the steady recovery of my beloved from surgery, for the strength of community and friends, for my own stamina. I take a breath, here/now in the pause between one year and the next. I know the consumer world is crazy with post-holiday sales, the media full of retrospectives and predictions, but I want slowing down, touching in, space for my own contemplation. In this space between, I claim time to spin the wooly jumble of too-muchness into a narrative thread I can stitch into the new year. I take a breath. I write.

Not beautiful pages of inspiration or poetics—just shifting the accumulated overload to the page and book. And then I can take these narrative threads and begin to knit my way forward into January. Every year I notice how my mind weaves experience into story. My story. The way I say what is happening—to me, in me, around me: to us, in us, around us. History is what scholars and victors say happened: story is what it is like to live on the ground.

My collage for 2026

These are strenuous times to be living on the ground. Our primary task is to not be ground up, not be crushed, but to persistently proclaim our own perspective, to take our place in the story and believe in our individual and collective voice. Our stories, whether left shimmering in the electronic blogosphere, or stashed on paper in letters and journals, become a treasure for our own life review, for grandchildren, for archives, for the mystery of the long clock that ticks beyond our lives.

When I look into the well of the world and am faced with so many things I cannot fix, or address, or even touch from the boundaries of my life—I return to the storyline to reclaim empowerment, for myself and for others.

January 2nd, the local Write Café returns. Friday mornings at the senior center, twenty+ of us gather with our journals. We say hello, settle in, read the circle agreements, light an LED candle in our centerpiece. Jeanne or I read a poem. People choose any phrase that starts them off. We write in silence for thirty minutes. Then a round of gentle checking out before we exit into our lives until next Friday morning. There is a core group always welcoming new people. Versions of this are now happening on other mornings in other coffeehouses, hosted by members of the original group. The format is simple, replicable, and community- building.

January 24th, I am hosting a fundraiser for a local love of mine, Healing Circles Langley. People are invited to join in “Shaking Your Family Tree for Stories.” I’ve done a version of this several times on-line and am excited to bring a roomful of folks together to explore how we harvest stories from our lineages. Not only is storycatching a rich personal experience, but it also leads to stronger community. Communities are shaped by the stories of inhabitants: the story of the collective is held together by the stories individuals bring to it. So, the greater number of individuals who are engaged in honoring, writing, telling their own stories, the stronger we are as citizens of our community spaces. We stand strong in the truths of who we are, where we come from, what we have arrived at this place and time to contribute, and we see this same strength in the diverse stories of those around us.

January 28th I am taking these narrative threads to another level, teaching a five-week course, “Storycatching for the Times We Are Living,” for the Natural Transitions Institute. It is a deeply gratifying series and the stories shared at the end of the autumn cohort were touching and gorgeous. I am delighted to be repeating the offering.

  • Class 1:Storycatching for the Times we Live in.
  • Class 2:Narrative Arc in a Time of Chaos.
  • Class 3: Story as Sacred Activism
  • Class 4:Living a Mythic Story in the Midst of it All.
  • Class 5:Celebration, witness, and commitment to our words. (In a large cohort, this class will be repeated in week 6 so that every voice may be heard.)

Writing, teaching, bearing witness to one another is what I know how to do. It feels good to step into the new year able to continue sharing this life-long passion.

Thank you for coming along… for the ways you hold onto and spin your own narrative threads, and for the gifts you offer to the world from your own skills and passions.

My quote for the year is attributed to crusty old, trusty old George Bernard Shaw: “This is the true joy in life: Being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being a force of nature instead off a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

See you in the burning brightly!

A Hmmm in the Chaos

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In these tumultuous weeks of autumn, 2025, I have been thinking about the generations in my novel, The Beekeeper’s Question. The impact and uncertainty of a faraway war rocks the community of Pigeon River, Montana in 1942-43. The young are swept into the situation, into the pressures of living through. Chapter 2 ends with a scene in the Philadelphia train station where Franklin Cooper is leaving for deployment and Maire, his bride, is standing on the platform among other women and families. (p14)

“At 30th Street Station, she buried her face in his jacket, nervously twisting the brass button bright on olive-green wool. Franklin heaved his duffel onboard and jumped up behind it. His hand reached through an open window. Maire’s hand reached from the platform. The hiss of brakes releasing. Rail cars jerking. Fingers slipping. His hand waving among dozens of finger-tipped branches reaching from the train. He was a soldier. She was his wife. It was their war.”

Though circumstances are different, I hear a similar tenor of concern, endurance, determination to make a life in the midst of it all, in conversations with mid-life nieces, nephews, and our daughter. These conversations focus on the practical, applicable, manageable: How do I stabilize my employment? Get to the right place to make it through? Cope with rising costs for housing, cars, insurance, food, education? What’s going to still be in place when my children are grown?

And then there are the elders in the story: Doc, Leo, Josie. They are the holders of perspective and life experience. Doc and Leo talk about the edgy moment of their arrival, how the Homestead Act gave them land and title, how the Indians had been forced into reservations, and then how the presence of the Indian School and the suffering of Native children awakened them to history and social consequences they still grapple with decades later.

Doc, the only woman in her medical school at the turn of the twentieth century. Leo, carrying on a life-long discussion with the bees and the Bible. And Josie Shines the Light, attached to the spirit of the land and the soul of her people, protecting knowledge forbidden by colonization.

In a scene in Josie’s lodge, tucked in the backcountry hills of the reservation, Leo is crediting her with saving his adopted son’s life. (p128) Josie responds, “Your son owes his life to his own spirit and to Iistapatapiop, Creator. We who serve our people know each one must swim their own river. Jesse was drowning when he arrived, but he was reaching for the surface.”

Regret twisted Leo’s heart. “In that season of loss, I too was near drowning. I was not a good father when he needed me most.”

Her eyes bore into him. “He needed you most on the day he was born. You took him as your own. You gave him a name, a family, a childhood.”

Our circumstances are different, but in the peer conversations around me, I hear a similar awareness of how we both hold and cannot hold the generations behind us. These conversations focus on where we can exercise empowerment, protect moral values, take care of grandchildren, leave our stories for a future we will not see.

At a recent panel for community authors, one woman said into the crowd, “This is a book I keep in my car. Whenever I’m in the ferry line or waiting somewhere, I pull it out and read whatever pages come open. I need these people. They are spiritual guides from their time to our time.”

And now we can have it in the magical voicing that Alyssa Keene brought to the story. Join us for the reader Zoom, and a merry conversation on the spoken and written word.

SHORT – The Beekeeper’s Question Audio Sample Video

Hanging onto the thread

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The sky is streaked with lingering light.

Mid-October 2025: Before going into the storyline that I’ve been noodling on the past few weeks, I want to acknowledge the huge hingepoint we are in: Portland and Chicago under siege by the US president, Gaza in tenuous ceasefire and hostage release, Ukraine shouldering into another season of war. None of this goes away. All of this breaks our hearts one way and another. Pause. Breathe. Keep an open heart.

Moonset, early morning facing west.

In Chapter One of my book, Storycatcher, I write, “Life hangs on a narrative thread. … The thread is slender, but strong: we trust it to hold us and allow us to swing over the edge of the known into the future we dream in words.” Never have I felt this more than true than now. I am swinging over the unknown while the threads coming at me are a tangled mess of broken narratives, soundbites, AI concoctions, manipulated information, reels and threads and phone-held videos—some of them helpful, amidst all that is not. Some of them the warps of lies. The lies are the hardest to deal with—the assumption that I will simply turn over my own thought process, moral code, and reality to whatever they say is true.

Every autumn for 30+ years this backyard maple has turned golden yellow… this year it is turning crimson red.

It’s a mystery.

In this whiplash environment, in the debris field of narrative, the battle of the story wars rages. And I am doing my best to hold on to the storyline that is my life, one thin thread-of-selfhood stitching my way through these times.

Greenbank Farm– early morning dog walks.

I am repeatedly challenged to ask myself, “What is my storyline in all this chaos? How do I articulate and live out what is most important to me? How do I hold myself to purpose on a daily, even hourly, basis? When I wander, where do I go to find my thread again? Journal writing? Dog walk? Weeding the garden? Tea with a friend?

Many days, this constant need for self-redirection is strenuous practice. My capacity to put “mental arms” around huge quantities of information and story and to synthesize incoming data into coherence has been a lifelong gift and challenge. As I age, and as the quantity of incoming stimulation explodes around me, the double-edged nature of being a synthesizer becomes ever more apparent. This is my skill: and it requires focus in the midst of all the peripheral data and story.

It is exactly a year since The Beekeeper’s Question came out, and I realize how deeply that writing project and  background research held me to a core sense of purpose. Waking in the mornings, I would project myself into the hours of the day and look for writing time, research time, hours to fit my life with the Cooper family, the Shines the Light clan, and the wartime lives of folks in Pigeon River, Montana, into my life with my beloved partner and family, dear friends, and the lives of folks on Whidbey Island, Washington. My author question remained: What have they, then, got to teach us, now, about how to live through times of social uncertainty and war without assured outcome?

My parents & grandparents, aka: Franklin, Maire, Doc, Leo

People ask me: “What’s the sequel? How do Maire and Franklin, Jesse and Willow move through the postwar years? Why don’t you write the lives of Flora and Drum? Or Boyd’s journey through the war… Are you doing a screenplay?” Of course, I still have big dreams for this book and the potential that it could be a dynamic mini-series. And the reality is that a book is like a baby—it needs daily feeding, tending, reminding other people it’s still here. The Beekeeper’s Question is now a toddler, and I am holding its hand and walking with it into a wider world.

She who tends and translates the hummm of the hive.

 

This autumn I am also teaching on-line, offering lectures, co-hosting our local writing café. These activities counterbalance the many ways I feel incompetent dealing with on-line promotion, bookstore introductions, booking podcasts, or seeking reviews. It would be easy to give up–but I am the servant to the story. I spent ten years dedicated to this book. These incredible people live only the page and in the audio. They kept me going through DT’s first presidency, the pandemic, and most the years of my seventies. They are counting on my stamina to keep them alive. But now that I’m in the piecemeal tasks of book maintenance, I often feel lost as a writer.  I want my core back— I want a sense of holding onto the thread.

 I do not know if I will be able or willing to take on another huge project. In six months, I will turn eighty years old. I am basically strong, healthy, dealing with small health challenges, nothing life threatening. I can recite huge quantities of story and background research on World War II, beekeeping, Celtic Shamanism, labor issues in the 1940s, etc. etc. and then forget for a few seconds why I walked into the kitchen. Overall, okay. More than okay. Thriving in a serious hearted way.

Friends on the road. Friends in chemo and radiation. Friends in the hospital. Late Dahlias and prayer candle… going 24/7.

Meanwhile, three things I know to be true about myself. One, writing is a lifeline. Writing is spiritual practice, activism, tribal—and I will continue this never-ending story as long as I have fingers and mind.

Two, Nature is my holy place.  I need daily contact with earth/air/fire/water. Geranium in a flowerpot, a tree pushing up the sidewalk, beach stones rolling under the wave action remind me of the planetary interdependence to which I belong. Everywhere I have traveled, Nature is the biggest marvel and my touchstone. I am so grateful to live where I do—a modest house nested at the edge of wild.

Leucistic doe eating apples in the roadbed.

Three, my life is seated in community. I put my time and attention into loving engagement. I show up to community needs—from tending aging neighbors, to demonstrating, to facilitating places of repose.  I am getting ready for whatever shall be asked of me in all these crises. Loving the folks in front of me, steadying myself and staying strong.

Watch for surprises–like a rooster escaped from the chicken yard crowing his freedom.

So, holding onto the thread means touching the ground I stand on, for some time every day. It means staying in the swirl of reciprocity with people around me and in connection through channels like these. And it means that every day between now and my birthday I am going to write something—short or long, I don’t know, but to keep putting who I am to the page, to discover what passion and projects remain mine to do.

“Life hangs by a narrative thread.

This thread is a braid of stories that inform us about who we are,

and where we come from, and where we might go…”

If we can make the path by writing: write.

The heart of the world is always expressing itself… even the fir needles beg the wind to shape a heart in my meandering path.

READER ZOOM CONVERSATIONS RETURN ON NOVEMBER 22. 9:00 AM PACIFIC/NOON EASTERN…  This session will be a dialogue between Christina and Alyssa Keene, the actress who narrated the audio version of the book.  On Audible and 30+ other distribution networks–including Libro. You can buy it through any local bookstore that has an audiobook account.

Read/listen.

Join in for a delightful conversation.

Hear Ye, Hear Ye–AUDIO is up!

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Front Cover

The audio version of The Beekeeper’s Question is ready for your ears! It went live on Audible September 8, and there is a one-week sale—so order now. The book is also available on thirty-four other audio distribution channels—Barnes & Noble, Chirpy, Spotify—wherever you like to download audio books—you can find it. In the next couple of days, I’ll be make arrangements with Kingfisher Books in Coupeville, WA so you can order through an independent bookstore—but because of the shortness of the sale (Audible sets these things)—I wanted to get word out to you all as soon as possible.

To get the audio into your library loaning system put in a request through Libby or Overdrive—whatever they use, and they can order it.

Rehearsing for Shakespeare–so many words!

Who wouldn’t want this bright energy reading you a story?!

The voice of the story is local actress and voice coach, Alyssa Keene. In just the last six months, Alyssa has been a shining lead as Golda in Fiddler on the Roof, and Island Shakespeare Festival’s production of As You Like It. She brings professional quality and a deep empathy  into the book’s voices as she immerses herself in the complexities of accents, genders, and narrative. And we will both be on the Readers’ Zoom call November 22nd: what it was like to write it/me, what it was like to read it/her. And then—what it was like to listen to it/you all.

So now, The Beekeeper’s Question is available in all formats.  More unfolding in this relaunch and celebration of the book’s first birthday.

Autumn presentations and classes!

Inkspiration—on September 27, I am part of three presentations by journal writing pioneers–myself, Tristine Rainer, Jamie Pennebaker, and series organization Kathleen Adams. For registration and more information go to The Center for Journal Therapy.

Story circle Network—on October 4, Writing from the Heart, Virtual Conference, I am presenting in the midst of a great line-up on “Shaking your Family Tree for Stories.” This day is a bargain—early bird discount until September 26.

For a longer dive into the power of story, writing your own story, and “Storycatching for the times we are living”, my five session zoom class, sponsored through Natural Transitions Network on the five Thursdays of October is a rich opportunity.

MOST OF ALL –THANK YOU, for all the ways you support this creative, circle-ly, story wandering life of mine. And to know that my writing and teaching continue to be meaningful, well what a blessing. And finding meaning is a blessing we create together—shared experiences of life and story and bearing witness. The world is hurting and cruel, and wonderful, and inspiring. We’re in it together. And as Doc says in the book, “We’ll figure it out.”

Artwork used with permission: Queen of the Bees… she who puts honey in our hearts.

Watermelon, Smoke, and Rainbows

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Rich farmland– landscape that feeds the country.

I’ve been traveling in eastern Minnesota and western Wisconsin: a friend’s daughter’s wedding, family visits on both sides, book club presentations, bookstore stops. It is high summer. We put five hundred miles on my sister’s loaned car, most of it back country highways, verdant green farmlands, crops growing, landscapes familiar from my youth spent here over 60-70 years ago.

And also, hints that this is not the America of my childhood. I have been collecting random thoughts to serve as this midsummer blog.

One of the last remaining Dutch Elm trees which shaded middle America for most the 20th century.

On the day of the wedding the AQI (Air Quality Index) in Duluth, along the shore of Lake Superior where we lounged all afternoon in an extended garden party, was 189—dangerous to breathe. Smoke from Canadian wildfires yellowed the air. All athletic endeavors cancelled—no jogging, biking, doing anything to increase breathing and heart rate. Inconvenient for us: disastrous for the regions actually on fire.

view from our VRBO into the bay.

Meanwhile, flash flooding put millions of Americans at risk, and the search and rescue and disaster stories pile up out of Texas, New Mexico, New Jersey. People are swept away. Bodies may never be found. Families will have to find a way to move on. Trauma grows with every event: loss overwhelms my mind.

Ah, but here at the wedding, a couple is making vows to continue their love path, families gather whose values are long-held traditions. Teenagers splash into Superior’s icy waters, screaming in chill and delight.

Hot air: Cold water.

The path we were on as a society was not sustainable: the path we are on as a society is not a remedy. We are people holding together while things fall apart. We are parents raising little ones, young adults planning educations and careers. We are elders and grandparents worrying together, seeking wisdom among our peers. It is July, high summer. A grandpa carries a tray of watermelon slices to the edge of the grass. “Spitting range.” The children look confused: modern watermelon does not have seeds. Things are not the same. We continue to hold together. Things continue to fall apart.

Staring into the sunset, Ann shares a passage from the book she’s reading, Turning to Stone, Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks (Flatiron Books) by Marcia Bjornerud. Lake Superior is featured in the chapter on basalt.  “Earth makes no distinction between creation and destruction.” One sentence. The words settle my heart: I am allowed to rest in not-knowing, in being present within a loving community, in sunsets when the sun is a smoky peach, in the sand between my toes and the bedrock of an active and evolving Earth beneath. And you, too. Rest. Regather. Restore.

Bees and Buzz, Honey and Magic

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The next reader’s zoom call is May 24, 9:00 AM Pacific. Link at the end of the blog.

The first photograph of me, I am three months old, lying on a baby blanket in my baptismal dress on the lawn at my grandparents’ house. July, Montana, the buzz of bees pollinating raspberries and garden vegetables. My little body is stretched over summer-warmed grass.

I do not remember this in the comb of memory, but my body knows. Whatever ceremony has just occurred in the little Methodist church my grandfather stewards, the one occurring in this photo is the land itself binding me to this place.

That autumn, my parents will drive east to New Jersey where my father will continue post-War university studies.  I will spend my childhood in Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Minnesota. I will never reside in Montana, but the West will always feel like home, and the Baldwin family will long identify this homestead as its spiritual source.  What Jeannine Ouelette calls, “a cartography of self.”

The summer I am five, we take the train from Indianapolis to Great Falls so my father can work the honey harvest, and my mother can join the daughters-in-law putting up garden produce for winter. Here my Montana memories begin. Picking raspberries, running through irrigation water, sucking honeycomb, and bees. Bees. Bees. Finally allowed to ride out to the bee yards in the honey truck with my grandpa and an uncle, I watch them work hives amid the buzzing swirl.

On our way back to the homestead, one loose bee, caught in the truck cab, stings me on the hand. I remember the sharp pang of it, my howl of surprise. My grandfather plucks the stinger out and sucks my thumb to draw out venom— his hands a calloused tenderness, his lips a blessing. He tells me, “Brave girl, Chrissie, you’re a real Baldwin now.” I am carried into the kitchen, turned over to the women, baking soda applied to my sting. There is supper around a family table, ice cream on the porch steps. Stories float like pollen in the evening air.

If this sounds like origin story to The Beekeeper’s Question: it is.

Over ten years—with so many variations of story shifting into place—the constant was the vocation of Leo Cooper, a combination of Protestant theology in the human community and the “protestant ethic” of hard-working bees. I drew upon memory rising through the summer visits that immersed me in the family mythos. I created story out of my DNA—those mitochondrial snippets that fed a synthesis of personal history beyond my ken—and from hours spent watching bees in action—asking for their guidance.

I studied A.I. Root’s tome, The ABC & XYZ of Bee Culture, 1930 edition—the book my grandfather had propped on the bookcase next to his King James version of the Old & New Testaments. I read Tammy Horn’s BEES in America, How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation (University of Kentucky, 2005). I read The Hive, The Story of the Honeybee and Us (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2004) by Bee Wilson.

Honeybees were brought to America by early English settlers in 1620. “European colonists brought an agrarian philosophy that depended on cows and bees to extend and define an agricultural legacy inherited from classical Greek and Roman writers.”  (Let alone, Old Testament references to the land of milk and honey.) The Indians called them “white man stinging flies,” their arrival linked to westward press of colonization. And one of the cultural compatibilities that supported the horrific importation of Africans into American slavery was how deeply interwoven cows and bees were in many African societies.  “As long as settlers had cattle and bees, they could be assured of the basic essentials—food, wax, medicine, candles, and clothing.” (p19 Bees in America)

Bees came into the Baldwin family in 1915 when a neighboring farmer was drafted into World War I and offered his hives to my grandfather for the duration. The man lived, but wasn’t interested in the bee business after the war, so the operation became “Baldwin & Sons Beeline Honey.”  It grew to 500 hives spread out in a 50-mile radius that supported his eight children through the Depression and paid for college educations.

Homestead from the story

A lot of what Leo Cooper says in the story, comes from conversations with my father, Leo Baldwin, recalling his youthful years in Montana during his elder years living nearby.  He died in 2018, the book shaped enough that I committed to finishing it.

And then I came across Jacqueline Freeman’s profound gem, Song of Increase, Listening to the Wisdom of Honeybees for Kinder Beekeeping and a Better World (Sounds True Press, 2016) and was introduced to the shamanic aspects of beekeeping. See her interview with Seth Godin here. I wish I could have had these conversations with my dad.

A lot of what Maire Cooper experiences in the story comes from Jacqueline’s book, and The Shamanic Way of the Bee, by Simon Buxton (Destiny Books, 2004) which introduced me to the long lineage of Bee Priestesses, the Melissae. The interweaving of bees with Celtic shamanism was in Maire’s blood and in the story, Leo’s bees awaken that within her.

And then there’s Sara Leedom, a global storycatcher honoring the Indigenous ways of beekeeping. Sara showed up in my memoir class to write about her travels to remote honey hunters. While I stayed home and wrote, she attended international bee conferences, including one in England that brought her in contact with the Melissae.

So, there’s a lot to think about, and a lot to honor in the lineage of bees. On these warm May days, I’ve been greeting the bumblebees diving into my rhododendron blossoms and yesterday I parked by a bee yard just to listen to the hum. Wherever you live, watch for them, and watch out for them. And if you’ve read The Beekeeper’s Question, join the zoom and join the buzz. Here’s the link: Saturday, May 24, 9:00 AM Pacific.

If you have any trouble, contact: christina@christinabaldwin.com

May there be love and honey in all our days.

Trauma and Transformation

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Life is full of challenges. We grow by baby steps, facing risks, being supported by older/bigger/wiser folks around us. We learn to handle stress, expand our capacities, discover our resilience. And all this prepares us when challenge becomes trauma. Trauma is injury or emotional distress caused by events that overwhelm our ability to cope. Abuse, assault, battle, betrayal, drastic injury or illness: we do not wish traumatic events upon ourselves or each other, but they happen. We are triggered into trauma when events beyond our control veer out of control.

We are also fascinated by trauma—especially when it’s not our own. We seek out stories that allow us to travel vicariously through the drastic edges of human experience, cheering for people to learn, to thrive, and to show us the way. We understand that trauma is a hinge-point: it will make us or break us. The ‘hero’ comes through trauma incorporating wisdom; “I have suffered and here is what I learned.” The ‘villain’ uses trauma as a wrecking ball; “I was wronged by life, and you shall suffer for it more.”

Writers embed trauma in stories because trauma is embedded in life. In the formative years of writing my historical novel, The Beekeeper’s Question, an editor told me, “Do not protect your characters. They must make bad decisions, costly mistakes, hurt each other and choose what course their lives will take. When in doubt, make it worse.”

“Make it worse” became a mantra writing scenes for the story. World War II is happening: trauma is everywhere. I had to write about this within the perspective of that time. The US Army in the North Africa campaign (where the young soldier, Franklin, is sent) applied what was called “forward treatment,” shipping overwhelmed soldiers to a field hospital putting them into an induced sleep cure for a week, and then, supposedly rested, sending them back to the front. Though trauma has always accompanied soldiers home from war, society didn’t address it as a collective issue, just sent survivors to their families and communities and hoped they’d carry on.

After the Vietnam war, the 700,0000 American servicemen and personnel who required psychological help, taught us that unaddressed trauma escalates in delayed response. The persistence of what was named “post-Vietnam syndrome” led to defining Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and opened up the study of trauma. My friend Michael Orange, a Vietnam veteran, helped me “make it worse” for the character of Franklin Cooper, the beekeeper’s son confronted with war, battle, and physical trauma.

Trauma is also present in the experiences of the women in the story: sexual assault, miscarriages, beatings, deaths of loved ones. Maire, Franklin’s wife, suffers from nightmares and anxiety. Willow, her sister-in-law, carries both the spiritual wisdom and intergenerational trauma of her Blackfeet people. In fact, women are twice as prone to PTSD as men but their trauma, often arising out of domestic life, is persistently discounted as an aspect of being “the weaker sex,” and enduring “women’s conditions.”

For those who have read The Beekeeper’s Question, I will be hosting a dialogue with Michael author of, Embracing the Ghosts, PTSD and the Vietnam Quagmire, and his wife Cynthia author of, Shock Waves, A Practical Guide to Living with a Loved One’s PTSD on the role of trauma and PTSD in the book. The ZOOM is MARCH 22, 9:00/Pacific—do the math for your time zone as needed. Click here to register. This takes you to my email–ask and I send you the zoom link.

The 1940’s has many echoes of then to now, and those echoes only grow stronger. I found a tee-shirt on Etsy printed with the slogan: “If you’ve ever wondered what you would have done in 1930s Germany, you’re doing it right now.”

Trauma is a catalyst. It shifts our lives—ready or not. The person we become depends on the choices we make in response to trauma. The same is true for communities and countries as we collectively respond to war, oppression, natural disaster, regime change. We become how we respond. The year 2025 is exposing trauma from the personal to the global—and we cannot avoid it. We are in a hinge-point of reckoning.

Image from social media.

As an American born just after World War II, I have been steeped in the mythos that mine is the “greatest country on earth,” that we are forever the righteous victors. I have been steeped in arrogance that American character, our delusions of the self-made (white) man, should be a model for all of societies. We are Americans: we can do anything we want, and the world will be better for it.  Evidence to the contrary disregarded. Welcome to our reckoning.

We are living through a huge shift in how we be human on the planet. We are collectively deciding whether we descend or ascend in our basic nature. Reckoning at this scale is terrifying. No matter how much we read, scroll through news sources and analysis, we cannot get true perspective. We are small and the issues are huge. We are embedded in the moment like tiny pieces in the world’s biggest jigsaw puzzle. Yet anyone who does jigsaw puzzles knows even the tiniest missing piece impacts the whole. We are needed—everyone of us—to stay present and play our part, to fit ourselves into the pieces around us, to make a pattern and a story within the perimeters of our lives.

Americana Art Enterprises: The world’s largest commercially available puzzle called What a Wonderful World is an 8′ (2.4m) tall by 29′ (8.8m) long 60,000 piece world map.

It took me ten years to channel the enormity of World War II through the microcosm of Pigeon River, Montana and the lives of the Cooper family. And now I am challenged, in my aging years, to live through this crisis in the microcosm of Whidbey Island, Washington and my own life and community. As I stagger out of winter’s shock, in the greening of early March, I am determined to use every added minute of light and each unfurling bud to rise, to meet trauma with transformation. I take the tiny piece of my life and snap it into connection, find the adjoining pieces, and act with trust that the whole picture will emerge—whether or not I live to see it.

Page 101, The Beekeeper’s Question: it is August 1942.

Rocking on porch chairs waiting for night breeze, Leo whispered into the dusk, “This war is a three-headed dragon, each black mouth round with teeth, consuming young men.”

“That’s surely the strain of it,” Doc peered skyward, “We don’t know what will become of them. Or us. Or our country.” Caged between the Big and Little Dippers, Draco the Dragon writhed in the night sky. … Doc stared at the cosmic expanse of the Milky Way.  “You’re the local preacher and I’m an old country doctor, what can we do?”

            “Help people live through the sacrifices required of us now.”

Even if you’re a rusty, one-legged scarecrow, you have a job guarding tulips. Let’s go…