Shadows in the Forest

Redrawing Your Borders with a Sharp Blade

There is something lurking in the woods. The Humming Meadow runs up from the road in a riot of dandelion and clover, sprawling in sunlight and song. A creature moves slowly there at the edge of the meadow-light, amid forgotten stone walls and ancient farm equipment rusting under the weight of more seasons than you and I have even seen.

It lurks and it threatens my future.

This was all too evident yesterday when my neighbor sent me a photograph. He’s a good man, jovial and kind with a knack for hunting and tracking. The photo caused me to grit my teeth and sigh though. A young black bear. Its youth makes it dangerous to me. An older bear would be cautious. It would know where to find skunk cabbage, tender shoots, the carcasses of animals that didn’t survive the winter. All food not associated with humans. But a young bear? It’s still learning. It hasn’t yet tasted the consequences of bad decisions.

My neighbor explained the bear had been behind his house, then lingered, unbothered, for half an hour in his driveway.

The driveway just across the road from my apiary.

I pulled on my tall green mud boots, the ones I wear for all homestead chores. We do not mow much in May, so the grass is long and heavy with dew and night rain. I walked down to the bee yard, where our twelve new hives stood housing approximately 125,000 bees, each busy collecting dandelion nectar from our little humming meadow.

The fence surrounding the yard hummed too, faint but fierce. A click, click, click every few seconds from the power source like a metronome. The grass was growing tall, brushing up against the lowest wire. That might not sound like a problem, but too much vegetation touching an electric wire creates a path to ground. This bleeds the current out, the charge weakens, and the shock that teaches a bear to leave the hives alone is defanged. Eventually, the fence goes quiet, and a curious snout pushes through.

I could take a weed whacker to it or I could cut the power and drag a mower through. Either would disturb the bees though. Loud, buzzing machines right next to their front doors? That’s a good way to get stung and, more importantly, interrupt their golden work. The solution, like so many solutions to our modern ills, lies in older tools. I went in the honey house, our outbuilding, and grabbed my sickle.

A hand-forged sickle from an etsy shop.

There is an incredible amount of relaxation to be found kneeling in an apiary, the activity of thousands of bees just above your head, while you quietly cut the grass by hand. Easy to forget about the modern world and all its ills as you gather the offending grass into a small bushel and slice. Gather, slice. Gather, slice.

It is meditative work, yes, but not sentimental. This is not just some quaint, rustic moment for the sake of aesthetics, for the vibes. I am maintaining a boundary. I am drawing a line and declaring, “No further.” That bear cannot understand this and the fence only works if I tend it. Every day I let the grass creep closer is a day I weaken the veil between order and ruin. That’s true for a bee yard and it’s true for everything good, everything that matters.

If you care about anything, your home, your children, your faith, your peace of mind, you need to learn how to draw and maintain boundaries. Not in one great push but again and again. In the rest of this essay, I’ll show you how kneeling by a simple fence revealed to me something deeper about the lines we must draw in life and why defending them matters now more than ever. You’ll learn what you need to do and how to respond when our wounded modern world pushes back and lashes out. It will. It already is.