My experience of gardens is that they are always teaming with life. What allows for the flourishing in the garden space are all the critters, fungi, and microscopic beings. You often must look or feel deep within the space to notice and recognize all the eating, lounging, exploring, and pillaging that occurs in the garden ecosystem. In this summer harvest, I have been witnessing the wildly intimate relationships between bees and summer squash. The squash begins as this lovely flower that opens itself to the world to, at times, be greeted by the bee. The flower produces orangish-yellow pollen that I imagine must be intoxicating for the bee as they are so deeply engaged and involved with the flower. Just one bee at a time. I notice the little ones just covered in the pollen, working, resting, and being. At times, they stay awhile, and the flower closes a bit to shade the visitor. And then the parlance ends. When this process occurs, the squash matures and grows with delicious proportions.

They are doing all this work to live, eat, survive and in-kind we are also given the gift of squash abundance. I am not even discussing the impact of the soil (alive and thriving), the water that feeds, and other plants and flowers in the garden that help to protect the precious produce. I am no botanist or horticulturalist, so I do not really know all scientific happenings in these relationships. I arrive at these conclusions through my witnessing. Then we eat. We all eat. In the natural world, teachers are abundant. This is unity in practice.