To my father, Bernardino.
This is the true story of how he taught me to call the bees.
"Heaven is love. Hell is love. What matters is how you make your journey there." - Balinese wisdom
Dear fellow explorers,
Birds are returning to Gandhi's Gardens. The breeze has changed, the scent and aromas in the air have changed. The light hours have changed. The paths that the trees' shadows follow under the sunlight have changed. They are now closer to their trunks, warmer, kinder, sweeter, like the words exhaled by a new lover. And... the trees have awakened!
But it's not only the birds and the trees. Also the bees, there are very few flowers yet in the gardens, but a handful of industrious city bees are skipping from blossom to blossom, in their joyful spring collection. I am sitting at a bench far from Gandhi, in the sunny side, near the bushes and observing the flight of my buzzy little friends. An intense memory floods my brain as I start remembering, inundating it with a different light...
I was 17 or 18, an insecure adolescent, living in a mid-sized town on the island called Tenerife, just off the Northwest coast of Africa. My dad, Bernardino, had been a farmer all his life, even after he had an accident that almost paralysed him from waist down. Fortunately, that didn't happen, and although he walks on crutches since then, life found a way to continue flowing: about four years after that accident he and my mother managed to conceive me, and three years later, they also conceived my little sister, Inma. Many times I wonder what would have happened if the accident had been any worse... I wouldn't be here... these sentences would have never been written... but that's part of another story.
