The Beehive
Happy new year everyone. Welcome to this newsletter’s first post of 2026.
A few announcements:
In the spirit of Raw Material, I’ll be including more medias in these posts moving forward. Today’s post is my first attempt at adding doodles, which I think are delightful. I hope you like them, too. Shoutout to Nick Gerard for helping me with the layout.
On January 4, the Raw Material community lost a little chihuahua named Leo. He belonged to Mary Ann Eddy, one of this newsletter’s earliest paid subscribers. In honor of the two of them, here’s my humble homage to Leo, who was much more handsome in person:
The Beehive
Not long after New York went on lockdown in 2020, the New Yorker published this cartoon by Hilary Alison:
I consumed a lot of content during lockdown (Joe Exotic this one’s for you) and to be frank I’ve forgotten most of it, which is probably for the best. Alison’s drawing, though, I think about often. Very often. Like a lot. On the day this cartoon landed in my inbox, the reality of lockdown had started to sink in for me and, from it, the realization that I had many slates of unfilled time ahead. This generated an existential, internal kind of panic within me, which I’ve come to refer to as the beehive.
The beehive tends to awaken in the face of unstructured emptiness, as if empty space was a state to avoid at all costs. As the rhythm of lockdown settled in, the bees promised to keep me safe. “Don’t be afraiiiid,” said the bees. “With all this time, you’ll finally learn Japanese.” And bake three times a day, brew beer, start sourdough, ferment everything in the house. Write the anthology of poems I never started in the night. Train my body for the Olympics at dawn.
They can be quite useful, these bees. They keep me alert during intense periods of work, they make sure I stay fit, they push me to produce, to do more, to do better and all the time. The bees I carry are very busy, you see, and they expect the same from me.
Stuck in a storm of incessant buzzing, Alison’s drawing helped me see that I’d turned into our friend in the rowboat, reaching for fillers that would make me feel productive to distract myself from the obvious fact that I had no control over external chaos. For a second there, the absurdity of it made me smile and I felt less alone.
If I had things my way, the mind-blowing aha moment I experienced with Alison’s cartoon would have immediately led to Clara’s Peace Treaty with the Unknown. But self-awareness rarely kicks in when you want it to.
Two weeks ago, we landed in San Jose and I realized I’d brought the beehive.
This was not the plan.
I’d been mentally preparing for this trip for weeks; I’d meditated and pictured my Higher Self embracing the golden stretch of time that sits between the end of one job and the start of another. This Higher Self laid like a well-hydrated starfish on the sand, manifesting her wildest dreams by the ocean, smiling in pretty cotton fabrics, thriving, rejoicing, oh so immaculately relaxed.
Needless to say that, in these visions, the beehive stayed at home. When I reached the airport customs, I looked at the officer through the security glass and hoped he wouldn’t notice the horde of bees dancing in my chest. What was happening? Why the hell were they buzzing?
“Why did you come!” I asked the bees at the baggage claim. “Why are you here??” My chest tickled—shit, I thought. They were excited. “OooOOOOOoooh but becaaaauuuuuse! With all this tiiiime! Think of how busy we will beeeeee!”
The constant thrumming and the weight that comes with carrying a nest of frenzied bees are standard experiences for me at this point. In the last few months especially, those sensations had become so familiar that I’d begun to accept them as my natural state, and the beehive and I went about our daily life, tucked in our duffle coat.
The problem with these bees is their inability to read social cues. It doesn’t matter to them that I open a book, close the bedroom door or stick my headphones in. As far as they’re concerned, they’re always invited. In fact, the quieter the better; the bees I carry want to be heard. Through trial and error, I’ve gathered that the bees can only be tamed from the inside. They dissipate in the airiness of focus and they retreat if I ignore them.
Which is why, stepping out of the airport, I became increasingly upset at me. What was wrong with me? Why wasn’t I feeling instant relief or spreading rays of light and joy? What else could I possibly need? I tried to scare myself into relaxation: RELAX IMMEDIATELY GODDAMMIT! Maybe anxiety could disappear like a bad case of hiccups (it doesn’t). We left the airport and drove for hours towards the jungle. The beehive continued to bang against my chest to the beat of bumps and potholes we rode over. The path to heaven was getting rough.
Then the road curved and led us over a strait of water. To our left, we spotted twinkling strips of ocean and all the plants I’d assumed were native to Williamsburg rental units in their natural habitat. Hallelujah! But before we could sing it, the car hit a dip, and we tried to rejoice but we had to focus on the road and I thought what will I do with all this time, where are we going, why can’t I relax—and then, something miraculous happened: I remembered Alison’s cartoon, and I laughed.
I couldn’t tell you why I thought of that drawing in that moment, maybe because driving on these dirt roads made our bodies rock like dinghies in a storm, but that night, we settled into a treehouse perched in the middle of the jungle, and the bees started to whisper.
My mornings now consist of observing howler monkeys hunt for leaves, and meditating to the songs of blue-tailed, multicolored birds called motmots. At some point between ten and noon, I gather myself and move a little before the air becomes too hot to do anything but nap. Before the day ends, we drive to the beach and watch the sun melt into the ocean until it becomes nothing but a glow hovering above the water. Otherwise, we eat, we read, and we breathe very slowly.
I don’t know how I did it either. Maybe I should’ve opened this post with a disclosure. All I know is that it’s nighttime now and the bees are gone. I can only hear crickets singing through the jungle. And maybe that’s enough.
See you soon,
Clara
P.S.: I dedicate this post to Naïma, my overactive powerhouse of a friend before she embarks on her own terrifying week of nothingness. We believe in you!
Lovely
Thank you. Know I am always rooting for you