“Last night, as I was sleeping, I dreamt – marvelous error! – that I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures.”  — Antonio Machado.

I learned some time ago that every humbled life has learned what I know. The sweetness of living comes to me when the vulnerabilities I try to hide, the flaws and shameful secrets are worked by time and nature and living into honey all their own.

“Ultimately,” wrote the author and humanist Mark Nepo, “it is where we are not perfect, where we are broken and cracked, where the wind whistles through – that is the stuff of transformation.”

Dear God, I have been transformed. I realized when I started my blog that I very rarely saw people online share their mistakes. It’s a magical place, sometimes, where people go to polish up their images and keep their mistakes to themselves (they love my mistakes, though.)

I resolved not to do that, and I undertook the hard and continuing work of facing the worst parts of myself and owning up to then. Suddenly, I had no awful secrets to hide. They were all out there.

The surprising thing for me was learning that telling the truth about the worst parts of me also brought out the best parts of me.

A reward, maybe, for being honest. The golden bees have feasted on me, but they gave me sweetness in return.

The pandemic is a great teacher. We can’t rush through life right now; we have to think about things. We can’t take things for granted; we have to feel them and make decisions for ourselves, sometimes for others.

I need less, I spend less.

The pandemic strikes when and where it wishes, something we are grudgingly learning.

We are all getting a lesson in mortality and grace.

We either treat each other better, or we treat each other worse. A choice each of us has to make.

We either learn from our mistakes or just make more.

The coronavirus is a moral happening; it challenges us to know who we are and make ethical decisions all the time? Go outside? Shop? Wear a mask? See Friends? Save money? Do good?

When it seems that things are falling apart, I learn that they are not. Hope and faith are inside of me, my job, not outside. Even a pandemic can’t break my spirit.

Each time I’ve failed at being what I wanted to be, or what someone else wanted or needed me to be or hoped for, each time I failed at love, or was cruel and thoughtless, or said or wrote things I regretted, or succumbed to fear, I learned things I never knew but needed to understand.

That has helped me now.

The virus reminds me of all of my mistakes.  It has taught me the sweet taste of survival and growth.

It has already changed my life. I’m helping to rescue feral cats. I’m writing about politics. My friends and I helped hungry people eat. I’ve gone solar. I have a car that gets 41 miles a gallon, and a Composter named Oscar.

I am reminded almost every day that Grandma Moses was right. Life is what you make of it. So are pandemics.

We helped the Mansion stay safe. I feel healthy and energized and purposeful than ever.

I learned to listen to my wife and step out of myself and hear her fear and worry.

I got to be alone, which is food for my soul. I learned to write better and more honestly. I learned to love my typos.

I made some friends and helped some others, and cast off a few more.

None of this lessens or erases the pain of life, but it gives me great comfort, even pride, to know that my failures, my countless stumbles, and falls, is the very human mix from which I am transformed,  mistake by mistake, and made whole – the honey in my soul.

I know now that when everything seems to be falling apart, I am just combing the ground for something rich, something that can’t be seen, just tasted and felt.

Something better than before.