From atop a mountain: Living, writing, etc.
Larisa Jašarević
Photographs: Larisa Jašarević
“Your life’s over,” my mother says. The verdict is predictable, coming from a practical Bosnian Muslim woman whose modern socialist upbringing predisposes her to thinking about “life” in terms of tangibles: fashionable wardrobe, cosmopolitan travels, clever kids, and a neat home. The list goes on: a rising career and high aspirations but feasible, daily to-do lists.
I could never live up to the expectations, but this was the first time that I had utterly disappointed. I had resigned from a teaching post at a North American university to live and work at our father’s land on a mountaintop in northeastern Bosnia. She herself had retired to the village to accompany my father when his heart condition expelled him from the city notorious for air pollution.
I’m the only anthropologist in our village. At the going rate of migration, my mother and I may soon be the only people left in our hamlet whose residents are searching for jobs and “life” elsewhere.
I start this “back to nature” story with my mother’s voice because our mothers—bless them—usually have a point, whether or not we like hearing it. And because they care that we live happily, which makes it hard to argue with them. Besides, my mother, a retired economist and a life-long poet, knew first-hand what caring for the land meant. Especially for a single, slender woman. Garden tools are mostly androgynous, but some items in the thesaurus of toil presume an effort that is strenuously muscular. Think of a felling axe or a scythe.
At least my research project was going well. Several years into my ethnographic fieldwork, I was getting a better sense of how local honeybees and their beekeepers weathered the effects of climate change as well as how Islamic ecological sensibilities framed people’s expectations of environmental wreckage, human responsibility, and the last chances.
It was the research process itself that connected all the dots, the biographical and the ethnographic: honeybees and our father’s land, local Sufis’ lessons and my past academic teaching, ruinous new habits of weather and a search for “a life” on this altitude.
Keeping bees (is heartbreaking)
Getting honeybees was an impulsive decision, although it rested on sound reasons. How could one conduct research on apiculture without getting to know the bees hands-on, I had argued to my family. Our land would be perfect for the bees, and the bees would do good to its many fruit trees, berry patches, and vegetable gardens.
The first hives of bees arrived at the backseat of our father’s beat-up old Škoda van—“Škodillac,” as we’ve nicknamed it. Buckled in, the two hives were droning, unsettled, as my sister Azra and I slowly rode the winding road up our mountain, avoiding the many potholes in the dark.
One hive at the time, the four of us fumbled our way from the car to the hillside designated for the apiary. Our parents’ flashlight showed the way through low-lying, thickly-woven tree canopies. Cradled in our outstretched arms, the roofless hive was bobbling to the unmatched rhythm of our steps as Azra and I climbed. Cautiously, lest we slip and break open the box of startled, irritated bees. Bees were clustered beneath the underlid and only the strapped wire mesh kept apart our human-apian bodies. Our rapid breaths above their heads, I imagined, sang unnerving lullabies.
Our father had set the concrete block foundations for the apiary, while our mother had painted the wooden boards of the hives’ stand. We pulled tin roofs over the boxes and removed damp sponges from the hives’ entrances. With these final touches, the bees landed.
The bands of crickets blasted the summer’s usual. Come dawn, the bees would find their doorway lit up early with sunrise: facing southeast, as is recommended by the local beekeepers, the hives turn toward Ka‘ba.
Years later, our land is unthinkable without the honeybees. Insect appetites and hives’ efforts—swarming, brood building, and foraging—attune us to the seasons even more than the resident plants. And because the weather is becoming unseasonal to the extreme, beekeeping is also heartbreaking.
I cannot quite explain the nature of this heartbreak though I keep trying. What I could show you is what it feels like. We would open the wooden boxes or tilt the one wicker skep we have. Take in the scent of the hive, its fragrance at once deep with amber and wax notes and fresh with the zing of floral nectar. Watch them. Our bees’ soft down comes in all hues, umber and strawberry blond, medlar red and chestnut brown. When they swarm or ventilate the hot hives, shimmering wings is all you see. It is the original cinematography, out in the open, with the cast of hymenoptera, the membrane-winged beings. The human eye becomes an organ of awe, witnessing the show of the visible and the mystery of light.
Note the two bees in what looks like an embrace, their proboscises touching. They pass nectar, drop by drop, from the forager who collected it to the housekeeping bee who will treat it with enzymes, ventilate it, and finally deposit it into cells. It takes an astonishing amount of insect effort to turn miniscule floral offerings into honey.
Unless you are a nuisance or a threat, the honeybees do not register your presence. They give you neither loving gazes nor a recognition for your service or neglect. Given chance, however, bees could displace you from the center of your own attention.
Rest an ear to the side of the hive, warm and fragrant, in a summer night. Watch the skies above, strewn with stars, flickering flames. When the speech falls silent, the bees’ humming, arising from within the combs, makes the up and down, the celestial and earthbound, human and apian relative: as in relate. Our senses, extended outwards, no longer distinguish between things and beings, here and there. Whether it is the hidden bees that glimmer or the stars that drone in the celestial combs, you are caught between them, enclosed in the circle of their invocation.
Local Muslims say that bees’ humming sounds like a dhikr of human dervishes. When seated in a circle, they are chanting: “Huwe, Hū,” the root of all divine names. The Revelation describes honeybees as the prophetic species and prophets are known as God’s close friends or lovers. When you are friends with someone, you love them and long to be with them. If they are far away, you keep them on your mind, so as to stay close at the distance. Invocation is just that: calling out to the dearest and the closest whose distance feels too great to bear.
If you come visit us at the time of nectar dearth, which now happens more often than not, you can join us in bottle-feeding the hives with sugar syrup. Or we may give them sugar patties that substitute nectar and pollen. This is what local beekeepers increasingly have to do to keep bees alive because honey flow is waning. As a veteran beekeeper told me in 2021: “I’ve never poured so much sugar into the hives.” That summer was dismally hot, but weather was rough on bees and their plants throughout the year, beginning with dry, mild winter. Believe it or not, at the root of honey is snow.
I write “sugar” and feed it to the bees with a sinking heart. Those who call honey “a sweetener” (it’s like calling an ocean or a river “a liquid”) can easily miss the tragedy entailed by the sight of honeybees processing sugar into “honey.”
If you spent time with our hives, you could help me write “compassion." The feeling that overwhelms and is not ours. It arises: we are flooded.
Whatever is capable of breaking our hearts is also capable of moving us to change. “Heart” is not a sentimental value here. In Islamic sources, it is the core of what it means to be human: a subtle organ, capacious but wavering.
Land wants care
For several years, I taught an undergraduate course entitled About Nature. The syllabus spelled out the agenda roughly in the following terms: “About Nature starts with a patient hearing of contemporary critiques of ‘the Nature’ then reviews alternative propositions that conceive of materiality—human, animal, insective, vegetal, and artificial—as relationally made and ontologically blurred. It reviews arguments for thinking and for political mobilizing ‘after Nature.’ With these initial insights, however, the class directs attention elsewhere.”
In retrospective, my classmates and I especially enjoyed directing attention elsewhere, that is, beyond the critical thinking that starts and ends with the impossibilities of finding (and foolishness of searching for) the domain of the Nature proper. We attended to “poetic and pragmatic zones of thinking and working where ‘the natural’ animates theory and practice; where it materializes in sensuous encounters, in local knowledges, or in ecstatic experiences; and where it rallies communities of passion, inquiry, and interest.” Teaching About Nature did not prepare me for living on the land but it primed me for the experience of “turning attention elsewhere.”
Our village land is thick with family history and overplanted in defiance of horticultural recommendations for proper spatial distancing between trees. In a word, we live in an orchard. The oldest fruit trees bear names of native varieties that our father passed down to us in the same unhurried tone he related the tales of One Thousand and One Nights when we were children: Jeribasma (“Do-not-touch-me”), Elif-Lama (the names of Arabic letters that, joined like branches, spell a “no”) and Osinjača (“Wasps’ own”). Some had been planted and grafted by his father before his trace was lost at the Balkan fronts of the First World War, and all were cared for by his mother, the woman who rented out land and sold its produce to raise her three children and see her only son through university. As soon as he earned his degree in economy, our father, the modern man of his time, sold off the village lands and the forests, and moved to the city. A single patch of funnel-shaped terrain on which we reside today remains—for who would have ever bought such a steep, rocky piece of land, our mother never tires of saying. Our grandmother cared for it, defiantly, from spring to fall, and dreamed of it during her city-bound winters.
The many trees are also grounding our land, like guardian angels. Quietly, beneath, where underground water is brewing trouble, the roots are stalling a creep landslide, its signs more pronounced with recurrent flash floods and droughts.
By the time I move to the village, my mother is caring for the land singlehandedly. “Land wants a hand” (zemlja hoće ruku) she tends to say, describing both the mode of caretaking (hands on, touching) and the manual technique suitable for the steep, overplanted, landslide-rippled slopes that do not lend themselves to machinery. What exactly the land “wants” of a human hand depends on the season. Every morning, early, my mother is out, investigating. Among the vines and trees, from within flower beds, by the greenhouse, in the berry patches, by the side of the edible, medicinal, and otherwise resolutely present weeds, she has her ear out for vegetal petitions. Her tools and hands are at the ready.
I would be helping more if it were not for the writing. As is, I bring in seeds and seedlings of plants dear to the bees. And I scythe. At times, my sister Azra, an urban dweller, comes to lend a hand. We each want our father’s scythe—the new one we bought is not nearly as good—so we take turns, hugging the dear tool.
Scything is intense, but as our village friend, shepherd Osman, puts it, “it’s a technique, not a muscle work.” The entire body is engaged. The mind feels light and focused on the grass and the blade. The motion is mesmerizing. The body swings to the right, the slender, curved blade falls and with one long sweep, it sails leftwards, then lifts up only to fall back again. Our blades cut in and come back guilty: stained with vegetal fluids, sticky, smelling bittersweet. Being out in the open and alert, tending to the land that keeps you grounded is the other side of writing; it is about being written, one’s own nature an emergent script.
Nature in Islamic sources is not only the material, sensuous domain out there but also a realm of subtlety and signification that extends inwards. The inner and the outer are complementaries as well as divine attributes which the tradition counts among “Beautiful divine names:” the Manifest (al-Ẓāhir) and the Subtle (al-Bāṭin). In other words, the divine is present in whatever strikes the eye, and God eludes what the gazes grasp. The natural is the fiber of the cosmos and of human frames. Because nature is a composite reality, both material and subtle, we can have profound experience of being outside ourselves as well as being moved to the core by what arrives from beyond us and exceeds us. Like compassion and joy. Or dread.
Heirlooms.
Village night life
The social life in a village? I can’t complain.
*
Have you any plans for the weekend?
I ask the village dog.
Her crooked, sky-wide smile goes off,
firecrackers,
with a back-roll, her belly up
fox-yellow,
all four paws paddling.
Just as I thought—none.
I seem more reserved,
but Joy makes the two of us one in kind,
the horizon is mellowing,
the quiet trails, all ours.
No escape
I also used to teach a class entitled End Tales. The reading list mixed genres, from poetry to philosophy to eco-writings, and our class meetings explored different media of thinking, from film to hands-on papermaking. The class promised to explore “diverse modes of recounting and responding to the contemporary more-than-human worlds on the brink of disaster.” It asked whether thinking is only ever paralyzed by the disaster or might there be other resources—critical, devotional, prophetic, or visionary—to draw from while living through and responding to the global environmental and climate catastrophe. And so on.
This class was a preface to my own “back to nature,” which was never meant to afford an escape. A shelter, perhaps. The village is a sweet spot on a troubled planet. The air is fresh, spring waters are cool and clear, and the produce is local and free of pesticides. Being here and committed to the honeybees and to the land, however, has exposed me to the strangeness of weather, by default, the way a weathervane, perched on a barn top, gets no break from reading the wind forecast.
Since 2014, I have been traveling across Bosnia and Herzegovina, conducting research on local beekeeping. The field travels deepened the feeling that disastrous weather due to the global warming is impossible to escape. Weather is a highly local and inherently fickle phenomenon, and as such, it is one of the least predictable features of the future climate. Projections and observations indicate that extreme weather events around the world are becoming more prevalent and more intense. Such weather disasters are likely to exacerbate the effects of steadier changes in temperature and precipitation patterns as well as to compound other prevailing anthropogenic assaults upon living environments. How are the local ecologies going to respond to weather disasters and to the everyday vagaries of unseasonal atmosphere? What seems certain, though, is that every chronicle of rupture and alteration will have weather at its heart. Future readers will use their own weathervanes as bookmarks.
To get a break from work, I head out to the forest. On foot, along the familiar trails, I keep a close watch on plants and insects. The village road is fringed by blackberry brambles; as it approaches the forests, it narrows into a bumpy, rocky path through ferns and shrubs of Cornelian cherry and black locust. These plants hold insect nests and host their feasts.
Sticking close to honeybees, I am usually attuned to their plant companions, the nectar- and pollen-yielding bloomers. Insect appetites are my guides to plant life cycles as well as to vegetal estrangement from the customs of four seasons. As a beekeeper, I dread snowless winters, summer heatwaves, rapid swings between floods and droughts, but I also have some means to support apiary bees, even if only to aide them in the short run with water fountains and emergency food. On the trail, however, I encounter the “near world” (dunyā) that is not in my care but that I grew to care for. My moods shift from weariness to wonder, from sadness to awe, as fast as false springs. I notice blackberry brambles wither as soon as they bloomed. To watch insects searching for food through lasting droughts. To see them courting in what used to be a winter. To know that, in the scrambled seasons, my hope alone is not enough.
Walking, I pray for them.
Walking in bad weather
Out on a walk, one afternoon, late in November:
*
Isn’t it too late,
too late in the day, for coupling?
The two are quietly ongoing,
by my shins,
slender moths, skeletal white,
with a sheen of phosphorus in their wings
unstirring, engaged,
silently with one other,
hooked, at their tail ends.
Isn’t it too late in the season,
too late, for coupling?
From high up, they seemed a single being
ripped apart by a spider or ravaged by time
eyelevel at insect altitudes
discerns two,
mirroring
one form and spirit,
charged,
breathless from intensity
wishless from awe, of having been found
—that’s how each being knows God—
the blade of grass alone is faltering.
Isn’t it too late on Earth,
too late, for coupling?
The sun is nearly falling,
a silence is answering.
Metaphysics to live by
The world will last for as long as there is a single human left still invoking God, Shaykh Ayne says.
All sorts of beings that exist on earth and in the heavens are invoking God, the Nurturer, and, in response to these multispecies prayers, divine treasuries flow with blessings. A blessing is what matches every fire salamander to a puddle.
Modern cultures, Muslim or not, tend to shove animals and plants to the margins of built worlds and to the endnotes of our thinking. Plenty of material in the Islamic textual and oral tradition, however, suggests that non-humans are not just integral to keeping the world whole but that attention to them is also key to a wholehearted human devotional practice since all species have the caring God in common.
Nonetheless, because human devotion is neither spontaneous nor steady, and because humans are uniquely responsible for trouble-making, the world’s bad end is hitched to their indifference.
Earthbound Metaphysics, another class I used to teach, was concerned with “the world” and the human species wrecking it. Since the modern commonsense about the composition and the meaning of the world is deeply implicated in the ruination of the planet, contemporary scholars are reappraising non-modern cosmologies and proposing alternate ontologies of things once taken for granted. Adventurous new thinking is hailed for its potential to compel the readers to think and feel otherwise.
In the field I encountered metaphysics in its traditional form—as a form of knowledge that is deeply thoughtful yet is not considered a branch of philosophy, not least because it is the basis of a practice that shapes hearts as well as minds, that recommends beautiful conducts as often as seminal texts. Islamic metaphysics is premised on the idea of reality as both sensuous and non-manifest. Invocations stir hearts, Shaykh Ayne says, and a lively heart makes sense of the human life.
Shaykh Ayne is a Sufi elder. In his mid-80s, luminous and frail, witty and well-read, he is my primary guide through Islamic teachings about ultimacies: death and the world’s End. We became friends. Once a week, I traveled to central Bosnia to study with him.
One time I arrive to his home library only to realize that I forgot my suitcase. Human is cut from the cloth of forgetfulness, Shaykh says. Insān, which is Arabic for “human,” is etymologically related to “forgetting”—nisyān. Forgetfulness, in the broadest sense, is a disregard, a distance made from some one or some thing that ought to matter. To forget is to forgo.
The fact that I kept travelling for the sake of Shaykh’s company was a sign of another human propensity. The root letters of the word insān, Shaykh often pointed out, also denote intimacy, sociability, and attachment: uns is about tending towards others with whom one cares—craves—to be. These two conflicting tendencies, to forget and to seek closeness, among others, define human nature.
To begin with, humans are forgetful of God. Because God is not only sheer transcendence—someone high up and far from here—the implications are intimate, like in the following verse of the Qur’an: “Do not be like those who forgot God so God made them forget themselves” (19:59). Divine reality is so closely related to the human that, Shaykh Ayne used to say, you must get to know yourself in order to get to know God.
Getting to know God seems an easier task. Islamic tradition starts with the basic distinction between God and everything else that matters; in other words, all the many things that are encountered and valued that act and exist. Summed up as “there is no god but God,” this distinction is the cornerstone of all invocations.
The deceptively simple formula is useful to keep in mind whenever the very idea of “God” is casually dismissed—as it so often is in secular writings—as stuffy, irrelevant, and outdated (irreverent dismissals quickly earn their authors an edginess while the thrill of scoring badass points contributes to the enduring appeal of blasphemy).
What can be easily dismissed is no god. God is what exceeds our most excessive thought in us as well as that private hankering for something more to life. Whatever it is that claims a powerful hold over our thoughts and desires, whatever name we privately invoke when we get high or hit the bottom, is our god.
The task of invocation is to help parse one’s self, one’s gods that come and go with changing moods and circumstances, and God that, the traditions says, is the everlasting reality like no other, revealing itself with Lā ilāha illa āllāh, “There is no god but God.” This is a recurrent verse in the Quran and the Islamic metaphysics in a nutshell.
Being a metaphysical statement—and God’s self-description—the formula presumes not just a rational process of comprehending but a trial in grasping, by means of a spiritual intuition, honed through a life-long practice and bestowed as a gift. Most of all, this summary statement of Islamic metaphysics is practically-oriented. Its invocation and contemplation are the means of getting to know reality, to taste it, and to be transformed by it.
The very possibility of transformation resides in human nature. Nature is not a fixed, uniform essence but an essential host of tendencies that make the human at once comparable with and distinct from other species: from plants and minerals to angels and animals. Natures are specific to species and so nature entails diversity, which is one of the core principles to Islamic thought that flows from the statement of God’s uniqueness. Divine imagination being inexhaustive, each member of the species, too, is engendered as a singular being: different from God and different from any other being. Differentiation works in every direction and at every scale. It sets apart each insect, although modern science too rarely treats insects as individuals, as behavior ecologists tend to complain.
Human natures are germinating with additional potential for change and this potential entails both human malleability and utter responsibility. This sounds abstract, but Shaykh Ayne’s metaphysics always keeps one foot here on earth, which makes it ecological by default. When followed through, it links up human dispositions and the salamanders that I meet on my walk to the forest: courting in mid-December, by the unseasonal puddles on the snowless paths.
We can tilt our natures, forwards and backwards,
left and right,
and their inclining and swaying is symbolized in dhikr
a dear friend Zejd writes to me. By dhikr, this Sufi means an invocation; seated in a circle, a devout group invokes divine names. Eyes closed, their voices come together but do not quite blend: each person’s timbre and breath carry through with the difference. Like surface ripples in a wave. A joint invocation rises, the air thickens with a magnetic charge, light floods the senses sensing behind their closed eyes, bodies sway then still as voices soften into whispers. When the invocation ceases, those who partook in it are no longer the same.
I write back:
Hmm.
So, the swaying with the rhythm of dhikr
is like the swaying of tendencies that are particular to each of our natures?
While our personal inclinations prime the way we receive what comes to us?
The ding of incoming message ushers in the reply:
That’s right.
God says that we act in accordance with our nature and
that He will account for our deeds with regard to those natures.
He gave them as “natures,” that is plural and different.
Therefore.
You cannot cut down, tear out, nor prune the tree of your fitrah [nature].
But you can lean it to the right. That’s change!
To the left. That, too, is a change.
Forwards and backwards. Those, again, are changes.
Texting builds its own rhythm. Every break begets a nisyān, every line hatches an uns, and so the digital media carries through with the beat natural to humans.
A day in the village
“Salam (peace). Did you leave the bee boxes toppled at the lower apiary?”
My mom texts me this morning just as I am bringing this piece to a close. Were it not so cold and slippery—the first snow of the winter just fell—she would walk over from her house up the hill, pop her head through my door, and deliver the message in person.
That was our summer routine. I would be writing at home and she would knock with the news: “You have a swarm up in the old apple tree.” Or: “A swarm has landed in the vineyard.” I would sigh, close the laptop, and go assemble my gear: a long pole with a swarm-catching bag at the end of it, a wicker skep, stepladder, and a veiled hat, just in case. Tending to the land, my mother is usually the first one to notice events at our two apiaries. This morning’s message, however, suggested an emergency.
I didn’t! I’m on my way.
I text back and jump to my feet. Was it the stray dogs that tipped over hives? Could it have been a bear, I wonder as I put on my jacket, scrambling to find boots. At the thought of the honeybees displaced from their nests into the cold, my gut clenches.
Come. I’ll go along with you,
my mother’s text sees me through the door.
Will they stay?
Larisa’s research on bees and climate change was generously funded by American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Wenner-Gren Foundation, Luce/ACLS Program for Religion, Journalism, and International Affairs, and Independent Social Research Foundation.
