My reread of The Secret Lives of Bees (2002) disclosed the healing power of the Sacred Feminine. Its author Sue Monk Kidd displayed unusual artistry in fashioning this riveting story, its worldwide appeal galvanizing hearts.

Secrets abound, not only within the darkness of the beehives, but also within the inner worlds of the characters, given to dreams, musings, writing, and spirited imaginations. Multi-layered symbols also abound—orphan, mother, bees, death—their auras intermingling with shuddery feelings, with breathlessness. The ensuing images, enfleshed in precise words, fired the imagination of this reader.

Note: Above each chapter, headings of honeybee behaviors mirrored the story as it unfolded.

Enter the droll narrator, fourteen-year-old Lily Owens, with black hair that flies in many directions, living on a peach farm with her widower father in a bigoted South Carolina town. It was summer, 1964, hot with racism. Attuned to hunches, Lily sought resolution of her secret and found her way to a bee-keeping farm in the next town.

There, Lily met the Boatwright sisters whose large-bosomed blackness mothered her through grief. Their eclectic devotions to Our Lady of Chains, the ancient figurehead from a ship’s mast honored in their living room, also opened Lily to the Sacred Feminine “… hidden everywhere. Her heart a red cup of fierceness tucked among ordinary things.” From her, Lily drew courage, “not just to love, but to persist in love” for her orphaned psyche and those around her.

The Secret Lives of Bees continues enriching imaginations with Eros, sorely needed today, to heal poisonous fissures sickening planet Earth as well as those in our own hearts. We but need to ask, humbly…