My father was a special agent for the FBI and 100% Irish with a cigarette perpetually in his hand or hanging out of the corner of his mouth. 

It is this father who climbed the roof of our house in suburban Los Angeles to hang the Christmas lights each year. With cigarette, yes. He was a man of the hearth. He liked being home—his refuge. He also did the laundry, mopped the floors Friday night while listening to Angel baseball games on his transistor, and aided my younger brother, Joe, born with Down syndrome, with his special needs, such as building wooden blocks for his trainer bike pedals so Joe Jr’s short legs could reach them.

Back to the Christmas lights. 

I normally ignored my father performing his yearly ritual. Watching all his tasks around the house, I sensed he carried a monk energy—quiet, taciturn, God in the details. If I saw him on the roof untangling lights, I’d think: “Ho Hum, Dad with the Christmas Lights.” I’d go hang out with friends or ride my bike to the beach four miles away. 

One day, however, when finishing stringing the lights around the edges of the roof on our house set on a corner lot on Martha Ann Drive, he walked inside and stood at my bedroom doorway. He always stood in silence for a minute before speaking. He was also trained in law. Perhaps he was gathering words for the case he was working on. Conversation with his eldest daughter being its own form of a case, I suppose.

“I was stringing the lights on the house,” he opened his mouth, pushed out a puff of smoke.

“Yes, Dad,” I said, adding a “thank you.”

He tossed his head back, continuing, “…and a bumble bee came flying up to me. He stayed, so I started talking to the bee.” Another drag on his cigarette.

I was listening to Beach Boys on my stereo. I turned down the music, wondering if my father was testing me somehow with this bee remark, how I might answer.

“Uh, so you talked to a bee—you had a conversation?”  I repeated what he’d said, as if to invite further clarification or rather just watch him turn around and walk away—another common habit of his.

Such vocalizations would escape his mouth, head-scratcher comments. He also said once that my brother Joe with Down syndrome held the keys to Heaven, but that’s a different story. As my father remained in the doorway, as if surrounded by a shroud, I said nothing, just nodded. Was this a sign of encroaching mental illness? Was the pressure of working for the FBI getting to him? Sometimes I’d watch him from my corner bedroom window take the trash to the curb at dusk, glancing down the suburban street in a way that felt as if he were waiting for sheep to come in from pasture.

Many decades later I enrolled in a PhD program in Depth Psychology, the study of the world soul and the inner soul that challenges our old notions of dualism. I learned how indigenous peoples—as my Irish ancestors—lived in an animated world of seen and unseen presences. I sensed how “indigenous time” was below the surface of this reality, the reverberating realms of the invisible, the quantum, the unfathomable. Way back then, I did wonder about my father’s mind as he spoke of talking to bees. But had I been in Ireland centuries ago, it would be clear that he was, in fact, talking to the fairies, who became bees under colonization—and in talking to the fairies he was navigating the magical, invisible realms.

My parents are long dead. 

Just this week I received a call from my younger brother Joe’s group home, a model of care for people with developmental disabilities, informing that his Alzheimers disease was entering its next phase. Joe has been mostly asymptomatic since his diagnosis a few years ago, other than weight loss. But there’s been a change in his eyes. I see that when I call him on FaceTime and sing to him. Now he is experiencing some incontinence. I learned that Hospice may be years down the line, but that with Down syndrome, these folks experience disease progression more quickly than others. Joe is 58, the same age my father was when he hung lights and spoke to the bees. 

I’m not sure what the connection is other than something in me has lit up.

I do long to connect with them, the bees, and the other animals and non-human life forms I find myself to be in love with. Here in Southern California, I’ve gone out on the whale and dolphin boat dozens of times since I moved back a year ago to heal after a major loss.  I want to be with them—the ones who live in that magical realm, who are attuned to vaster quantum sonic energies, those who live in grace.

I am quiet now. I am watching this same, insistent hummingbird who’s been coming up to my window all week, staring in with high frequency. What is she after? What is she trying to say?

Maybe it’s time to start that conversation.

More news soon on my new podcast, “Original Belonging: Through-Threads from Life’s First 14 Years.” Stay tuned!