The Bee Memorial Fund
When Bee was six, we climbed Little Whiskey Mountain. At the steep meadow she burst into tears, and I turned her around to see how far we had already come. She looked, and thought about it, and said: I want to go up.
So we picked a point ten feet ahead. Walked to it. Rested. Did it again. Past every false summit, all the way to the top — and at the top, both arms in the air. 4.2 miles and 1,244 feet of climbing, for a knockoff CamelBak.
Bee was an artist and a writer and a maker of films — quirky, exacting, entirely herself. Bee was nonbinary and used both she and they, and so do I. Bee once scolded an enormous elk named Junie for eating our tree, with complete affection: I like you. I think you're pretty cool, but that doesn't mean you can eat our tree. I can't babysit you all the time. Hey. Bye, have a nice day.
Bee was, from very young, deeply aware of and concerned about the suffering of others. Bee had taught herself to make films, and worked and saved for the software and the computer to do it. At fourteen, after watching Selma, Bee made a film that wove the civil rights movement together with Black Lives Matter, then only just emerging — the Selma footage in black and white, the present in color. One movement, not two. It was made when Bee should have been studying for exams, because Bee was moved and could not leave it unmade. Bee wanted to make movies that helped people grow, and said so into a voice memo at sixteen, hoping to inspire someone someday.
And in pen and ink, on lined paper, with flowers pressing in from every margin, Bee wrote this:
The flowers bloomed and thrived in the empty, broken spaces of my heart. They filled the hurt and the pain with love and hope. The flowers bloomed until my heart not only healed, but grew. And grew. And grew. I was whole again and my garden of love had flourished on its own.
It hangs where I see it every day.
Bee — Abbott Lee Butler — died on July 8, 2021, at eighteen.
Everything I do now grows in that garden.
What the fund is for
Bee wanted to make things that helped people grow.
This work is about the transformation of consciousness — a different way of being human, and of being human together.
It begins in a person. The end of outsourcing your own light and exiling your own darkness. The dignity of your own yes. Learning to hold the story you were handed lightly enough to wonder about it.
And it does not stay in a person. What changes in one of us changes what we are able to make with each other, and with the earth, and hand on to whoever comes next. That is slow work, and it is why it needs holding.
Gifts to the Fund do three things
They hold a place. Nobody walks away from a circle over money. A gift to the Fund is what makes that true — it holds a place for someone who needs one, without their having to explain themselves or ask twice.
They make the work possible. When Bee was five or six I was working at the seminary, and she would go behind the two-ton altar and put her small hands up and say the Lord be with you — and I would answer, and she would do the whole interchange. Then she would come out from behind the altar and say: Mama, when I grow up we're going to share a job and take turns wearing the collar.
And we are.
I live with a brain injury, and there is only so much I can carry in a day — while this work, the partnership Bee named, is unwilling to stay small. I began on my own. As it has grown I have found myself carrying a great deal that was never really mine to carry.
Gifts to the Fund pay for the people who take that up: the back-office work that lets me stay with what is coming through me, and the hands that let this reach further than I could reach alone. I cannot do this alone, and I have stopped pretending otherwise.
They build what comes after. The teaching is written and the circles are alive, but the pathway that would let other people learn to hold a circle in their own community does not exist yet. The Fund is how that gets built — so this does not rest on one person.
One of the things I love most is watching people who never knew Bee in this life come to know her, and love her, and be inspired by her even so.
Where it lives
The Bee Memorial Fund for The Remembering Way is held by St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in Estes Park, Colorado, which receives gifts toward this work and does not charge for the holding. Gifts are tax-deductible. St. Bart's sends the tax letter for your records, and I send a letter of my own — they come in the same envelope.
To Give
To give online, visit St. Bartholomew's giving page using the button above. Once there, click "Give online now via credit card" and select "The Bee Memorial Fund (The Remembering Way)" from the dropdown menu.
Gifts hold places for people who could not otherwise take part, and they make the work itself — the circles, the writing, the podcast.
By check. Gifts by check avoid the processing fees that online giving carries, so more of what you give reaches the work. Make the check payable to St. Bart's Bee Memorial Fund, with The Remembering Way on the memo line, and send it to:
St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church
880 MacGregor Ave
Estes Park, CO 80517
If you would like to talk about a larger gift, write to me: elizabeth@therememberingway.org
The flowers bloomed and thrived in the empty, broken spaces of my heart.
Bee · July 22, 2002 – July 8, 2021