The Wisdom of the Hive: Facing Fear and the Future Together, Part 3 of 3
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In this three-part Reimagine series, Michelle Cassandra Johnson and special guests explore themes from her newest book The Wisdom of the Hive (Sounds True, 2025). By seeing honeybees as our teachers, we can learn about our relationship with ourselves, each other, and the world at large. In times marked by grief, chaos and uncertainty, bees offer a powerful example of turning toward pain and fear, committing to better conditions for all beings to survive, and building a sweeter future where all can thrive.
Featuring luminaries from the fields of wellness, science, spirituality, and the arts, this interdisciplinary series includes panel discussions, sound and visual meditations, and tools to foster a more collective mindset, much like the bees, which function as a superorganism, not thinking of themselves as individual bees, but rather as a unified collective. Each session opens and closes with a mindful moment and practice inspired by a buzzing beehive of activity. Together we will cultivate the values of interdependence, strive for greater attunement to one another and the planet, and see the liminal space between darkness and light as a resource for growth.
From September 30 - December 30, 2025, registrants to the series receive a 20% discount on The Wisdom of the Hive paperback on Bookshop.org. Discount code: LetsReimagine20
Session 3 looks at the resilient and sustaining nature of bees in a time of climate crisis, eco-anxiety, and grief. Panelists from the fields of thanatology, climate science, psychology, environmental education and activism will provide context for the ways in which bees model our capacity to survive and thrive across a long arc of history.
Michelle Cassandra Johnson is an author, activist, spiritual teacher, racial equity consultant and educator, and intuitive and shamanic healer. She has led transformative work dismantling racism and systems of oppression, disrupting the wellness industry to make it more inclusive and accessible, creating space for healing in myriad ways, and through her work for over two decades as a clinical social worker. Michelle’s work centers on healing from individual and collective trauma, returning to wholeness, and aligning the mind, body, spirit, and heart.
https://www.michellecjohnson.com/wisdom-of-the-hive
Cole Imperi is the Founder of the School of American Thanatology, which has students in more than 30 countries, where she both teaches and conducts research under the school’s ThanaLab. Through her development of Shadowloss Theory and her pioneering work with the field of Thanabotany, Cole’s work seeks to bridge the gaps left by the decline in non-clinical, community-led bereavement support. She is the author of A Guide to Grief, for teens and tweens, and a forthcoming grief book for adults to be published by Penguin in 2027.
Cole has diverse experience from working in and around loss and grief since 2008 where she worked as a chaplain-thanatologist in one of America’s 25 largest jails, mortuary college professor, crematory operator, hospice volunteer, grief support group leader for children as young as 3 to adults, death companion, served on the board of a green burial startup, and as Board President of a historic cemetery and arboretum. She traveled the US and Canada for 5 years training funeral directors and embalmers, and co-founded a deathcare startup. She currently consults on bereavement programming for organizations, and publishes the popular column Grief or Madness.
Cole was the recipient of the Curtis Gates Lloyd Fellowship through the Lloyd Library and Museum and is a California Master Gardener. She is based in Los Angeles.
Naomi Ortiz (they) is a Reclaiming the US/Mexico Border Narrative Awardee and a 2022 U.S. Artist Disability Futures Fellow. Ortiz's collection, Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice, offers potent insights about the complexity of interdependence, calling readers to deepen their understanding of what it means to witness and love an endangered world. Their non-fiction book, Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice, provides informative tools and insightful strategies for diverse communities on addressing burnout. Ortiz is also a co-editor of the anthology, Every Place on the Map is Disabled: Poems and Essays on Disability. As a Disabled Mestize poet, writer, facilitator, and visual artist, they explore how we create meaning and connection within states of rapid change. ALT Text: Naomi Ortiz, a light-skinned Mestize, wears a bandanna, a V-neck shirt, with silver hoop earrings, and dark lipstick. Photo Credit: Jade Beall
LaUra Schmidt is the founding director of Good Grief Network and the coauthor of How to Live in a Chaotic Climate: 10-Steps to Reconnect with Ourselves, Our Communities, and Our Planet. She is a truth seeker, community builder, trainer, program designer, and facilitator. LaUra has long been captivated by the human condition. She is a lifelong student, curator, and practitioner of personal and collective resilience strategies. Inspiration finds her in natural landscapes and honest, open-hearted dialogue. LaUra graduated with a BS in Environmental Studies, Biology, and Religious Studies. Her MS is in Environmental Humanities. She has earned certificates in “Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy” and “Climate Psychology.”
Alexandra “ahlay” Blakely is a descendant of Ashkenazi, Scandinavian, and British folk. She is an artist, singer-songwriter, communal grief tender, community organizer, facilitator, and ceramicist walking the path of ancestral healing and the reclaiming of lost cultural memory. Her community singing album Spells from the Unknown offers songs for collective transformation, inquiry, and living in service to the future ones. Her second album, WAILS: Songs for Grief, was recorded with a 200-person choir and is entirely dedicated to grief, inspired by the Whales of the Sea, the wails of our times, and Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow, especially “the five gates of grief.” Her forthcoming third album, Anthems for an Apocalypse, arrives September 2025 and explores themes of collapse, courage, and abolitionist love. Through her music and gatherings, ahlay invites people into deep feeling, collective remembering, and the restoration of belonging across time.
https://www.healingattheroots.com/
About Reimagine
Reimagine is a nonprofit organization catalyzing a uniquely powerful community–people of different backgrounds, ages, races, and faiths (and no faith) coming together to create a more compassionate world. We support each other in facing adversity, loss, and mortality and channeling life's biggest challenges into meaningful action and growth.
