05/22/2026
Hey guys, the editor at The Sun wants to run my Personal Nature Essay. I'd love to share it with you. If you've got 15 minutes...Its a 5,000 word essay.
The Reward Is Return
Bees, Hawks, Hens, Trout, and the Chores That Call Me Back
by Wayne Stephen
I often think about the lives I almost entered.
Beekeeper. Falconer. Fly fisherman. Keeper of hens.
Not as hobbies exactly. Not as costumes. Not as some late-life branding exercise where a man buys the right hat and calls himself whole.
I mean the old disciplines. The ones that ask for patience, attention, humility, and a willingness to be taught by creatures that don't care who you think you are.
I've touched some of those worlds and failed to stay in them. Bees in Arizona. Desert hawking. Fly tying at a table. Chickens still waiting somewhere in the life I keep imagining.
And now, at fifty-five, broke more often than I care to admit, starting over again with sore hands and a food trailer that holds nearly everything I have left, I find myself wanting those worlds more than ever.
Not because they will save me.
Because they might teach me how to return.
Some nights I sit out back by the bay and listen to what I call the Critter Jazz.
Frogs sawing away in the dark. Crickets ticking in the grass like tiny percussionists. A loon calling somewhere across the water, lonely enough to make the whole bay feel older. Birds making their last remarks from the trees. Water moving soft against the bank. Something unseen slipping through the weeds with its own business to attend to.
It’s not silence.
It's not noise either.
It's the world carrying on without asking me to explain myself.
And I sit there — fifty-five years old, dented, grateful, half-ashamed, half-amazed I made it this far — listening like a man outside a church he's not sure he’s allowed to enter.
I’ve spent a lot of my life wanting to belong to that music.
Not the cleaned-up version of nature. Not the kind people post after they’ve cropped out the mud, the mosquitoes, the rot, the work, and the part where everything living eventually eats or gets eaten. I mean something rougher than that. Older. More demanding.
I mean the kind of belonging that requires chores.
Feed the hens. Check the water. Light the smoker. Tie the knot. Read the current. Watch the bird. Shut the gate.
Clean the kitchen.
Call my mom.
Make the doctor’s appointment.
That's where the romance usually falls apart — not in the wanting, but in the doing. In the small, unglamorous acts of care I keep putting off.
Because I'm usually been drawn to disciplines that require patience I don't naturally possess — bees, falcons, fly rods, chickens, quiet water, morning chores. Creatures and crafts that don't care about my damage, my charm, my excuses, or whatever heroic little story I’m telling myself that week.
They require presence.
Clean hands. Good knots. Calm breath. Closed gates. Sharp eyes. Showing up again tomorrow.
But they also bear fruit.
That’s the thrill.
A fish rises. A rabbit bolts and the hawk answers. A bee colony settles because you finally stopped acting like a lunatic around it. A hen gives an egg. An unremarkable fly I tied fools something wild. A command becomes a maneuver. A creature that owes me nothing begins, somehow, to meet me halfway.
And even when nothing is caught, nothing harvested, nothing proven, there's still the reward.
Connection.
Survival.
Peace, if you can stand it.
Belonging, if you don’t scare it off.
That's the drug in it.
Not domination. Not escape. Something closer to relationship. Something earned in small payments.
Which is funny, 'cause some days I can barely clean the kitchen. Some days making a doctor’s appointment feels like trying to move a refrigerator across a gravel road by myself.
And still, I want all of it.
I want hens in the morning. I want bees in the heat. I want a peregrine falcon overhead — fast, wild, and completely itself. I want trout water. I want fly boxes full of small, ridiculous hope. I want the honest stupidity of standing in a river and believing I might understand something.
I want the chores because I want the reward.
That may be the truest thing I know.
About twelve years ago, in Arizona, I tried to become a beekeeper.
Tried is the honest word.
I apprenticed for about six months. Long enough to learn that bees are not cute little ambassadors of sweetness. They're not cartoon saints with pollen baskets. They are a civilization with wings. A humming republic. A weather system with a queen somewhere inside it.
They can give you honey, wax, pollination, awe — and they can also light your ass up if you come in wrong.
That was part of the lesson.
You don't storm a hive.
You approach.
Slow hands. Calm breath. No flailing. No panic. No false authority. The bees know. Somehow they know.
A hive is not impressed by your story. It doesn’t care what you survived. It doesn't care what you meant to become. It reads your body. Your rhythm. Your disturbance.
That's a lil' terrifying when you're a man who's spent years being disturbance.
But it's also beautiful.
Because if you can quiet yourself enough, even briefly, the hive changes. Or maybe you do. The sound becomes less like threat and more like work. Thousands of small bodies moving through one enormous task. Nectar becoming honey. Flowers becoming food. Landscape becoming sweetness.
And the whole thing runs on information. Not speeches. Not orders barked from some little golden throne. Movement. Pattern. Direction. The waggle dance — a bee coming back from the world and telling the others, with her body, where the sweetness is. A map made of dancing motions.
And yes, her body. That matters. The hive is mostly female. The workers are female. The foragers are female. The ladies run the place. The ladies do the work. The queen matters, but not in the storybook way people imagine. The hive survives because thousands of women with wings keep showing up.
Hattie Ellis writes about bees as one of the great mysterious companions of human civilization — honey, wax, medicine, myth, agriculture, s*x, labor, monarchy, religion, all of it braided through that small impossible creature. Humans have projected almost everything onto the hive. Order. Purity. Industry. Obedience. Feminine power. Royal power. Divine design. Whatever age we’re living in, we seem to look at bees and find ourselves staring back.
But what stayed with me was simpler.
Honey is evidence.
Something bloomed.
Something gathered.
Something returned.
Something changed.
That's no small thing.
For a man like me, transformation has never felt clean. It has usually looked more like damage trying to learn manners. But bees made transformation physical. They made it visible. They took the world in pieces and brought it back golden.
I never finished the apprenticeship.
That matters.
This isn't an essay about mastery. If anything, it’s about the ache of unfinished apprenticeships. The things I reached for, loved, failed to complete, and still carry around like tools I may need someday.
Bees were one.
Falconry was another.
Desert Hawking as well.
Even now the words do something to me. They open a door in the mind.
A hawk on the glove can look, from a distance, like possession. It's not. It’s not a pet, not a mascot, not something to nuzzle like a barn kitten unless you have grown tired of your current face. A raptor is hunger with feathers. Muscle, fear, instinct, altitude, decision. It doesn't belong to you. It may work with you. It may return. It may accept the terms of the moment.
But it's never yours.
That, is the sacred trust.
Maybe that's why I wanted it so badly. Not because I wanted to own wildness, but because I wanted to be near something that could not be lied to. Something that wouldn't be charmed. Something that would either answer the command or vanish into the sky.
I apprenticed for about a year.
Again: never finished.
Again: still marked by it.
In falconry, the reward isn't obedience.
That word is too small. Too human. A little too managerial.
The reward is return.
A hawk leaves the fist and becomes itself. That is the terror and the beauty of it. One second it's weight on your glove — talons, leather, breath, muscle — and the next it's a blade moving through the desert air.
You do NOT possess that....You witness it.
If you’re lucky, if you've done your work, if the relationship holds for one more pass, the bird comes back.
THAT'S different from control.
That's agreement.
In desert hawking, a rabbit may bolt. The hawk may answer...or not.
The whole thing may become dust, silence, waiting, failure, another walk through heat and scrub and thorn.
But even failure out there has instruction in it.
The desert doesn’t flatter a man. It doesn't care about his intentions. It exposes rhythm. It exposes impatience. It exposes sloppy attention. It tells the truth without raising its voice.
That's what I mean by sacred trust.
Not the soft version of stewardship, where a person admires nature from a safe distance and calls himself healed. I mean the harder version. The version that asks where the line is between interacting and interfering. Between relationship and possession. Between care and control.
That question sits at the heart of Sacred Trusts, and it sits at the heart of damn near every craft I keep circling.
A falconer enters into terms with wildness.
A beekeeper enters into terms with a colony.
A fly fisher enters into terms with water.
A person who keeps hens enters into terms with morning.
None of these things are metaphors first. That matters. A hawk is a hawk. A bee is a bee. A trout is a trout. A hen is a hen. They’re not here to decorate my recovery story.
If they teach anything, they teach because they remain themselves.
That's the humility.
I can barely fly fish.
Yep, that sentence needs to stay honest.
I love the idea of fly fishing. I love the gear, the flies, the water, the old language of it. I love the quiet arrogance of believing a bit of feather and thread can fool a fish that lives by reading the world better than I do.
But casting? Presentation? Drift? The thousand small humiliations of actually doing the thing?
I'm still mostly a man standing in water with a little hope and s**tty timing.
But tying flies — that got me.
There's something about the vise. The hook. The thread. The pinch of fur. The feather fibers lined up just so. The smallness of the work. The absurd faith of it.
You sit there building a lie out of natural materials, attempting to mimick mother nature, and if you build it well enough, gently enough, something wild may believe you.
That's ridiculous.
That's holy.
And even if no fish ever takes it, the process has already done something to you. Your hands slow down. Your breath changes. Your attention narrows until the noise in your head loses some of its authority.
A fly isn't just bait.
It's a little handmade argument that says: I was here. I noticed. I tried to understand the hatch, the season, the water, the hunger, the shape of a thing alive.
And then you step into the river and learn, almost immediately, how little you understand.
That's the gift.
The river doesn't care how beautiful your fly is. The trout doesn't care how badly you need a win. The current doesn't care about your mythology either.
It asks for drift.
It asks for reading.
It asks for humility.
And sometimes — not always, not on command — a fish rises.
There it is.
The reward.
Not because you conquered anything.
Because for one second, your hand, your eye, your clumsy little feathered offering, the insect life, the current, the fish, the light, and the old hunger of the world all lined up.
THAT is marrow.
That's why a person goes back.
I haven't raised hens yet.
Not really.
There was the hobby-farm life when I was a kid, enough proximity to animals and chores to leave the smell of it somewhere in me. But my own hens? My own coop? My own morning rhythm of feed, water, bedding, eggs, weather, s**t, feathers, and small complaints?
Not yet.
Maybe that's why they call to me so hard.
A hen isn't exotic. That's her power. She's not a hawk cutting through desert light. She's not a hive humming with ancient mystery. She's not a trout rising through cold water like a secret.
She is domestic. Ridiculous. Useful. Bossy. Vulnerable. Comic. Ancient.
She turns the household back into an ecosystem.
Scraps become eggs. Manure becomes compost. Compost becomes soil. Soil becomes garden. Garden becomes food. Food becomes scraps again.
That's not nostalgia.
That's a loop.
And maybe what I have been looking for, all these years, is a way back into the loop.
The Way of the Hen understands that. It understands that chickens are not just charming backyard accessories for people with linen aprons and expensive seed catalogs. They’re little feathered clocks. They make rhythm physical.
Morning has a job.
Evening has a job.
Winter has a job.
You can't fake care with hens. You either checked the water or you didn’t. You either closed the coop or you left the door open to teeth in the dark.
That's the mercy of chores.
They aren't interested in your self-image. They aren't moved by your intentions. They ask one question:
Did you show up?
And that question is brutal when you’ve spent parts of your life unable to show up even for yourself.
But it's also merciful.
Because you don't have to solve your whole life to fill a waterer.
You don't have to become a better man in theory.
You carry the feed. You clean the bedding. You gather the egg. You do the next small necessary thing.
And the reward is warm in your hand.
Here's the part I’ve been avoiding:
I don’t have the money for most of this life right now.
Not the clean version of it. Not the glossy version. Not the version where a man simply decides to become more whole and then orders the proper equipment.
I can't just go buy the good fly rod, the waders, the bee boxes, the lumber, the fencing, the feed, the books, the gas, the licenses, the falconry equipment, the time. I can't just purchase my way into the man I keep imagining.
And at fifty-five, that truth has teeth.
Because the wanting is not casual anymore. It’s not some young man’s dreamy list of things he might get around to someday. Someday used to feel like a field. Now it feels more like a narrowing trail, and I can hear the brush closing in behind me.
Everything I have left, where work and labor are concerned, is going into a food trailer.
That trailer is not the subject of this essay, but it is the pressure behind it.
It's the culmination of a restaurant life that has made me a sommelier, brewer, cook, bartender, manager, server, trainer, dishwasher, host, janitor, prep cook, wine guy, floor guy, emergency guy, “figure it out” guy — whatever the shift required.
Thirty-some years of service, heat, burns, cuts, charm, failure, adrenaline, theater, muscle memory, and making it look easier than it was.
All of that is now being asked to fit inside a trailer.
That's funny if I'm in the right mood.
Terrifying if I'm not.
Because this isn't retirement fantasy. This isnt a man with a pension buying hobbies to soften the edges of his golden years. This is starting over with sore hands, a worried mind, and a stubborn little flame that refuses to go out.
The trailer is my shot.
Maybe the last clean shot.
And maybe, if I can keep it alive, it becomes more than a business.
Maybe it becomes a way to bring veterans and kids-at-risk into contact with food, farmers, soil, work, weather, responsibility, and each other. Maybe we grow produce. Maybe we cook together. Maybe we learn how to show up. Maybe the lesson is not “nature heals,” because that phrase has been beaten half to death by people selling retreats and candles and $300 blankets.
Maybe the lesson is simpler.
Shared work gives people a reason to stay.
That's what I believe when I'm brave enough to believe anything.
But belief doesn't buy lumber.
Hope doesn't build a coop.
Passion doesn't pay for a peregrine falcon, or the housing, training, permits, gear, food, time, mentorship, and discipline required to honor that bird properly. And if I ever do that — if I ever come close to that sacred old craft again — I want to do it right. I want the peregrine because the bird itself feels like a prayer made out of speed. But wanting the bird is not enough. Wanting is cheap. Care is expensive. Not just in money, but in steadiness.
And steadiness has not always been my gift.
So I have to begin where I actually am.
Not where the fantasy version of me lives.
I can tie flies.
I can read.
I can ask questions.
I can reach out to mentors without pretending I know more than I do.
I can sketch a hen enclosure.
I can price lumber.
I can build one bee box slowly.
I can save scraps of money and scraps of wood and scraps of courage.
I can sit by the bay and listen.
That part is still free.
The frogs don't charge admission.
The bugs don't ask for proof of income.
The water doesn't care if I own waders.
A person can still step outside and be humbled for nothing.
That matters.
Because somewhere along the way, even nature started to feel like something a person had to buy his way into.
The right boots. The right rod. The right pack. The right truck. The right cabin. The right cooler. The right jacket that breathes better than half the people I know. The right photograph of a life supposedly well-lived.
And if you are broke, or tired, or starting over, that can mess with your head. It can make the living world feel like another private club. Another velvet rope. Another beautiful thing for people with better money, better timing, better knees, better weekends, better nervous systems.
And that’s bulls**t.
Mostly.
Money matters. Gear matters. Gas matters. Access matters. Time matters. I know damn well a nickel and a good attitude will not buy a fly rod, build a chicken coop, feed a hawk, or put gas in a vehicle.
But I also know this:
A kid with a nickel used to be able to walk outside and find a whole kingdom.
A stick became a sword.
A ditch became a creek.
A puddle became an ocean.
A bug became a monster.
A tree became a fort.
A field became a world.
We knew how to do that once.
Before every comfort got delivered. Before every silence got filled. Before every boredom got murdered by a screen. Before the world convinced us that wonder required a reservation, a receipt, and the right fu**in pants.
The living world is still out there.
Not just at the end of an expensive trip.
It's in the ditch flowers.
The crows.
The dragonflies.
The garden soil.
The night sounds.
The weeds coming through the fence.
The frogs playing for free.
It costs a little physical currency sometimes. A license. A hook. A packet of seeds. A board for the coop. A jar for fireflies. A used field guide from a thrift store.
But sometimes it costs almost nothing.
A chair outside.
A cup of coffee gone cold.
A willingness to shut up long enough to hear what's already playing.
That may be where a person starts again.
Not with the perfect gear.
Not with the perfect life.
With a chair.
With attention.
With the old child still somewhere inside him, broke as hell maybe, but not yet bankrupt in wonder.
He's not only a resume of failures and unpaid bills and unfinished plans.
He's also an animal among animals.
A creature trying to return.
That's where I am now.
Not healed.
Not established.
Not fully equipped.
Not ready in the way I wish I were ready.
But still called.
Still listening.
Still trying to build the conditions for a life that might hold me.
Maybe that's the thread through all of it.
The hum.
The shadow.
The still water.
The egg warm in the hand.
The trailer waiting like a dare.
The kitchen sink.
The doctor’s appointment.
The bay at night, playing for free.
Different creatures. Different crafts. Same ache.
I’ve e wanted relationship with the living world for as long as I can remember. Maybe longer than I've had language for it. But relationship is not just wanting. That's the hard part. Wanting is easy for me. Dreaming is easy. Longing? Christ, I can long all day. I can sit there with coffee going cold and build a whole beautiful life in my head while the sink fills up behind me.
But relationship doesn't live in the beautiful life in my head.
It lives in the chore.
It lives in the smoker lit before the hive is opened. The jesses checked before the bird is flown. The fly tied again after the first one looks like a crime scene. The waterer filled before the freeze. The kitchen cleaned before the life I claim to want can actually enter the room.
It lives in the small ugly steps too.
Calling the doctor.
Washing the pan.
Sending the message.
Asking the mentor.
Buying one board instead of dreaming about the whole coop.
Tying one bad fly and then tying another one.
That's the part I keep circling.
I want the reward.
God, do I want the reward.
I want the honey. I want the egg. I want the fish. I want the hawk’s return. I want the rabbit, or the clean miss, or the honest failure. I want the moment when a living thing answers back and says, without words: Yes. You were paying attention.
But I am starting to understand that the reward isnt waiting in some perfect future where I finally have the money, the gear, the land, the bird, the boxes, the hens, the time, and the clean kitchen.
The reward starts earlier than that.
It starts the moment I stop pretending longing is the same as care.
That's the hard teaching.
You don't get the honey without the hive. You don't get the hawk’s return without the daily terms of trust. You don't get the fish without the water, the drift, the knots, the failure, the humility. You don't get the egg without morning.
And you don't get peace by wishing for a peaceful life.
You build the conditions.
Badly, maybe. Slowly. With relapses into chaos. With dishes in the sink and appointments avoided and grand plans collapsing under the weight of ordinary Tuesday.
But still.
You build the conditions.
That's what these creatures have been trying to tell me, whether I knew it or not.
The reward isn't a prize at the end of the work.
The reward is what happens when the work becomes relationship.
That's why even the unfinished apprenticeships matter.
I didn't become a beekeeper. I didn't become a falconer. I'm not some elegant old fly fisherman standing in a river like a catalog ghost. I don't yet have hens.
But those crafts still marked me.
They left instructions.
Move slower.
Watch closer.
Don't grab.
Don't flail.
Don't confuse possession with love.
Don't confuse wanting with care.
Don't confuse escape with belonging.
Show up.
And when you fail, return.
That may be the oldest lesson in the world.
And so I come back to the bay.
Not as a master of anything.
Not as a healed man.
Not as a beekeeper, falconer, fly fisherman, or keeper of hens.
Not yet.
Maybe not ever in the clean way I once imagined.
But I come back listening.
The frogs start first some nights. Then the bugs. Then the birds settling into their dark opinions. Water nudges the bank. Grass moves without explanation. Something alive goes about its business beyond the reach of my little porch light.
Critter Jazz.
That's what I call it because I don’t know what else to call a world that keeps playing even after you’ve made a mess of yourself.
And maybe that’s the final mercy.
The world doesn’t require me to be impressive before it lets me listen.
It doesn't ask for a resume.
It doesn't ask if I finished the apprenticeship.
It doesn't ask if I caught the fish, flew the hawk, kept the bees, raised the hens, cleaned the kitchen, or made the doctor’s appointment.
Not tonight.
Tonight it only asks for attention.
And attention, if I can manage it, is a beginning.
Maybe tomorrow I clean the kitchen.
Maybe tomorrow I make the appointment.
Maybe tomorrow I take one small step toward the life I keep claiming I want — the life with hens, bees, water, feathers, thread, wild shadows, honest chores, and a trailer that somehow becomes more than a trailer.
Or maybe I don’t.
That has to stay possible, too.
Because this isn’t a redemption commercial. This isn’t the part where the music swells and the damaged man finally becomes useful in a montage.
Some days I return.
Some days I don’t.
Some days the sink wins.
Some days the phone call doesn't get made.
Some days the whole bright imagined life stays on the other side of one stupid task.
But tonight, I sit out back by the bay and listen.
The frogs saw away.
The bugs keep time.
The water moves.
The dark breathes.
And somewhere inside all that noise, all that rhythm, all that ordinary living music, I hear the thing I’ve been chasing through every unfinished apprenticeship of my life:
Not salvation.
Not mastery.
Something quieter.
A place in the song.
The world, still playing.
Me, trying to listen.
