“My legacy is that I stayed on course from the beginning to the end because I believed in something inside of me.”
They stand quietly, looking at a beehive.
It’s humming. Constant. Alive. A thousand wingbeats in the sun.
And for a moment, Trungpa doesn’t say anything.
Which, for him, is rare.
Then Tina, soft but unwavering, says:
“You know, these bees—they don’t try to escape their purpose.
They don’t question it, or perform it.
They just live it.”
Trungpa raises an eyebrow. He wants to interrupt, make it a teaching. But he senses something in her tone. So he stays silent.
“They aren’t afraid to work. Or to die.
But they never stop making sweetness. Even in danger.”
She pauses. “That’s what I learned when I left. When I was alone.”
She doesn’t mention the chanting yet. Not the stage. Not the pain.
She just watches a worker bee land, loaded with pollen, heavy and sacred.
“I used to think strength was in surviving.
But it’s in offering. Over and over. Without applause.”
Trungpa blinks. His mind goes to his own students. His own contradictions.
His brilliance. His drinking. The chaos he called clarity.
“I drank to dissolve things,” he says finally. “Structure. Ego. Even my own ideas of truth.”
Tina smiles, just barely.
“I chanted to find mine.”
The hive buzzes louder. A drone stumbles out. A bee dies in the grass.
They both see it.
“They don’t mourn the one that dies,” she says.
“They just keep going. As if the gift was always the doing, not the outcome.”
She turns to him.
“You taught warriorship. I lived it.
Not in a monastery. Not on a cushion.
In a house where I had to sing to stay sane.”
He exhales. It’s not defeat. It’s recognition.
“So you’re saying the bees are already enlightened?”
“I’m saying they don’t need to be.”
They stand together a little longer.
No mantra. No scripture. Just a hum that holds the whole world.
And in that moment, it’s Tina Turner who is the teacher and Trungpa has much to learn.
oxox Dennis
