Peeka Trenkle - A Unique Perspective on Healing

February 3, 2009

The Increase of Light

It is bitter cold this morning. As I sit and write, the snow is falling. I look out the window on the grey, white and brown colors of February. Nothing seems to have any life. It is the dead of winter, a time of year that feels like nothing will ever be green again. Everything is frozen and still.

And yet, there is an increase of light now. We are halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring equinox. The daylight is a full hour longer than it was a month ago and deep in the darkness of the Winter hive, the queen is beginning to lay her eggs.

I have two colonies of honey bees on my property. One I have had for two years, the other just for one year. I am a novice and an amateur beekeeper and am filled with a deep reverence for these lovely creatures. Since I began keeping them, they have also become for me a metaphor for healing, a pure example of wholeness and interrelatedness.

At this time of year as the light increases, the worker bees begin to generate royal jelly from the glands in their heads. They feed it to the queen who then begins to lay her eggs again deep in the dark in the center of the hive with tens of thousands of bees clustered around her. Slowly at first, her laying increases with the increase of light daily until, at the height of the light at the Summer solstice, a strong queen can be laying as many as 1500 eggs a day. In the beginning of this process we can see nothing. The energy of the hive is turned inward and is unavailable for observation. But what is happening now, unseen, is crucially important for the survival of the colony.

We live in a very outer-directed world. It is a world in which accomplishments matter and what we do accomplish we ought to be able to quantify. We should have something to show for all of our hard work and always be productive.

But it is important to be conscious of the cycles of our lives too. Sometimes the deepest healing is invisible from the outside.  Sometimes we are deep within a process that requires a different kind of focus.  Healing can be happening during times of stillness and of silence. The queen is laying eggs slowly and steadily in the darkness of the hive - and life is continuing on.