I write down my arm, into my journal, every day. I tear the pages from the book, crumple them, use them to build a fire at night. Every word that comes through me is eventually turned to ash. Everything that I do is already ash.
I have come upon four snakes in the last month; only one was fully living. It was the first. A king snake, black, whipping into its hole home as I ran past on the desert dirt. A flash of a shadow, I barely noticed it, yet could not forget as I walked on how quickly it moved. We think that we can outrun things, out-sweat things, and all the while, beside us, within us, there are snakes whipping themselves into and out of holes. There is no outrunning a truth. There is only learning to see it.
What truths might I have been outrunning? The truth that I still struggle to feel my full beauty; the truth that I still question if I can ever love someone? The truth that I feel made for bigness, and the realization that every single one of us feels that way. Sonder. A word that means the world in which we live is comprised of other humans, souls, who also live big worlds. My world is a single scale on a snake’s skin.
I used to sit on top of hills and look down at the backlit windows of houses, straining to see the humans inside. Inside each of those homes, there is a person, or two, or five, or ten. And each of them has their own life, their own world, where they are the center of everything. Can this earth truly contain each of us, with all of our weightiness, our hopes, and still keep turning? It feels like it will sink beneath the unlived dreams we continue to carry, the loss we have and haven’t mourned, the pain we feel in our bodies and hearts that we don’t know how to metabolize. You look at me. I look at you. We can never fully see.
The second snake I saw was not a snake anymore. It was the exoskeleton of a snake. I am not sure if it was a rattlesnake; the print on the transparent cape it shed does not indicate, at least to my untrained eyes, the species. Rather, I found myself holding three feet of dead life. The snake had slithered from the open mouth of its shell. Even its eye holes were still intact. Buried along the side of my parent’s house, this snake was strength and fragility, how they go hand in hand. To molt its skin in such a way, a snake must become nearly catatonically dormant. It hinges itself to sharp object- a rock, the protruding lip of a house foundation–and as it begins to move forward over days and weeks, as it crawls outside of its old self, the sharp edge clutches onto the skin, keeps it in place, behind, so the new snake can emerge. Liberation.
I am a shedder of many skins. I am a wearer of many skins. I remember a week in high school where I dressed like different “types” of myself each day: goth, preppy, artsy. Each of these “costumes” tried on for size as I continued to try to understand which one was me. I thought I was the skin. I didn’t yet know I was the snake.
The third snake I saw was hanging in the balance between life and death. On a bike ride in my neighborhood, I saw it jolting around on the road. It was small, young. Barely a foot long. As thin as a finger. Its body spasmed as it tried to understand that its belly intestines were falling out, that its blood was pooling beneath it. I picked up the snake with two long sticks and brought it to the edge of the road. I watched it for a minute, two, three, as it took its final breaths. The only other creature whose death I had witnessed was my dog, Cody. But that death did not come with the gasping. It was induced by a needle, in the comfort of our home, with a fire in the fireplace, with all of us gathered. This snake was not ready to die. In its final minute, it kept rising up its head, opening and closing its mouth, as if to try to tell me all the things that it has already learned. The lessons it has gleaned from its few weeks, months of life. It had lived time enough to learn things enough to share. It was not ready. I made it an altar when it finally stopped moving, yet even as I reached close to the head, placing stones, I half-expected it to jolt awake again, lurch forward, bite. It had so much desire to live.
I have not fought for my life in such a visceral away, though I do know the feeling of fighting for myself. I remember when I decided to leave the comfort of a long relationship, my decision fueled by sobbing truth: I did not know who I was, and I was no longer ok with that. Snakeskin after skin, my own mutations had become such a part of me I didn’t realize that I was the one beneath it all. So easy to pick up the habits, the passions, the music, the tendencies of another. I didn’t know what was mine, and what was inherited. We are always, of course, gathering as we go, trying to learn how to do so in a way that is right and honoring, and yet, I found myself left staring into a mirror, into a face, I both recognized and felt stranger to. I left. I left to find what was already, always, within.
But I didn’t know that yet, and so I began to move. From place to place, country to country, taking jobs that let me travel, working 4-month programs where I was “on” 24 hours a day. I taught, I listened, I counseled. I poured myself into this fluid space, suckling for the validating boundaries of others. I was gasping for an answer, please. Tell me how to do this. How to live. How to love. How to heal. How to listen to some truth that is inside myself. Tell me what to believe, and how to be alone, and how to be a daughter, sister, teacher, writer, lover, friend, partner. I gasped mouthful after mouthful of air, not realizing the pursuit of looking for answers outside of myself was already a mission doomed for death.
The fourth snake I saw was dead twice over and recently living. In the glowing moonlight, the white of its underbelly reflected the sky above. I almost stepped on it. Holding out his flashlight, my friend illuminated the path and we saw it, still, yet it seemed nearly throbbing. There was no head; there was no rattle. I used rocks to turn its body over, and we saw its skin. Western Diamondback. One of the most common, and most self-protective, snakes of the southern desert. Who were you, and what happened?
Where the head had been, a bloody knob remained. Where the rattle had shook, a broken tail flayed. The body was thick, almost two inches across, and even without its head and its tail, close to two feet in length. As I moved it between the rocks, I could feel the weight of its boneless frame. Perhaps an animal was still inside, being digested by a nearly dead system. The rocks as my fingers, I could still feel the mass of it– slimy and firm, squishy and structured. The body lulled itself like an uncontrollable tongue between my grasp. We moved it over to the side of the path and created an altar, like the altar for the young snake before. Human or animal death, we were unsure. I feel animal. It may have attacked the head first, then chewed and spit out the rattle; it was preparing to eat the rest when we approached. A yellow-eyed creature watching us from the bushes.
This year has been a year of death and life, of yellow eyes watching and thick-bodied serpents needed to be held. It has included the death of programs I’ve loved along with the life of new ideas as schools, organizations, people, adapt. It is a year of millions who have died, from this pandemic as well other diseases, pain, poverty, hurt, harm that seem to be part of the human condition, though it shouldn’t be this way. It has been a year of some of my fears shriveling, pruning, taking their last breaths as the life of words, and images pour out. Snakes are symbols of transformation. We are amidst evolution.
In various traditions, from Indian mythology to Navajo and Hopi symbolism, snakes signify transformation, fertility, sex, an enemy, the presence of change. For my ancestors of Norse mythology, the snake held both order and destruction. Their shedding of skin, the embodiment of flow, snakes exist on the spectrum of both, and. They ask for patience as they ask for change. Snakes are teachers, right now and always.
I believe that when we go to the desert, when we go to nature, it is when we are ready to listen to and absorb the messages. We go when we are ready to give what we can of ourselves to that place. We do not take without asking permission; we give only what is wanted. This is how everyday reciprocity, as described by scientist-author Robin Wall Kimmerer, exists in its highest state. We all have that which we can give; we have to be willing to ask as well as receive.
These last weeks, I have given and received much. I have taken a snakeskin, snake memories, and snake gasps for life. Even in filming the video above, I paused. I asked the snake if it was ok. The spirit of the snake responded that having a reminder for what death, and life, look like is important. I hit record.
In giving, I have left rock altars, offerings, and words. The snakes continue to communicate; they have come to visit me in my dreams, both living and dead. The snakes, and myself, it’s hard to understand where life and death meet. We are learning how to communicate, the snakes and me, me and myself. We try to understand our temporality in this world. For now, a gasp for life, a skin for legacy, a flash for remembering, burial grounds for honoring. This is how one moves. This is enough. Thank you.
