At the time that I was born, my dad had two very large boa constrictors as pets. Their names were Slick and Rambo and they were big enough to eat live chickens. My dad let them roam freely in an atrium in the center of our house that also had a hot tub and there are pictures of me at about 4 years old with one of them draped around my shoulders, my two little hands barely big enough to wrap around its neck. I don’t ever remember being afraid of them in the slightest.
One evening when I was about 6, my parents were out in the garage looking for something and had left the backdoor open. I walked into the kitchen to see a large black snake, not one of our pets, slithering across the floor, and yelled to my dad that a snake had gotten inside. My mom yelled back from the garage that it was just the vacuum hose that she had left out in the kitchen earlier, but when my dad came in moments later, he took one look at the snake and then looked at me and said, “I didn’t really think you would confuse a vacuum hose for a snake,” and smiled before getting a broom to gently guide the snake back out the back door.
I grew up with a deep respect for snakes, no sense that they were anything to fear, but certainly had an acute awareness of their power and knew that poisonous snakes were absolutely not to be tangled with. It wasn’t until I started studying lore, mythology, and the spiritual symbolism of animals that I started to see snake encounters as messages from Spirit. In some of the traditions I’ve studied, snakes represent transmutation and alchemy, the process of transforming something seemingly mundane into something greater than what it was before. I think of this process often when I’m dealing with hardship in life, and the analogy that comes to mind isn’t the prettiest, but truly, what represents turning hardship into something meaningful and uplifting more than the image of shit being used to fertilize a garden? When I’m really going through it, I often ask myself, “How can I use this moment to create beauty? What gifts are held within this experience? What goodness can I mine out of these circumstances?”
I have asked myself those questions a lot in recent months as the isolation I’ve experienced as a result of the pandemic has pushed me up against all sorts of internal edges. And the thing I keep coming back to is that this period of time to myself would be a wonderful opportunity to write the book I’ve been saying I was going to write for far too many years.
I even made a proclamation a couple of months ago that I was officially committing to writing my story, little by little, in the months ahead, and got several short pieces out, but eventually dropped out of the flow and let my writing fall to the wayside once again.
Sometimes when we don’t listen to that inner voice, Spirit comes in and sends us messages that are a little more jarring. If we don’t catch it the first time, the messengers will just keep on coming, with increasing intensity until the message is received. This past week, the messengers came in the form of rattlesnakes.
I have lived in Ojai for a little over two and a half years and, before this week, I had come across a rattlesnake only once. A friend of mine and I were walking a fire trail along the foothills overlooking Ojai one evening and were moving quite briskly on our way back because the light was fading very quickly. We heard the rattle before we saw the snake, but once we looked up, we saw that we had startled a rather large rattlesnake which, in response, had reared up and even lunged forward towards us in a defensive maneuver as it shook its rattle to warn us that we had come a little too close too quickly.
We backed up and it eventually calmed down and slithered off the trail and we made our way back to the car, a little adrenaline-buzzed, but otherwise unscathed.
About a week ago, I came upon another rattlesnake in almost the exact same section of that trail. I was by myself and had just spent several hours roaming around in the upper hills so my energy was very mellow and I walking at a gentle pace. I saw the snake when it was about 15 feet in front of me and proceeded to walk forward, cautiously, giving it a wide berth. I’m not sure if it was trying to go undetected or simply just unbothered by me, but it never moved a muscle. I stood there admiring it for a few minutes and then continued on towards the trailhead.
Then, over this past weekend, I went hiking with a friend and on our way down the mountain, we came around a switchback to find a rattlesnake making its way across the trail into some brush. My friend made his way through that part of the trail ahead of me and when he neared that area the rattlesnake sounded its alarm, but continued moving away from us deeper into the brush.
At the time I thought that it was quite unusual to see two rattlesnakes in a single week, and then last night, as another friend of mine and I were making our way back down a different trail with her dog, we apparently caught another rattlesnake off guard on a narrow section of trail with low shrubs all around. The previous two encounters hadn’t phased me particularly because I saw each of those snakes before I was anywhere near them, but the one last night definitely shook me momentarily as I couldn’t immediately pinpoint where the sounds was coming from, even though I knew what was making it and that it was quite a bit closer than I would have liked for it to be.
When I have unusual encounters with animals, I typically make a mental note of whatever I sense the message to be about and then get on with my business, but sometimes the messages are so intense and clear that no mental note is necessary. The run in with the rattlesnake last night felt like someone clapping their hands right in front of my face. A wake up call of sorts. And as I was showering off the sweat and trail dust and letting the ringing of that unmistakable sound begin to settle from my nervous system, I knew, without question, what message that snake was meant to give me.
Writing this book isn’t a choice. It’s something that has to come through me.
That little voice inside of me has been saying so for quite some time. And even though I’ve heard it and known that it needed to be honored, my actual response has amounted to a “yeah yeah yeah”.
I wasn’t listening. Not really.
So Spirit sent in the snakes. And not some little grass snakes or gopher snakes or other sweet-natured serpents, but fiery, fierce rattlers, singing their shrill song, telling me it’s time to create. To transmute my struggles into something that can offer healing, to myself, and hopefully to others as well. To use this time wisely by making a gift out of circumstances that I never would have asked for.
So here I am. Starting clumsily, but starting nonetheless.
I’m listening.
I’m writing.
And if Spirit happens to be listening as well, I hope it knows that no additional venomous snakes are necessary. Message received and very much noted.