When Spirit Sends in the Snakes

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.

The Story of My Scars

Some of you know that I have been on a long and tedious journey with skin cancer. As a redhead with blue eyes and very fair skin, I’ve always known that I needed to be careful in the sun. Growing up, I did my best to use sunscreen any time I knew I was going to be outside for any extended period of time and tried to avoid getting burned, although there were a handful of times where I wasn’t careful enough. By the time I was in my preteens I was wearing sunscreen on my face daily no matter what. Sure, I got a little bit of pinkness on my nose and shoulders here and there, but that seemed pretty harmless at the time, especially when I would watch friends of mine bathe in the sun for hours on end.

I had my first skin cancer removal nearly ten years ago shortly after I moved back to Los Angeles from the Bay Area. It was a basal cell carcinoma, the least aggressive type of skin cancer, and the removal was pretty simple and involved almost no downtime. I assumed that was an anomaly and that, if at all, I wouldn’t have to deal with anything like that again for many, many years. 

Little did I know that only five years later, I would enter a phase of my life that would be punctuated with surgery after surgery. To date, I have had 8 skin cancer removals, 5 on my arms, 1 on my leg, and 2 removals on my forehead. If that sounds like a lot that’s because it is. 

I have a sister who is only eighteen months younger than me and who I was nearly inseparable from as a child. We played outside for hours on end as kids and, while I’m sure there have been some differences in our habits over the years, we’ve had essentially the same amount of sun exposure and yet she has not had any skin cancers develop (and I’m very much hoping it stays that way for her), while I have found one little abnormal patch of skin pop up on my body after another. 

As I write this, I am bandaged up in three different places on my body from more biopsies and am scheduled to have a couple more biopsies taken from areas on my face in the weeks ahead.

I would be lying to you if I said I wasn’t scared, sad, angry, and pretty much any other emotion you might imagine to be fitting in this moment.

I have been lucky so far that nothing has been more serious than a basal cell carcinoma, but even so, the surgeries have not been easy on my body or my heart. 

As vain as it might sound, the ones on my face have been the hardest, not because I felt that my features were some pinnacle of perfection, but they are what I have always known and the thought of potentially one day looking in the mirror and not recognizing myself behind my scars leaves me shaken. 

I have had to remind myself again and again that I am not my body and even more so that my body is not mine, at least not in a permanent way. Yes, this vessel of flesh is how I move through the world. It is how I experience the sensations of being human. But, it is not who I am.

It is also not something that comes with any sort of guarantee. 

Whether it happens slowly or all at once, we are all moving towards disintegration every single day of our lives. 

Is it strange that this thought somehow comforts me? Makes me feel less alone? Less broken somehow?

I don’t know what’s going to happen or how much more of this is on the horizon for me. 

I do know that worrying about it changes nothing and, while there are still days that I get swallowed up by the sinking dread of things that may or may not ever come to pass, I feel something shifting deep within me, a new level of surrender, because really, what else can one do when confronted with the reality that we are not actually in control?

Resistance to what is only heightens the suffering, so I am trying to find a way to embrace, (yes, embrace) this experience that I never would have asked for but I know must certainly hold some gifts for me. And I think that is part of why I am sharing this here and now with you, whoever you are. 

I have been quiet about this part of my experience for so many reasons. Up until now it had felt too raw and too vulnerable to splay out for everyone to see. Even though it makes absolutely no rational sense, there is some sort of shame tied up in health struggles for so many of us, as if we are somehow to blame when things in our body go haywire, even if we have cared for ourselves as well as we could. But if there’s anything I know about shame, it’s that it can’t live in the light of day. When we put it out in the open and say, “here it is, this may not be the prettiest or most easily celebrated part of my journey, but I own it just as much as all the rest of it”, we take our power back. We claim something and in doing so we also open up the possibility for releasing it when the time is right. 

If you’re still here reading this, then thank you for bearing witness to this piece of me that I have struggled with most often in silence for really much too long. I hope that if you’re going through something similar, on any level, that this somehow helps you to feel less alone and maybe even more capable of embracing whatever it is that is yours in this moment, regardless of whether you would have chosen it or not. If nothing else, I hope you know that it’s okay to be human. Scars and all.

The Long Journey Home

I honestly can’t remember a time in my childhood when I felt comfortable in my own skin. I’ve had to work pretty hard for that and only now as I am on the tail-end of the third decade of my life am I starting to embrace the full spectrum of the being that I am. Not that that’s always a graceful or seamless process even these days. 

I still feel like I talk too much and manage to pull off astounding levels of awkwardness in some of the most seemingly straightforward social situations. For anyone who has ever seen me as “cool” for even a brief moment in time, God love you. To me the essence of true coolness is being so deeply secure in who you are that you just radiate ease and warmth. No need to judge others or to get too ruffled by anything anyone does because you just love and accept who you are and are therefore able to extend the same grace to others.

I work on this practice daily. It’s a mix of shadow work, radical self love, and authentic embodiment work and I don’t imagine I’ll ever run out of material to dig into. 

I can remember coming home from school in first grade, marching upstairs and into the bathroom, and climbing right up onto the sink so I could get as close to the mirror as possible.

I would look not really at but into myself. I would search for who I was inside the little shell of a girl who never felt like her spirit matched the body she was given for this go round. 

I sometimes stared into the mirror for so long that my features would stop making any sense and I’d no longer be completely sure which side of the mirror I was even on.

I started a new school at the beginning of sixth grade and decided that, since I wouldn’t know a soul there, it was my chance to try a different version of myself on for size.

On my first day of school, when my teacher called my name during roll, I raised my hand and told her with a nonchalant smile that, “I actually go by Dottie.” 

She seemed confused and I said something vague about it being a family nickname and that no one calls me “Ashley”.

I’m still not sure how, at 10 years old, I was able to summon enough bravado to tell such a lie with a completely straight face, but my teacher either bought it or decided to just forgo trying to sort through what was going on with the odd little new student in her class and for the rest of that year, I was “Dottie”.

The next year my father moved my sister and me out to the outskirts of Houston where we lived part time in a commune and part time with the mother of one of my dad’s friends while he lived in an apartment in downtown Houston. I never saw anyone from my sixth grade class again, but all of the farewell notes from my friends in my yearbook from that year say things like, “See you next year, Dottie!” and “Have a great summer, Dottie!”.

I guess if I ran into any of my friends from that school on the street today, I would still be “Dottie” to them.

I’m not sure that my family ever really fully knew about my little sixth grade social experiment. My dad did seem somewhat bemused when friends from school would call our house and ask for “Dottie”, but I just told him that it was just something friends from school called me.

At home, to him and my sister and any of the other cast of characters that might be living with us at any given time, I was always “Ashley”.

I never tried to change my name again but that certainly wasn’t the end of my identity exploration.

From high school to college to the handful of years working odd jobs post-graduation and even into my time in graduate school, I shaped-shifted time and time again.

I jumped from one social group to another, tapping into different parts of myself within the context of each scene. 

Each version was a slice of the truth. But when you build friendships based on only a fraction of who you are, they often stop feeling like a fit once the full range of your being starts seeping through. And it always does eventually.

It took years for me to stop playing the roles of whoever it was that I thought people wanted me to be and to just start allowing the full weight of who I actually am to land and to be willing to deal with the consequences of that.

But what a relief it was to finally stop trying to keep so much of myself tucked in.

I still have moments where I catch myself in the mirror and wonder who is in there, behind the eyes inside this vessel that still doesn’t always feel like mine.

The difference now though is that the question feels lighter because I know the answer will never be one thing. And that I don’t need to go searching for myself.

I’m right here. I’ve always been right here. 

All I needed to do was create space for my truth to come through and then welcome every bit of it  in, without exception, when it does.

Part of Everything

I’ve never been good at smalltalk. I blame my father for that. 

After my mother moved out of our house just shortly before I turned seven, my sister and I started accompanying my father to work on occasions when he couldn’t find a babysitter. He was an emergency room doctor and often worked back-to-back shifts at emergency rooms all over the Houston metropolitan area.

My sister and I would stay in his on call room, eating vending machine food and watching TV from the hospital bed, while he worked. Sometimes we would play in the hospital hallways and distract the nurses. We just had to make sure that my father never caught us since, depending on his mood, his reaction could range from amusement to contempt.

Sometimes the drives between one hospital and the next took hours. Anyone who’s ever driven from one side of Houston to the other knows that it’s a sprawling beast of a city.

My dad was often exhausted from a combination of workaholism and sleep apnea and, since my sister pretty much always fell asleep a matter of minutes into any long drive, it became my job to sit up front and keep him from falling asleep at the wheel. 

Maybe it was because he was essentially trusting me to keep all of us alive, but on these drives, he never treated me like a kid. I was the copilot, a fellow soldier, and his confidant. 

We would sometimes listen to music or books on tape, but mostly we would just talk about anything and everything.

Death was something that came up a lot.

I remember him asking me what I thought happened after we die and how, when I told him I thought we were like gas being released from a jar, that we become part of everything, extending infinitely into space, he smiled softly and nodded, eyes still fixed on the road, calm as could be, almost as if he were daydreaming.

When he told me that he wanted to choose how he went, that he never wanted to be old or bed-ridden and that one day, he would choose when it was his time and go, I understood what he was saying and accepted it.

I don’t remember feeling any fear or sadness. It seemed like a fair choice and one that was his to make.

And I can’t say now that I feel differently, except that I’m not sure his plan accounted for the possibility that our birth and death and everything in between may be guided by forces so much bigger than we could ever wrap our minds around. And that to try to tamper with or control the very essence of our existence, the energies that cause our hearts to beat and our spirits to be drawn to everything that they are, might be absolutely futile.

That perhaps there are some things we are destined to go through in one form or another, for the growth and evolution of our souls. And that if we try to bypass these parts of our journey, we will only find ourselves rerouted again and again back to that same part of the path until we have the courage to walk down it.

I can’t know if this is true for certain, but it feels true from the depths of my being.

And I’m not  sure where he is right now. My father, in and of himself, was quite the force of nature.

Sometimes I think he’s everywhere at once, permeating every swath of existence.

Sometimes I think he’s living another life. Revisiting everything he loved and everything he wasn’t yet ready to meet in his last one.

I hope this time he feels like he can face it. 

Whatever it is.

I guess that’s something I hope for all of us.