S N A K E S
I HAVE A LONG HISTORY WITH SNAKES. As a child, I swam in Lake Winnipesaukee, in New Hampshire, diving for large, smooth, broad-headed water snakes that were fat with fish and frogs, which, much of the time, my camp buddy Terry and I caught by latching them onto our outstretched arms and dragging them into the rowboat. Terry caught “Grandpa Snakee,” which he took home to Brooklyn with him (his mother, I suspect, was as pleased as mine was when I showed her my summer catch), and found out at the Bronx Zoo that it was just two inches short of a record.
That summer, as I entered puberty, the test of manhood was plowing toward me with its head extended above the waters of our trembling selfhood.
We left no log unturned, no fallen board or branch unmoved in our quest for the smooth, cool touch of the grass and water snakes, and the bull, milk, garter, king, big black racer, and corn snakes.
Indeed, in my thirteen-year-old mind, being the outsider I always felt myself to be, I became quite attached to a small, emerald-green grass snake, “Greenie,” that I felt I communicated with, feeding him ant eggs and inviting him to reside in my shirt pocket for a couple of weeks. He even remained in my shirt pocket when I slept—my first yoga was learning to be still in my sleep on my back, not to turn and perhaps roll over on Greenie. After I completed whatever initiation was to be had from so small a creature in so big a world about the perfect beauty in nature, he took off one night. I was much the wiser for our relationship. He had taught me to be still.
I thought, as I slalomed through adolescence, that I would become a herpetologist and make the study of reptiles my life’s work. I was encouraged in these endeavors by my parents, who also were relieved, I suspect, hoping that it might draw me away from my interests in chemistry and my lab in the cellar in which there had already been two explosions—I’d been provided with chemicals, flasks, and burners by my chemist father. I think they wanted most, even more than to encourage my study of snakes, was to leave their home unexploded. As a teenager, my interest in science, which was noticed by my teachers, allowed me to take college classes in the New York State teachers college associated with the high school I attended. I went to lectures and met the great herpetologist Raymond Ditmars, and I wrote to Dr. T. Van, the director of the Bronx Zoo, and was invited to visit.
The other day, while walking by the stream, my attention was drawn to the diaphanous skin shed by a bull snake. Sitting by the slightly singing stream under the green canopy of summer, my mind filled that empty skin, my attention fitting perfectly within. Fossils are imprints set in stone, composed out of the earth element—a teaching in the long trail of time that has brought us to this living moment. Some creatures, however, leave but an airy mark in time, a glistening bit of well-designed protoplasm trembled by the breeze: they are a teaching in impermanence. The snake’s shed skin says that sometimes even time is left behind—only the present moment is real and all the rest is a dream about the egg from which we hatched and the many skins we will shed on our way to completion.
The shed skin speaks of how our sole identification with the superficial—the outer body, composed of a few thin cells—delays our entrance into the real body that lies beneath, the life body that holds our acquired exterior in place.
My anticipated university training had great support and good recommendations. But then the powerful Kundalini energy depicted in Asia as a serpent, regarded as the seat of the life force, said to be coiled at the base of the spine, began to rise within me past the realms of survival and sex and my acquired personage in the world. Over the next years, it began softening in me and releasing the fearful armoring that we carry in the belly, which uncoils from the belly to the heart, occasionally passing through hell on the way to heaven, through our collective isolation to the awaiting communion, to a new life accompanied by the opening of the Eye of Beauty and the start of singing. The origin of my song was revealed. My song had perhaps begun decades before with that little, emerald-green grass snake.
The only frame of reference I had for this spiritual upwelling, this awakening, was from the green snake’s sleep teachings, and my learning to surrender the restlessness of adolescence so as not to injure another. Somehow, not holding onto pride or resistance (therefore experiencing grace), like a snake shedding his skin as he grew, I allowed the bright new energy to pass on through without getting stuck in some neuron-cluster or loose filament in the body dug by the fear of the mind, and without causing difficulties in finding another nesting place, or perhaps even experiencing illness. Spiritual pride is like a pit viper in flowered grass.
The snake sheds its skin because there is not room enough within the skin for it to grow. This is a clear-eyed teaching on the benefits of change, and how, on another level, as the heart expands, it finds itself in a greater body, acting for the benefit of a larger world. The snake is only able to receive nourishment from what it has ingested if it finds a source of warmth, most often accompanied by a source of light. This is an object lesson that, with little or no distortion, exemplifies that in a life without warmth and light (mercy and wisdom), we decompose. When these charms, mercy and wisdom, are present—whether through our caring for a fragile wildling or our holding the hand of a young mother dying of cancer—we feel the pulse of the universe in our fingertips. A star-nosed mole momentarily understands everything and becomes preternaturally patient, becomes the pulse of evolution. The ticking of change.
* * *
Before I can leave this story, I must make an act of contrition:
I must ask the forgiveness of two snakes I killed: one forty years ago, one a few years ago.
The first was a six-foot black racer on the cliff above Monterey Bay beside Steinbeck’s Watsonville.
Great Granddad Snake, winding out of the flowering ice plant, you were sacrificed to make a talisman, a medicine bag for a friend. I dried your shimmering skin in the sun. I ask your forgiveness.
The second was a rattlesnake hunkered down in the rocks beside the house where our grandchildren sometimes play. We asked it to leave all day long, pulling the dogs away from it repeatedly. We sent metta, loving kindness, to it on and off during the night and hoped for its safe retreat. But in the morning it was still there, just out of reach.
I did not know what else to do, with the children’s visiting weekend approaching. The noise startled the dogs. I ask your forgiveness.
* * *
July 11
This morning I kill the Beloved in the backyard with a shotgun.
He comes as a timber rattlesnake this time
to test the heart, to see what remains in the karmic bundle.
He wishes me no harm, only death.
I lean down to look into his eyes,
to try to make contact, a slit of onyx
in a glistening amber field,
but he does not like that, and coils to strike,
a sacred articulation in each rising vertebra,
the hiss and rattle of the Nagas,
or of the demons in Milarepa’s cave,
trying to draw the saint’s attention away
from the healing buried in his body.
The serpent three times throws himself forward and draws himself back.
In his open mouth is the seed syllable “hum.”
He is the living Uroborus, mending our broken world
by intentionally completing the sacred hoop.
He wishes only to evolve, to dream.
He is a moment of energy teetering on the edge of eternity.
Serpent, back to the heavens with you!
Serpent, tell them we won’t be long….
* * *
Some years ago, Coyote Trickster, as our Pueblo neighbors might say, played a serpentine trick on us. Ondrea was driving, and out of the heating vent near the floor on my side of the front seat I saw the head of a snake appear. I thought at first she might be playing a practical joke on me with a rubber snake, but the snake kept drawing itself out through the vent onto the floor of the car. I asked Ondrea to stop, to pull over, to get out of the car! But she thought I was just kidding about a snake in the car—a practical joke from me—and kept driving.
With some urgency, I suggested we’d better get out of the car. But Ondrea was not clearly seeing the markings of one of our local rattlesnakes, which had probably followed the scent of a mouse up into the engine compartment when the car was parked. I had to reach over and tap her on the elbow to please look over before we were going to be forced out of the car in some Keystone-cops tumble on the side of the road. By now, about four feet of the six-footer had made its way into the cab. Ondrea looked over, the car wobbled a bit, and we pulled quickly to the side and jumped out of the now snake-inhabited SUV. It was a gopher snake, fake rattles and all. We invited the harmless creature (something of a poser) out of the car next to a grassy meadow.
We still laugh about that one. I learned a lesson and received another moment of serpent wisdom.
* * *
And then there was the lovely congregation of garter snakes in an old cemetery behind an old white clapboard church down the road from Ondrea’s parents in New Hampshire. Ondrea and I have long had an aesthetic and heart-nourishing interest in old cemeteries, ever since we saw a small family plot from the eighteenth century whose tombstone read:
Remember friends, as you pass by
As you are now, so once so was I.
As I am now, so you must be.
Prepare yourself to follow me.
Practicing mindfulness and mercy is the perfect preparation for death. And so, for some reason, perhaps the recent rains or some underground disturbance, multiple shiny, excessively harmless garter snakes appeared that day in the old New Hampshire cemetery, coming from around and under numerous gravestones. We had never seen anything like it. There may have been a hundred swaying, tumbling, racing, lovemaking Olympic participants. And they were friendlier than the human base-reptilian brain often allows. So we sat down on the grass and let a number of them ordain us with that particular, almost magical “included” feeling of a snake gliding through our fingers and hands.
After we received the blessing of the extraordinary parishioners behind the church, exorcising Eden’s curse, and we sang a few hymns to the inexpressible joy of nature, we returned to Ondrea’s parents’ house for soup.
* * *
Surrounding the planet is the Uroborus, the alchemical serpent with its tail in its mouth—the dragon of the interstice, the leaper of species, containing the secrets of turning dross to gold, of the enlightenment of minerals and all sentient beings. The snake is evolution, and we are the snake before dreaming gave us the rest of us.
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