Two dead snakes at my feet today, on my daily walking path like an omen of some sort. I am mesmerised by it all: the shiny scales, eyes wide open, flattened by death and lifeless.
Not three – the number that is holy and giving. But two – what divides, the dichotomy, opposites and choices. Or perhaps, the union.
The serpent. I was told that the serpent is evil. The whisper of sin, the surrendering into carnality and a weakened mind. Eve following that calling to pleasure. I was spoken of the dangers, the potential of death, warned of our blood sucking in venom. It’s better to keep out of those dark corners, of such encounters, repressing our own mortality like a dark secret.
Yet I questioned the dark. I crave it, I seek it almost like a masochist that demands pain. I question Fear and the story of sin. I question the image of god that’s been painted in my head by another, and the image of evil fed to me as being blackness.
I stopped believing those stories long ago, of what the others carved as being true, right or wrong.
No one spoke to me about the necessity of dying with regularity. About how evil is often bright and joyful, a chameleon of light. I never knew about the fertility of the dark until my body began to shed like a snake, my mouth to hiss with song. My spine coiling and uncoiling. Low to the ground in prayer, reverence to the earth, crawling my way through. No one spoke to me about the gracefulness of snakes. The wisdom of the serpent that holds onto nothing, whose layers do not stagnate, whose eyes are always open. No one told me that the dark is holy, and the whisper of sin was in fact a call to fullness of feeling, a call to feeling the god within our bones and blood. The beauty of snake eyes that even in death remain open and receiving, seeing. I was spoken of fear, but not of the power of snakes, for it takes strength of heart to let go of old skin.
What does it mean to find two dead snakes on my way, shining even though dead.
So frighteningly beautiful.
I let these questions brew in me, until my belly births the answer.
Ouroboros. The serpent who eats his own tail, who dies and is reborn in perpetual cyclic renewal of life and infinity, the eternal return. Here is where you begin.
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