The Snake and the Girl

Camas : Winter 2018

It was late August, tall grasses stiff and bent to gold light. Three of us, grown women, still girls, rode our bikes toward the creek for one last soak of sun. Forgetting the press of traffic, I stopped my bike suddenly and stooped to see the muscular whip of a thing stunned and silent, staring back at me. I’d nearly missed her in my hurry, coiled and injured on the asphalt.

I didn’t think to ask her if she was sunning herself or simply trying to get somewhere, just pushed my bike to the sidewalk and went back to her, awkwardly grabbing her middle. Her small, warm body wrapped around my fingers, holding onto me, holding onto her. When I crouched to set her down, I lifted her face to mine, noticed the fine lines on one side, red with blood. Unnamed creeks on a map. One jewel-black eye keen on mine. The universe cracked open around us. 

Had I paused longer, would I have understood her gaze as a question, a request to stay, an expression of gratitude? I only understood it as trust, as I searched for a soft spot in the grass to place her, while my friends looked on, their bodies half-turned toward the creek. 

And then a flood of judgements bubbled up in my mind.

Because I will stop everything for other animals who need help. And people don’t always understand it.

It’s just a snake. 

Because I don’t see my friends often and I didn’t want them to think they were less important.

Don’t spoil the fun. 

Because I will not forget what women before me withstood and lately it feels like we are sliding back that way. Witches and familiars. A world more whole than understood.

They burned women like me at the stake.  

So I left her there, her one good eye still steady on me, 

murmured a prayer, a wish, an apology—

whatever name she would give it, 

whatever way she would understand it. 

***

I didn’t know the word empath until a college professor gently suggested I was one.There were clues in my family, but those who might have guided me were simply too engrossed in their own battles. There was no magic toolbox to cope with what they’d been given. 

They were sick with it. 

I fumbled my way into it.

The beauty of all things living, the vast collective breath, it sometimes lifts me higher than I am comfortable and sometimes make me ache so profoundly that I want to flee my own bones.  And I spent much of my young adult life beating myself up for being too sensitive. It was my weakness.

I pushed this part of myself deep down. 

***

My feet pale against the prism of stones on the creek bottom, I could only think of the snake, ask myself if I’d done what I could. I ask this of myself a lot these days and the answer is rarely clear. So, with the cool night coming on, I stopped to find her on our way home, hoping she’d slithered off, but she was there, the heat of her drained away. I picked her up again, her body still supple, her eye still gleaming in the falling light. And I couldn’t tell if she was dead or alive. 

I know the difference between dead and alive. At least most of the time. There was that one day, when I was young. Maybe nine. The neighbors caught two garter snakes, chopped off their heads and hung the bodies in the spirea bush. I was making my daily rounds for flowers and berries, happened upon them, startled at the motion of the headless bodies, suspended, still moving in a languid slither. 

The ones who did the killing nowhere to be found. 

No one but me to watch the slow leaving. 

I couldn’t grasp that space between

this side of the veil

and the other, 

but I suppose I’ve walked it ever since, 

wondering. 

One thing I’ve learned is that it is clear when they go on. 

Except for snakes. 

Her body still slid softly across my palm, curved in my fingers. That eye seeing the distance through me, to the other side. So I tucked her in a box, wrapped in a pale blue flannel sheet, in my friends’ laundry room. Because they couldn’t tell if she was dead either and being normal people, the thought of a live snake free in their house made them nervous. 

The blunt line of her nose 

poked out from beneath the sheet, 

some idea of loving her

in all her foreign menace. 

Which wasn’t menacing at all. 

That night, I spent my dreams laced and twined around her, wishing her alive. 

I know that I am not alone. I believe that each one of us can feel what is easier to push away. Fragility is hard to bear, especially our own. 

The precarious nature of now

shows itself 

In the playful and deadly pounce of a coyote at dawn. 

In the headlight stare of a friend whose body is betraying her into an early death. 

In the brittle bone set of a stranger’s jaw at any given moment. 

I cultivate hope more than despair, most of the time. And I’ve learned that my empathy is not a weakness or an illness, but more of a super power. Doesn’t mean I am a hero, it just means that when I try to dwell deeper in that space, instead of run from it, and when I try to understand others who appear so different from me, progress happens. 

It is in that kind of space that I found the snake.

Traffic all around and the world falling away. 

A moment with the wordless.

A  breath in the midst of rising voices trying to be heard. 

Yet it is hard to hear, no matter how much I try to listen and so I ask to feel the intention--to find the space where we hold each other carefully; the way we want to be held. 

All the while, I have my eye on the veil. 

It is closer than any of us know. 

But we sense it. 

There lies this collective ache, this desire for peace and progress, a certain desperation. 

Regardless of belief, it is feeling. 

What the tongue struggles to name. 

It is in the air that rushes out when that same stranger holds the door for me. It is in the rattle of sandhill cranes flying overhead, each person on earth stopped with their eyes trained to the sky. It is in the creak of the chairs as a room full of people listens so hard to hear something true in a language they don’t understand, they nearly fall from their seats.  

The wordless waits for us. 

***

One of the most ubiquitous symbols across history and cultures is that of the serpent eating its tail. Ouroboros: the tail devourer. Egyptians associated it with cyclical time: repetition, renewal, eternity. Alchemists saw, in it, that one is all. For gnostics, it was about the divine and earthly natures of man existing in unison with each other; the harmony of contrary forces. 

Is this why I couldn’t tell if the snake was dead or alive? For it neither ends nor begins. It is one and all. It is my divine nature—my feral twin—touching back down to remind me of the delicate space we live in. 

The only difference between a snake and a serpent, is mythology. In this age of unbelievability, we still need story and magic. Dead snakes have a way of appearing alive. A way of making us question our reality. And what we think we know. Science would tell me that snakes die and it might explain why they don’t always appear dead. But I am more interested in how to be at peace with what we do not know. How to sense the frangible, eggshell edges and move mercifully among them. How to pick up what scares me and gaze into her one good eye. 

She spent the night in the box and then I carried her out into the pale white morning, rested her in a better place, wound in a spiral, facing the sun. 

Without fragility, resilience cannot exist. 

I stood up, stretched my stiff body and looked to the road.