Snakes strike fear in many people. It’s one of those pervasive fears, like the fear of spiders, that I somehow don’t subscribe to. I’m not sure why, but neither of these creatures cause me too much alarm, though I have a good healthy respect for snakes.
There are poisonous varieties in these parts, and, in fact, I saw one this week, stretched out on a trail while I was on a hike. It was a small rattlesnake, about twelve inches long, with a striking gray and black pattern and a very small rattle. I didn’t study the snake for very long, and I should have taken a photo to verify what species it was, but my research led me to conclude it was a pygmy rattlesnake. While the snake tasted the air with its forked tongue, my hiking companion and I stepped gingerly around it from behind.
When my daughter and her friends visited the lake house in late August, they found a snake skin in the outdoor closet that stores all of our water sports equipment. The skin was underneath our rolled up lily pad, the giant floating raft we use to laze on the lake. I speculated that the snake got into the closet, shed its coat, then the friends deposited the lily pad onto the freshly shed skin, though unseen, and flattened it. It was really quite fascinating, and we left the skin where we found it.
Unlike the butterfly who transforms into a whole new creature when shed of its chrysalis, the snake, and other creatures that shed their skins, just outgrow their old ones. This is cicada season right now in Alabama, and I find their shells almost daily, clinging to the trunk of a tree, a downspout, or even my outdoor stairs.
Shedding one’s skin in order to begin anew has long been a metaphor for starting over.
There is something poetic, beautiful, and a little sad about outgrowing oneself. I sometimes wish I could physically shed my ill-fitting old self as I grew into a new phase of my life or realized a new truth when the old one no longer served me. It would be satisfying to have such a literal sign of new growth.
Personal growth occurs when we realize that we can’t continue in our same worn patterns, and we move forward. If we can’t let go of something that keeps us from growing, our spirit dies. We cannot cling to old thought patterns when we have stretched beyond them. And no one can force us to hold onto our old skins; we must shed them of our own accord.
We can do this metaphorically when we feel that we have outgrown old habits, thoughts, or ways of seeing the world. Maybe we write down that way of thinking onto a piece of paper and burn it. Maybe it’s as simple as saying a prayer for the person we use to be and wishing her well. We can create meaningful rituals that mark a passage from one chapter of life into the next. Even if we don’t recognize growth and shedding when it’s happening, we can look back with compassion at the persons we were and appreciate that the skin that use to serve us has now fallen away.