One morning in India, looking out my kitchen window onto the porch, I caught sight of a five-foot-long snake winding its way along a bamboo pole bare of the summer’s hanging green mesh; immediately I called my property manager. Upon arriving he killed it. At my insistence, the long, gray body was carried to the far front field so that on taking out the compost I wouldn’t be able to see it. How the snake had slithered into my brick-walled compound or where it was headed I pushed to the back of my mind. But I knew that it brought a message.
During my years here, walking on wide, dirt paths through orchards that surround the hill, I have stopped dead still if a snake’s head emerged from the edging of field grass. Without moving until its thick body had fully undulated ten feet or less in front of me, I have understood that our meeting had been perfectly timed. Since 1997 when I first read Jamie Sams and David Carson’s Medicine Cards, I have lived with a new attentiveness to the birds and animals around me. Not all are messengers; for some I merely have an affinity. But with certain ones I know that a contact is being made.
Snake medicine is powerful and to be desired. But it brings with it a need to transmute something in one’s life. I pay attention to these snake encounters as to what it is in my life that I need to change—or let go of. The meanings of snake medicine are different for each of the physical, emotional, and mental places in us, but on a personal level it means that we are universal. The meaning of the spiritual plane naturally draws me: “When this Snake energy reaches the spiritual plane, it becomes wisdom, understanding, wholeness and connection to Great Spirit.”*
My realization is, “Without our awareness, we may miss important pieces of information for our growth coming to us through the natural world.
* Jamie Sams and David Carson, Medicine Cards, as presented on the website of scottfoglesong.printandwebdesign.com/