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The collective is dancing with Grief. Loss. Transformation. Transmutation. Ascension isn’t necessarily an easeful process. And as below, so above. As without, so within. You’re probably feeling lots of feels as your life changes, relationships end, loved ones cross over. All in preparation for the grand ascension of humanity.

Buckle up.

I’m told there’s a tremendous interpersonal shake up happening on planet earth of late. A great many relationships are being ‘redefined’. If it’s happening to me, I’m betting the house it’s happening to you, too. Marriages and friendships dissolving. Families estranged. I’m told it’s something like a cleansing. A making way for Sacred Unions to emerge that will radically – and for the better – transform humanity.

Let’s be real, though. It’s Confusing. Painful. Heartbreaking. When it’s happening to you.

(Shedding skin seems more challenging for this human than for her scaly counterparts.)

But indeed isn’t this also an invitation into a redefinition of your primary relationship? Your relationship with your whole, perfect, unadulterated Soul Self. A Sacred Union with the Divine, the divinity within YOU.

Foreward:

I grew up with snakes. (Without ever understanding the gravity of snake medicine.) They were just everywhere, blending perfectly with the southern New Mexico desert. Finding their untimely end by the blade of my father’s shovel. Me, always fascinated by the primal power and the rattling tail of the Western Diamondback. Me not knowing that, under their tutelage, I would spend my life reinventing myself again and again and again, whether I wanted to or not.

Journal Entry - November 4, 2022:

Seasons of the Snake, an Oracle

April 30th, on the New Moon in Taurus last year, my beloved rose, showered and then announced he no longer wanted to be married, that we were just too different and he was divorcing me.

24 years of relationship altered in an instant.    My world crumbled.

On June 18th, my partner and best friend exited our shared dream in Santa Fe, our shared vision of the life we worked so hard to co-create after two+ decades together in California.

He left our home. I left my body.

That same day, my neighbor called me in a panic. There was a snake in his living room and he hoped I would remove it for him. (I’m a snake relocation volunteer in my community.)

   Snake has a way of bringing you into deep, sacred presence.

What at first glance looked like a baby rattlesnake was swiftly dropped into my snake bucket. It turned out to be a baby hognose, but the message was clear:

        “This marks the end of one phase of your life and heralds in a new and wiser awakening within yourself. Know that this is a transitional period in your life with new spiritual awakenings knocking at your door.”  - Snake

Two days later, on June 20th, I was asked to remove a wounded snake from another nearby home. The homeowner was understandably upset, having accidentally injured the snake that was coiled in her casement window.

The ants were already on the scene. This beautiful bull snake with an unmistakable female energy had lived long enough to stretch well over four feet long. My heart ached even more.

I took her lifeless body home with me knowing she was there to support the holy work of shedding my own skin.

The following morning, on the Summer Solstice, I laid her in the field outside my home with yarrow and calla lily. An offering to death, rebirth, new beginnings and eternal love.

I wept as I set an intention to be through the most painful part of this seismic shift by the Winter Solstice.

The day before the Fall Equinox, I found two more dead snakes. The first one was cut in half. The second one, much smaller, was whole. They seemed a powerful metaphor for me and my beloved. Both had been mortally wounded on the road.

I placed them in the field with obsidian, clear quartz, local pink quartz and rosemary, which the ancient Greeks used for remembering.

Journal Entry - December 22, 2022:

Shedding Her Skin

If I can accept that everything – no matter how painful, no matter if I brought it upon myself or not – is a learning opportunity that is placed on my path for my ultimate growth, then I am at one with the snake.

If I can accept that change is inevitable, that everything withers, that new life cannot exist apart from death, then I am in atonement – which is to say, at one with – snake medicine.

If I can allow myself for even one moment to take a step back, a wider view, to see that all that transpires in this lifetime is theater and I am but one actor among billions, that the cosmic choreography operates at a timescale incomprehensible to mere mortals, then I can relax into the essence of snake energy.

If I can allow myself – even for one moment – to release my judgments, my need to be right or vindicated, my role as martyr, my grasping for that which is long dead, then perhaps I, too, can shed my skin.

But I am human. And messy. I grasp. I writhe. I cling. I fear and I loathe. I resent. I love and I miss and I regret so very much.

And so slithers in snake medicine to teach me and you and all of us to let go. To just. Let. Go.

The snake never asks why she must shed her skin. She never struggles to keep her old scales, fearing she’ll lose herself in her moult.

She doesn’t bargain with god, promising to do better if only things could be the way they were.

When it’s time to grow that’s exactly what she does.

That which is no longer useful gets scraped along the lower stems of my salvia bush, leaving this message: You cannot expand, heal, and reach your potential, dear heart, unlesssss you shed your sssskin.

 

Journal Entry - March 23, 2022:

11 moons

The air in our home is dense, thick, full. As I shuffle the corridor of this mortal coil the energy swirls, coils around me. This place is heavy with moult. With scales that fall from me, scales fall from me, from my heart, my eyes, my pussy. Scales falling, falling, falling, filling this place we used to share, this life we used to share. I look the same. Skin no different after the moult. Only perhaps my snake eyes are clearer, crystalline. Is my heart different? My soul says, yes. So different the difference will only be known in time.

I sip my tea. Talk to the desert willow. One-eyed Moon at my heels, the moon always chasing, always counting, always reminding me. I am here you are not. But I am here. I am. I am. I am shuffling the halls. Feeling the thick energy of so many scales flaking off. Revealing new skin. Revealing old skin. The me I was before. The me I was before. The me I was when the moon was formed, when the earth solidified, when the oceans cooled; the boiling the boiling the boiling of my own heart, my own heart, my own heartbeat that pulses with the beat of the earth.

I hear it in my snake ears. Do snakes hear? I hear the snakes just now beginning to warm, beginning to ready themselves to greet me in the garden. To show me how easy it is to let the old skin go. To let the past lay

to let it lay. let it lay.

let it lay in the garden.

the garden

the garden of my soul

full of life

full of death

spent blooms

full of promise

promise

for what lies

   what slithers

       what

           blossoms

       ahead

Anné M. Klint

www.annemklint.com