Year of the Snake

are you shedding your skin?

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

I am every girl I have ever been. They sing inside me like a choir. The believer. The invalid. The seductress. The victim. The fighter. The heretic. The forager. The survivor. Uncivilized. Hungry. Angry. Wild.

And yet, learning to shed my skin has helped me inhabit new versions of myself.

This is the paradox.

When a snake is ready to shed, it begins by secreting a fluid between its old and new layers of skin, loosening the connection. Its eyes turn cloudy, its color dulls, and it may become less active, even refusing to eat. To begin the shedding process, the snake rubs its head against a rough surface like a rock or tree, creating a small tear. It then pushes through tight spaces, using friction to peel away the old skin, usually starting from the head and working down its body. This process, which can take days or even weeks, allows the snake to emerge renewed, leaving behind a delicate, translucent husk of its former self.

There were years, an entire decade even, when I longed to stay exactly as I was, suspended in boundless energy, with a career and family and four young children whose chaos filled our home. I wanted to hold them there, to keep their small hands in mine, to freeze time before it could loosen our bond. But just as a snake’s skin eventually becomes too tight, so did theirs. I watched them stretch beyond our family, growing into new versions of themselves, finding new loves, and though their transformations sometimes stole my breath, it was easier to witness in them than to accept in myself.

Shedding isn’t easy. It requires surrender, a willingness to break open, to release what once fit, but no longer does.

And it’s the only way to grow.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

~MC Richards

My daughter River has been in the hospital all week, a patient in the same hospital where she works as an ER nurse. Each time we thought she was improving, something else went wrong. Time has slowed and folded in on itself, layering over the nights and days of my own childhood hospital stays, intersecting with every version of River I have known—the infant I first held at my breast in a hospital room like this one, as we sat in the NICU waiting for her twin sister to get well; the wild-hearted child who filled our house and yard with animals; the student walking the halls of the college where I taught; the bride standing in a botanical garden; the mother cradling her son and her own twin daughters. All these iterations of her are interwoven with the countless selves—hers and mine—I will never fully know.

I have shed so many skins, but some things remain. I am still a woman sitting by a hospital bed, willing my love to be enough. And despite the years and distance I’ve put between myself and my past, I can still hear a refrain from my youth, words I memorized so long ago—that in the end, these three remain: faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love.

For 99% of the time since our species came to be, we were hunters and foragers...We were bounded only by the Earth and the ocean and the sky ..

~Carl Sagan

If you haven’t had a chance to pick up a copy of Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult, my memoir about growing up in a fundamentalist, apocalyptic cult started by my grandfather, I’d love and so greatly appreciate you giving it read and maybe even a review. It’s available anywhere books are sold, including an audio version I narrated on Audible and Spotify. Thank you for considering it!

Upcoming Events

1. PLEASE NOTE NEW RETREAT DATE - If you’re in southern California, you’re invited to join me in Foraging for Self-Care: A Nature-Inspired Writing Retreat on March 30 from 9:30-4:30. Reconnect with your writing in nature and in artistic spaces, connecting with an intimate community over a colorful, nourishing lunch.

   Click here to register.

2. Artist’s Way group - The Artists’ Way is Julia Cameron’s seminal book on cultivating creativity. There are two main components in her 12-week program: daily Morning Pages (three sheets of unfiltered, anything-goes journaling, written by hand) and weekly Artist’s Dates (solo adventures during which you spend time with your inner artist). Our next cohort will convene for The Summer Solstice on Zoom on Saturday, June 21st at 1:00 PT for 12 weeks of self-directed study and guided support.

Thank you for being on this journey with me. I am grateful for the gift of your presence. Walking this path, knowing so many of you are walking it too, gives me hope. May we recognize our interbeing, with one another and the anima mundi, supporting each other in growth and recovery, like a mycelial network.