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Before we begin our devotional, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from last week:
On our discussion question, all about finding pockets of generosity in unexpected places,
replied:I find constant generosity in how my family (both husband and young kids) reflexively help me to navigate this life of chronic pain. As a mom who’s (constantly) overstimulated, it’s easy to find anger, frustration, overwhelm, sadness. But as my kids get older and they added more words and understanding to their tool belts, they meet me where I am, and where I must be on some days. My husband helps tend to the emotion and guilt that arises surrounding all of this. It’s easy to think that this is how it *should* be, but real life is messier than that. These are new developments, and there will always be growing pains as we make space for each other as well as ourselves. We are all human, growing and learning around each other, but it’s a comfort that my family holds me, and we make life work (despite the chaos).
What a beautiful tribute to your family, Rikki. Thank you for sharing this with us! Rikki writes an honest and colorful newsletter here on Substack called Starmoth’s Wild Faith where they investigate faith, creativity, and mysticism. Always a fascinating read!
If you want a chance to be featured in next week’s Comment Highlight, all you have to do is post a comment on any of this week’s posts or threads. That’s it!
Now, on with this week’s devotional…
just when I start to wonder whose skin I am in, they appear lying coiled in the sun drunk on the warmth and smelling spring on their tongues; scaled wonders, shedding winter leaving the shape of themselves behind and facing a new season reborn.
Over the last week or so we’ve had a handful of slightly warmer days. The kind of spring days when standing in the sun feels like summer and standing in the shade feels like winter. And for the first time in months, the garter snakes have re-emerged from wherever they hide in the winter, finding places to bask in the thin sunshine. They especially seem to like the expansive concrete bricks on our retaining wall or the old tar-covered railroad ties that keep the salal from taking over our driveway.
I have been asked on more than one occasion how I, as a Pacific Northwest gardener, handle pests. Especially slugs, which love our wet weather and proliferate easily here. My answer is that I don’t handle them at all. I just let the snakes do it. Garter snakes love to eat slugs, and I happily let them.
Snakes have an undeserved bad reputation, I think. Garter snakes in particular are harmless to humans and would rather run away than bite. They really are beautiful creatures, and such a wonder of natural engineering. When we approach them—our dog is especially fond of giving them a sniff, and knows not to hurt them—they move so fast without the benefit of limbs. They flick their tails and taste the air. They sit in the safety of their hiding places between stones or under bushes and they watch us, just as curious as we are, big black eyes glimmering.
And we find bits and pieces that they leave behind, their shed skins. Paper-thin, they crumble easily in our clumsy fingertips. Finding a nearly-whole one is something of a rarity and always celebrated. A ghost of a snake, a suggestion, a hint of something now transformed.
It is no wonder that snakes are often seen as a metaphor for rebirth, for starting over. Because to grow, you have to let the old fall away. What no longer fits must be left behind.
Whether this process is as painful for the snake as it is for us, who can say? But there is a pragmatic poetry to finding a whole snake-skin. It is as if the things we leave behind are only recognizable in retrospect, ghosts that look like us, the shape of what we were. All the selves we have left behind over the years, tangible, yet paper-thin.
There is no life in those shells, now. We take it with us as we emerge, glossy and new, into the light of every warm and welcoming spring.
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As the seasons of creation and of the church calendar slip by, it seems to me I am rhythmically made new, again and again. On a cellular level, I am made new every several years. But I maintain a sense of self. Memories. Hopes. What is the continuity that is me from moment to moment? Am I who I was; or will be? Like a snake, I grow and outgrow myself, leaving behind pieces of who and what I was. I pray this growth is towards the making new of all creation as I dig into Christ’s work in the world.
Wonderful image, and something I've never really contemplated. Interesting corollary: what if the snake were to decide not to cooperate with this skin-shedding business? What if the snake chose instead to hold tightly to the familiar? I suspect that in time the poor snake would look pretty unappealing, layered in something that was supposed to have been left behind. What's worse, the snake that refuses the shedding process misses out on the shiny newness that was its destiny.