Reality and I are having a very active disagreement on how we should experience one another. I have all these things I want to change and new experiences I feel should be a part of my life yet the fact remains that reality has not quite signed the change in protocol. Reality tells me it's not a very good idea to make grandiose changes right now. But I insist. I am ready for newness. And so the debate/argument rages.
Then I realized I know exactly what's going on with me. When I was a young girl, I lived across the street from the Snake River in Idaho. Watersnakes love that river, so the river bottoms were often filled with the slimy little freak-out-makers. I don't like snakes. Things that slither - so not me. So, I typically jumped a mile and ran screaming across any hot surface of safety. But this day, I remember pausing to watch the snake because it was dragging an old skin behind its body. Attached to a single skin cell, the shedding refused to cut loose. The snake was much more interested in that noxious appendage than my presence. It would slither a bit. Pause. Shake and shake its tail. Then resume attempts to slither before repeating the cycle.
That's me. Right now. I'm ready to shed the past like an old, useless, dead skin. I go about my world in newfound happiness and self-satisfaction. Then something catches. That old dead skin. I stop. I shake - I claim I need to relocate to some forest where the stupid skin can't possibly live - and then I try to resume my journey.
I don't know when the skin will finally snap loose. But I know I don't have to relocate for it to happen. It'll all change when the last cell finally releases its hold. In the meantime, I just have to accept that every so often I have to pause, shake, hiss, and resume the journey.
The soundtrack of my re-skinning can be found here. I adore this Internet station. I wrote my senator to save it and received a lovely response from one of her staffers.
3 comments:
Analogy/karma/philosophy time.
When you were a little girl, watching that snake... you could have helped him along and tugged off the last of his skin. You were a bit creeped out, though- understandably so- and didn't.
Now you're the snake. Kind of gross, but whatever. Find whoever is scared of you (or vice-versa, more probably, given that snakes are, of course, more scared of us) but in a position to help... therein lies your answer.
Your back Glo. Cool. How interesting, I found an in tact snake skin today mowing weeds around a hay field. It was a really good one not broken or ripped at all.
I need to de-skin and re-skin, too. Perfect parable.
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