A snake slithers into the chicken coop.
It’s lunchtime and she seats herself into the hugged booth of a nest. In careful swallows she indulgently devours the delicacy of local, free-range eggs. She coils her satisfied scales, like a determined fist, over the remaining few which, naturally, will serve as a dessert.
Forget about the rat scampering through the shed, she sleepily thinks as she drifts in the dreamy heat haze, and in this languid manner, she’s discovered.
And thank the chicken-clucking-gods, not by me.
She’s found lethargic in guilty food-coma by my generously kind neighbor, who luckily looks before scooping up the eggs and is greeted by irritated reptilian eyes and a mouth widening in warning.
I see a photo, after.
And though I never formally meet this omelet guest, I do see the powerful and elegant shine of her long gleaming body hurling vicious insults at another knightly neighbor who escorts her out of the coop. He gallantly carries her further out into the wild, away from our chickens, who are astonishingly unruffled and enjoying shade by a little fresh water spring. And while the snake may not feast on the specialty of our eggs, I fancy she’ll probably dine on rat again.
The end of the event leads and leaves my neighbor and I at are respectful front porches. And somewhere in between expressing relief for a situation resolved and noting chicken-co-parenting responsibilities, I slip out a fear about moving backward.
I’m heightened in worry. This crucial decision I’m in the process of making may move me into old dynamics and into a stagnation that could dangerously slow my evolutionary journey.
This fear looms larger than the snake, and now it’s been startled and seen.
This fear of moving backwards, of stagnating in personal growth is as a real as the visceral repulsion that shoots alarms to run throughout the soles of my feet when I watch the snake snarl and vehemently shake in a fit to be released.
And just like I stood in wide-eyed, riveted terror to witness the farewell of the snake, this fear of moving backwards freezes me.
Or I freeze in fear.
My reaction to fear is to deer-in-the-headlight freeze. I don’t fight, I don’t flee, I remain frozen in place, and can’t seem to take my eyes away from the surreal scene – a snake lashing out at my neighbor’s gloved hand, his cool black leather jacket bitten in repeated seething attacks (and just to clarify, both snake and neighbor are fine, but the tumultuous exit from the coop sent serpentine shivers up my spine).
This fear creeps and occupies the back of my mind, cooped up, unwelcomed and cozying up to the revelations and inspirations ready to hatch and take shape in spiritually yoked guidance.
My whole-souled self wildly calls for me to answer with action that I feel in the deepest marrow of bone to be aligned, and yet, this fear disguises itself in rationality and screeches for me to halt, to be cautious, to wait. Now in the waiting, I am in the stagnancy I initially feared in the first place.
“You can’t ever move backwards. It’s just not possible. There’s no moving backwards. You can only move forward and bring with you everything you’ve learned and everything you continue to be.”
And I do freeze, but only to hear the warmth of wisdom that’s being bestowed from a human being who just devoted their afternoon to ensuring both the chickens’ and snake’s wellbeing. I pause to integrate, to feel the crescendo of an embodied intelligence rush to sign resonance with this truth.
We can only move forward.
There’s only forward movement, because forward, as the snake and the chickens and the rat who lives in the shed can attest, forward is the real pace of life.
The move back is not backwards, it’s all progression. And so even experiencing well-known challenges will be acts of forward movement, too, because these loops of lessons keep getting larger with opportunities for refinement and nuanced knowing we can now apply to lean into as a way to advance our understanding of that particular life-teaching.
And an old teaching finds me later.
Around an hour later, I am tasked and miserably failing to put the chickens back inside their coop. There’s one strangler, Gladys, who either becomes confused or just obstinate, and in an attempt to coax her inside, the whole flock breaks free and they flee in glee back into the garden and toward the sweet water of the spring.
Profanity foams at my mouth. Sweat spoils the second outfit of the day. Mosquitos happily help themselves to three-course meals. I press away any lurking thought of maybe the snake sporting a summer lover whose watching me from a rafter of the coop, amused.
The coos of love I had for the chickens an hour or so before evaporate into a steamy fog of frustration that teeters on tearful self-pity. I feel myself experiencing the sensations of helplessness and a well-replayed narrative that I’m not good enough, and I can’t do anything right, like putting chickens to bed for the night.
And while it’s familiar, I move forward with it. I become aware of this old song, this old mental dance, and do what I have learned to do in stress-inducing scenarios.
Pause. Reorient. Recenter into the bigger picture.
I take a break and I go inside. I sip tea. I change into longer pants, and cover myself in mosquito spray, and then re-enter the fray calm and present-focused. The chickens are lured back to their coop, except for two who keep rummaging along the sides. While I hover at the coop door, on the edge of wanting to curse, I become aware of the tension currents that block me from embodied insight and soften.
I choose to stand tall, and I choose to breathe, and to exude a peacefulness that will soothe the chickens and invite them to come closer to me.
And when I shift into an aura of gentleness, they almost immediately notice and easily walk over and right into the coop.
This is the dance of forward. This is the spin of Mercury retrograde delivering snakes in coops to uncover what’s really hidden in the nests of our minds and what fierce and pivotal reckonings we can genuinely and honestly foster when fear is revealed.
And the fear may be familiar, and this no longer has the power to freeze me up, into tricking me that since it’s familiar it’s a failure. There’s only forward movement, especially in the revisiting of known fears masquerading in a relevant issue.
We can step into the flow of the revisit with an empowered arsenal of what we’ve learned before and how we are now.
This stirs further momentum, propelling an enlivened embodied remembrance that we can never be in stagnation if we exist in the truthful orchestration that we are ever-evolving life.
Place a hand on the heart and reconnect to the powerful waves of breath and heartbeat, or just think of a snake and feel the body’s response, communicating an ancient intelligence that informs us what to perhaps do if we happen to catch a snake digesting a stolen egg, or two.