in shed, re-membering

Jake the Snake, my rosy boa constrictor

Yesterday I spent the entire day in bed, reading Book Three of the Ice and Fire Series. I only got up to pee and to eat. I had a heavy weight on my chest. My body felt alien to me. I'd look down at it and wonder whose it was. I heard my daughter and grand-daughter and pets out in the rest of the house and felt a gulf between their world and mine.

I wanted that gulf.

I didn't want to Be Here. I wanted to disappear. So I disappeared into fiction.

Truth is, I've felt this way for weeks.

By the end of the night I also knew that in the morning I would get up, and get busy, and start accomplishing things I'd been avoiding and delaying and putting off. I knew that I have had enough of feeling this way, and that in the morning I would take action whether I felt like it or not. I knew that sitting on my bed, even if I am "being productive" in some way, makes me feel like an invalid. I knew that in the morning I would not start my day sitting on my bed.

This morning, instead of having my cup of coffee on the bed, I sat in the wicker chair next to my rosy boa Jake's cage. As I drank my coffee and contemplated my day, I realized that what I've been experiencing the last few weeks is what we call shed in snake husbandry.

Every few months, Jakie gets unaccountably sluggish. He goes from being all about coming out of his cage and draping himself around my shoulders and exploring the environment and making friends with the other pets to lying curled up either behind or inside his warm hidey-hole and sleeping away the days. His skin gets dull and flaky. He refuses his rat pup. He seems to be in an all-around general funk. And he wants no part of me.

When I first got him I was apprehensive about taking good care of him. I fell in love at first sight. I have always loved snakes and when I found Jake I finally realized I could have one of my own. But I didn't yet know his patterns and I had to learn them as time passed. I'm accustomed to shed now. I don't always know that's what's going on with him, but I let him have his down time and figure he knows best what's right for him. Now that he's been with me for a couple of years I almost have the schedule down as well...it's been three months...he's acting anti-social, he's probably in shed.

What I just realized this morning is that I have similar patterns. They don't come every three months, thank heaven. But they come. And I'm in one of those times now. I have lost my "appetite." I have retracted from outward things. I have pulled my energy in. And I am shedding an old skin. It is the skin of what should have happened by now. It is the skin of what I should have accomplished. It is the skin of how I should be and how I should look. It is the skin of who I was when I was younger and who she thought she would be by now.

Perhaps it is the skin of expectations.

me at 23, photo Martha Cotton

My last post was a post of grieving. Of asking where is she? about my younger self. Here's the truth I'm remembering today: She is where she has always been. In her moment. Always. As I am in mine.

I know time is an illusion. I know every moment is eternal and we are always simultaneously present at all times and in every place. I know I am a multi-dimensional Divine Being pretending to be limited. So it is impossible for me to have lost her beauty and her promise. For me, these statements are not beliefs. They are not even convictions. They are experiences of consciousness.

I also know that in her moments as I lived them, she was equally not there, not content, berating herself. Doing to herself then -- when she was young, and so beautiful, and so full of promise -- what I have been doing to myself now, when my body has aged, and my promises are only partially fulfilled, and I know that might be the end of it this lifetime.

So why would I need to recapture that time? I don't need to.

What I have done, over the years, is shed. And shed again. And shed yet again. It has nothing whatsoever to do with failure.

Tonight I embrace that truth. Tonight I know I am in shed. Tonight I can feel the luster and softness and sheen of my new skin as it is emerging.

I accept my moment. I accept my Self in this moment. I know she encompasses all those "earlier" selves and that she has also shed them as she has needed to.

And I am excited to see what comes next as I move through this illusion of time.