It started with SA.
She was headed east, towards her performances during Austin's SxSW week when she experienced her injury - an incident that left her immobile, crutching around and healing for almost two months at her parent's place in Canada.
I came next - with my "accident" and similar need to focus on my personal healing and movement forward. "If I want to evolve, I have to heal," I spoke to sweet faces this now past weekend.
N soon followed on my heels - fracturing her heel while snowboarding in Tahoe. At Saturday night's saloon, she was the sexiest barroom babe leaning on a singular crutch.
Then, B had to go and twist her ankle on the only bone laying in a wide, open parking lot.
On Friday night, B shared, "Cara, I was thinking about you and how I wanted to reach out. Later that same day, D called and said that you were in the ICU for a rattlesnake bite." She then spoke of her newest piece of art. A gorgeous tattoo, it covers most of her upper back with an image of an outstretched Great Blue Heron, a coiled snake at its feet & a yellow rose blooming from the snake's spiraling center.
"Why the snake?" I inquired. "It came from a dream," she said. Shamefully fending off a river full of striking snakes, she asked the river guide why the slithering reptiles only had eyes for her. "Because you have to learn how to relax into yourself," he nonchalantly replied. So, she breathed in, jumped overboard and comfortably swam amongst them.
Last night, while dressing for the costume party, I happily placed a yellow, cloth rose that I've been using for three years now - ever since I first actively began this dance of marrying
local health wealth with global prosperity - into my hair. Later, while sitting in N's room and as she was readying for bed, DE wanted to share photos taken on his iPhone of his own, recent serpent encounter.
While sitting on a rock outcropping just a few feet above a Diamondback, he eventually recognized that the rattling sound he was hearing wasn't the wind through the trees. With his trusty pocket tool, he caught up close and personal images of an extremely agitated creature. Brilliant, copper red, the snake was defensively perched, with it's rattle in motion and sticking up above its coil as its head peered in the ready to strike mode.
My snake was none of this. It never rattled. It was a gorgeous Grey/Blue color and when I turned to look down to my left to inquire what the piercing sharpness in my lower calf could be from, it just laid there looking up me like, "Yeah. I did that." There was never any moment of disharmony, at least until I broke our reverie by screaming and diving back into the waist-high sage brush that I had just emerged from.
Now, I'm recognizing another angle of this story. My snake was a mirror of me - for it is just as T wrote, "You are a mirror for all of life around you, so you will attract into your life others as teachers." I've always known my essence, even as pain and suffering began wrapping its death grip around me. More than love, I am also harmony. I prefer to live my life feeling the wind across my face while listening to leaves rustling in the breeze and birds singing in the trees. I feel most alive, vibrant and free when the lyrics of love vibrate through me as I give voice to them through song and dance.
Others have been giving testament to how I now have potent medicine channeling through me and, today, I realized that, likewise, my Pacific Southwest Speckled Rattlesnake now has my blood coursing through it. It tasted human and I think, perhaps, the Universe has also decreed that its ready to evolve into one of US next time around. For, our shared evolution isn't just about Homo sapiens sapiens. "We're not alone here, folks! Never have been, and never will bee." In other words, the experience has been exactly what needed to happen for everyone involved. Complete and total LIBERATION!!
