The last years for all of us have been Powerful. Potent. Painful, even.
The collective is dancing with Grief. Loss. Transformation. Transmutation. Ascension isn’t necessarily an easeful process. And as below, so above. As without, so within. You’re probably feeling lots of feels as your life changes, relationships end, loved ones cross over. All in preparation for the grand ascension of humanity.
Buckle up.
I’m told there’s a tremendous interpersonal shake up happening on planet earth of late. A great many relationships are being ‘redefined’. If it’s happening to me, I’m betting the house it’s happening to you, too. Marriages and friendships dissolving. Families estranged. I’m told it’s something like a cleansing. A making way for Sacred Unions to emerge that will radically – and for the better – transform humanity.
Let’s be real, though. It’s Confusing. Painful. Heartbreaking. When it’s happening to you.
(Shedding skin seems more challenging for this human than for her scaly counterparts.)
But indeed isn’t this also an invitation into a redefinition of your primary relationship? Your relationship with your whole, perfect, unadulterated Soul Self. A Sacred Union with the Divine, the divinity within YOU.
Foreward:
I grew up with snakes. (Without ever understanding the gravity of snake medicine.) They were just everywhere, blending perfectly with the southern New Mexico desert. Finding their untimely end by the blade of my father’s shovel. Me, always fascinated by the primal power and the rattling tail of the Western Diamondback. Me not knowing that, under their tutelage, I would spend my life reinventing myself again and again and again, whether I wanted to or not.
Journal Entry
November 4, 2022: Seasons of the Snake, an Oracle
April 30th, on the New Moon in Taurus last year, my beloved rose, showered and then announced he no longer wanted to be married, that we were just too different and he was divorcing me.
24 years of relationship altered in an instant. My world crumbled.
On June 18th, my partner and best friend exited our shared dream in Santa Fe, our shared vision of the life we worked so hard to co-create after two+ decades together in California.
He left our home. I left my body.
That same day, my neighbor called me in a panic. There was a snake in his living room and he hoped I would remove it for him. (I’m a snake relocation volunteer in my community.)
Snake has a way of bringing you into deep, sacred presence.
What at first glance looked like a baby rattlesnake was swiftly dropped into my snake bucket. It turned out to be a baby hognose, but the message was clear:
“This marks the end of one phase of your life and heralds in a new and wiser awakening within yourself. Know that this is a transitional period in your life with new spiritual awakenings knocking at your door.” – Snake
Two days later, on June 20th, I was asked to remove a wounded snake from another nearby home. The homeowner was understandably upset, having accidentally injured the snake that was coiled in her casement window.
The ants were already on the scene. This beautiful bull snake with an unmistakable female energy had lived long enough to stretch well over four feet long. My heart ached even more.
I took her lifeless body home with me knowing she was there to support the holy work of shedding my own skin.
The following morning, on the Summer Solstice, I laid her in the field outside my home with yarrow and calla lily. An offering to death, rebirth, new beginnings and eternal love.
I wept as I set an intention to be through the most painful part of this seismic shift by the Winter Solstice.
The day before the Fall Equinox, I found two more dead snakes. The first one was cut in half. The second one, much smaller, was whole. They seemed a powerful metaphor for me and my beloved. Both had been mortally wounded on the road.
I placed them in the field with obsidian, clear quartz, local pink quartz and rosemary, which the ancient Greeks used for remembering.
Seven moons have passed since you left. The rupture in our marriage opened the floodgates to a lifetime of stored grief. I do the deep and sacred work of holding my emotions, allowing myself to feel all the feels, all that I suppressed over lifetimes. Coming to acceptance, though admittedly, often with great reluctance.
I have been in (and continue to travel) this metaphysical and metaphorical birth canal.
Dancing with tremendous fear, loneliness, rejection, unlovability, sorrow and despair.
Asking how I, too, can shed my skin.
Journal Entry
December 22, 2022: Shedding Her Skin
If I can accept that everything – no matter how painful, no matter if I brought it upon myself or not – is a learning opportunity that is placed on my path for my ultimate growth, then I am at one with the snake.
If I can accept that change is inevitable, that everything withers, that new life cannot exist apart from death, then I am in atonement – which is to say, at one with – snake medicine.
If I can allow myself for even one moment to take a step back, a wider view, to see that all that transpires in this lifetime is theater and I am but one actor among billions, that the cosmic choreography operates at a timescale incomprehensible to mere mortals, then I can relax into the essence of snake energy.
If I can allow myself – even for one moment – to release my judgments, my need to be right or vindicated, my role as martyr, my grasping for that which is long dead, then perhaps I, too, can shed my skin.
But I am human. And messy. I grasp. I writhe. I cling. I fear and I loathe. I resent. I love and I miss and I regret so very much.
And so slithers in snake medicine to teach me and you and all of us to let go. To just. Let. Go.
The snake never asks why she must shed her skin. She never struggles to keep her old scales, fearing she’ll lose herself in her moult.
She doesn’t bargain with god, promising to do better if only things could be the way they were.
When it’s time to grow that’s exactly what she does.
That which is no longer useful gets scraped along the lower stems of my salvia bush, leaving this message: You cannot expand, heal, and reach your potential, dear heart, unlesssss you shed your sssskin.
Journal Entry
March 23, 2023: 11 moons
The air in our home is dense, thick, full. As I shuffle the corridor of this mortal coil the energy swirls, coils around me. This place is heavy with moult. With scales that fall from me, scales fall from me, from my heart, my eyes, my pussy. Scales falling, falling, falling, filling this place we used to share, this life we used to share. I look the same. Skin no different after the moult. Only perhaps my snake eyes are clearer, crystalline. Is my heart different? My soul says, yes. So different the difference will only be known in time.
I sip my tea. Talk to the desert willow. One-eyed Moon at my heels, the moon always chasing, always counting, always reminding me. I am here you are not. But I am here. I am. I am. I am shuffling the halls. Feeling the thick energy of so many scales flaking off. Revealing new skin. Revealing old skin. The me I was before. The me I was before. The me I was when the moon was formed, when the earth solidified, when the oceans cooled; the boiling the boiling the boiling of my own heart, my own heart, my own heartbeat that pulses with the beat of the earth.
I hear it in my snake ears. Do snakes hear? I hear the snakes just now beginning to warm, beginning to ready themselves to greet me in the garden. To show me how easy it is to let the old skin go. To let the past lay
to let it lay. let it lay.
let it lay in the garden.
the garden
the garden of my soul
full of life
full of death
spent blooms
full of promise
promise
for what lies
what slithers
what
blossoms
ahead
Journal Entry
April 30, 2023: A year ago
A year ago today you got up and left.
But the truth is you left so long, so long, so long
ago so long maybe you weren’t ever really there at all.
A year ago today I gazed upon you with a love
so total and complete it shocked us both
love so absolute, so ordained
so not from my broken mortal heart.
My heart cracked open wide streaming
pure pure pure starlight
pure golden milk
honey pure intensity before
it fell to the ground
shattered into 1 million tiny fractures
shards the likes of which burrow into skin and fester.
A year ago today it felt as though possibly an earthquake of never-before-recorded magnitude had shaken the Earth from its axis, from its known place, from its position among the planets and sent it shuttling off into some eerily familiar yet totally unknown solar system.
A year ago, a year, so many tears, so many unanswered questions. I planted
sunflowers and sage, unsure whether I would be here to see the blooms
planted squash and borage.
A year ago I cried. A day ago I cried.
A year ago I wanted you to come home
come back, resume life as we knew it.
A year ago I was shell shocked, in a stupor
performing life like a dutiful little robot.
A good daughter caretaking her father
a good wife keeping the kitchen clean.
For a man who walked away, walked away, walked out.
A year ago I walked our dog.
A year ago I would forget again and again and again that you weren’t coming home.
Nope. Not coming home.
A year ago today I wanted you to come home.
A year later and I’m gazing at the lettuce in full bloom.
Somehow this delicate plant survived all the snow
and the single digit temperatures
survived neglect and even sorrow.
And today stands tall blooming, sending sacred seeds
out into the precious world.
Go forth and prosper.
I never knew how beautiful the lettuce in bloom truly is.
I have longed for you, Beloved.
reached out for you whispered
Good night as I lay down to sleep.
I have cursed you as well, Beloved.
Hated that fate – Ha! – brought our two planets
into gravitational pull hated
that you came to teach me finally how
to fiercely love myself hated
all the ways into which I must now blossom.
unfurl myself into the grace of beginning the grace
of beginning a life on my own
Grace, grace. Oh how sweet and sacred and graceful shame
can be what beginning waits
for the lettuce seeds cast
about on the
wind?
What beginning waits for me?
Anné M. Klint 2022-2023
Anné (“Anna”) works with women all over the globe to heal their painful past and embrace their shadow in order to create lives they really love. An expert in the field of psycho-spiritual-energetic healing, she uses state-of-the-art energy healing tools and transformational listening + spiritual coaching to guide her clients out of confusion, self-doubt, and perfectionism and into a life of grace, ease, connection and purpose. Anné lives in Santa Fe, NM and when she’s not writing about self-love and ascension, you’ll find her walking her one-eyed heeler, Luna Tuna, amongst the juniper trees.