“God’s country” -- people use this phrase to describe the eroded, scarred canyons of the desert Southwest. An area of intense natural beauty, it happens to be home to scorpions, rattlesnakes, Gila monsters… poisonous creatures evoking a mixture of fear and repulsion among many fellow humans. I understand their discomfort, but I’ve learned to take a different approach, one which says, “If these creatures make their home in ‘God’s country,’ aren’t they likely to be good friends or family of God?”
My first rattlesnake encounter was in California’s Eureka Valley, northwest of Death Valley National Monument, a rugged and delicate landscape that bathed daily in fire and air. Ten minutes out of base camp, hiking toward the open mouth of a side canyon, I was brought up short by two bursts of snapping sounds, sharply cutting the baking stillness. There, a few feet before me, poised and motionless in the dappled shade of a creosote bush, was a four and a half foot specimen of Crotulus scululatus, the Mojave rattlesnake.
Fear commanded me into retreat, but curiosity, awe, respect, and something akin to affection, for I believe there’s a spirit that joins us all to life, urged me to stay, or even approach. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I told myself. Intellectually I knew I was not “prey” to this creature. “It’s probably afraid of me,” I thought. My thinking made sense, but thinking had no effect on the fear wrapped around my belly.
The rattlesnake was still, intent upon me. I had never seen a creature so motionless. I had heard many things about rattlesnakes: An acquaintance had once described them as “honorable” -- they gave clear messages and were not malicious. I had heard their rattle described as a not-unfriendly warning, a reminder (in the spirit of Robert Frost) saying, “Good fences make good neighbors.” I’d heard that in over half the cases in which rattlesnakes struck they did not envenomate. Rationally I knew this animal was not evil, but rationality only scratched the surface of this encounter. Underneath that surface there were dimensions that included the mythic, the numinous, the magical.
Crotulus was not simply an inhabitant of the southwest deserts. This was an engagement with one of the great mythological actors throughout history: a creature present in the Garden of Eden; the image of Kundalini, coiled at the base of the spine in Hindu cosmology; the great primal serpent power who joined with the vision of Eagle in the Mayan god Quetzalcoatl. This meeting, this being, had power beyond the mundane and logical, and fear notwithstanding, I could not walk away from it.
Love and fear, attraction and repulsion -- not an uncommon dilemma, although the stakes here seemed higher than in other, more pedestrian circumstances. How could I reach out when I wanted to run away, be loose with a knot in my belly, speak when the cat had my tongue? Intent, immobile, Crotulus watched me. The ball was in my court. It was my move… I began singing to him.
I tried to let my heart do the speaking as I made words to my song. I sang of my fear and my desire to reach out. I sang of my longing to connect, to trust, to move past my separation, my protectiveness. Slowly kneeling before him, I sang of the life force and the earth we shared. I sang to be present, to remove the distance between us. I felt my fear leave me, and in that moment Crotulus moved.
His head turned, his small black tongue slowly flickered out. His body moved slightly, and his breathing became noticeable. I continued to sing as a wave of gratitude, a sense of the sacred broke over me. I had let go of my fear, and Crotulus had relaxed. He was listening.
For the next ten minutes I knelt and sang to him. I sang my gratitude for our meeting and my respect for the life and wisdom he carried. I sang my acknowledgement of him as friend, relative, brother and my intent to do no harm. I sang until I felt a movement in my heart that told me our meeting was complete. Simultaneously, Crotulus turned and slid away through the creosote.
Most people say they love nature, but the nature they refer to is one of beautiful sunsets, birds nesting, sunlit rivers, and majestic mountains. How much does that love extend to spiders, a drenching downpour, poison ivy, rattlesnakes? Can we really love nature while excluding vast portions of what she is?
I think not. No one I know would be satisfied with a love so partial, so conditional. We want more than that, and nature deserves it also.
Our heritage of myth and fable teaches us this. When the princess allows the frog to sleep in her bed, the repulsive creature is transformed, becoming a radiant and beautiful prince. When Beauty sees and loves the heart of Beast, he is changed, redeemed, the act simultaneously effecting and making her passage from child to woman. Loving some of nature’s more “unsavory” elements, like Crotulus, can transform them, and we can be transformed in the process.
Nature responds to the way we treat it. The rattlesnake I sung to, in its way, clearly “heard” me. It responded. I have heard of and experienced many remarkable experiences of communion with nature resulting from an extended and open heart. Joseph Campbell used the expression “masks of God,” referring to a perception that all beings, newborn child and tarantula, are aspects of Spirit, God, the Great Mystery, each with a different face. It is part of our maturation process, our calling, to see the divine within and beyond any face it wears. To do less is to turn our back on “god,” to refuse to be “god-like.”
There is a common saying, “We don’t see the world the way it is. We see the world the way we are.” Nature holds a looking glass before us. To ignore the natural world, to not speak, to be repulsed by parts of it says very little about Nature and much about our own nature. When we see beauty in the beast we create a beautiful presence in our hearts. To apprehend the sacred is to awaken our own spirit. If “god” truly “made man in his own image,” knowing ourselves requires that we look in his mirror.
And may we see there the face of love.
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