Snake season

& eating your own tail

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by Namasri Niumim

There are more snakes in the garden than usual this year. For the record, they are garter snakes, harmless little garden companions. It feels like every time I turn around, one pops out giving me a little jump scare before slithering away, as if to say “don’t you forget that I’m here”.

I love having them in the garden. They are a beautiful part of this little ecosystem I’ve created. They are a symbol of transformation, season after season, year after year. Just as it feels like there are more snakes in the garden this turn of the wheel, I feel a bit of their essence in my own life.

At the beginning of this year I started shedding.

It wasn’t something I was doing very consciously, but things began to fall away nonetheless. I stopped making bitters, the core of my business. I shut down the brick and mortar shop in our small town. I found it more and more difficult to show up on social media, going weeks without a single post. Really the only thing I kept up with consistently was this newsletter, because it gives my mind a space to make sense of things. I didn’t know why exactly or what I would find once everything was stripped away, I just knew that I was ready to let these things go.

What I found once I finished this shedding of skins was purpose. It showed up in the last place I was looking. It was home, lineage, land. For most of my life I spent as little time as I could in the kitchen, cleaning, or doing pretty much anything domestic because I saw how these things could chain women. Instead I got a job as soon as I turned 15 and haven’t slowed down since.

But after The Shedding, with this extra time on my hands, suddenly I saw how important, how utterly magical and significant baking a loaf of bread well is or how cleaning windowsills shines a home’s spirit. I could feel the garden reach out to me when I spent more time listening and not just doing. Healing happens in spaces that are well kept, it said.

It changed everything I knew about housekeeping and many parts of myself. Maybe independence can still exist within the home as long as I still have space to create outside of it. To wander deep in the woods all alone and sit on river banks during summer. Then maybe the home isn’t a prison, but a sanctuary to return to.

This season showed me that it is even more deeply rooted than that. The home is where our ancestors live. These tasks that we do over and over again, especially those done by hand, are things that they’ve done for thousands of years. The ancestors are like the snake in the garden, “don’t you forget that I’m here” they whisper from the attic. Our repetitive actions in these spaces brings them back to life.

Since I’ve learned the names, faces, and stories of my own ancestors, I’ve felt their presence quite strongly. Maybe they had a role in this snake season of mine, invisibly peeling back my layers one at a time until I saw what was important to them, and now to me.

They showed me the Polish names of the plants in my garden, taught me the best way to knead a loaf of babka, how to keep cool in this heat with chłodnik (a cold beet soup), how an ailment could be coaxed out by giving it a name and sending it to the crossroads, that floors are best swept when an incense of juniper is burning.

So now, standing here skinless but completely whole, I’ve been asking myself where do I go from here? Without the chaos I’ve created around me, I can hear my own thoughts. And for once, those thoughts are quite simple.

There are two ways we exist in the world. The first is internally; these are things we do to nourish our own lives and those of our family and friends. The second is externally; this is the work we put out into the world. It is exploration, community work, adventure. Existing in these two ways keeps the home from turning into the prison and prevents the noise of the outside world from degrading our internal life.

For too long I’ve spent so much time in the external world, getting whiplash from the bad news of the day and feeling completely ungrounded by it all, while fervently grasping onto things that no longer fit me. That internal world gives us a solid foundation, a lifeline to reel us back in when the world becomes too much. It gives clarity to what we truly believe in and want in life.

So when we feel lost, flighty, ungrounded, we are called to nourish the internal life. When we feel stuck, stifled, caged, we are called to nourish the external life.

I think it’s normal to go through cycles of all of these things throughout our seasons of life. Like the snake that eats its own tail, we are constantly creating and exploring new versions of ourselves, learning how to balance new stages, new knowledge.

Now in this skinless season, I want to grow back new scales. Internally I want only to nourish my home and family with simple foods, medicines, and intentional tending. Externally I want space to create whatever it is I feel an urge to create, to wander freely, go out into the world lightly.

But most of all, like the snake, I want to let things die when they are ready.

Much love,

Val