It’s a crisp October day, two days before the full moon, and my little boy and I are walking in the woods in Oklahoma. We passed a pile of cut logs at the edge of a stream, and follow a trail along the water’s edge. The trail opens up into a wide shoreline of soft mud, covered in little deer tracks. Just on the other side of the mud, there is a movement of grey, and three deer, flushed out of the water’s edge by our presence, climbed up the bank ahead and disappeared.
The trail here just disappeared, so we retraced our steps and started heading back to the car. I walk the land with intention, heart and eyes searching for meaning behind every blade of grass, touch of wind, song of bird. Along the way, I found a perfect little white feather in the brown leaves below us. I have been finding feathers on the regular the past few months, since my spiritual awakening begun in earnest.
We find a secondary trail, one that appears to have been cut by truck tires, and our feet crumble dried brown leaves as we walk, destination unknown. We are just exploring. Along this walk, he is telling me about an anime he has been playing online called “Bleach” in which there are two types of resurrections: a regular resurrection is where you die and then you get revived, and a “resurreccion” in which the character is transformed. The regular kind can happen any time, but “resurreccion” only happens during a full moon. The character says a magical trigger word and then releases a burst of “reiatsu”, a word meaning “spiritual energy” in order to cause this transformation to occur.
I am intrigued by this because it reminds me of my experience last full moon. I had put a concentrated focus on transformation. “I let go of self-doubt and fear. I walk in faith and confidence”, I had affirmed to myself. I still feel the skin of self-doubt, but it has begun to loosen and slide off. I can recognize the feeling and remind myself to let it go.
A couple of weeks ago, during the time of the New Moon, I had gone to this spiritual retreat called “Soul Camp”. While there, one of the exercises was to do an hour-long silent meditation walk in nature. I had wandered slowly, eyes wide in wonder. By the edge of a pond, the sun had baked the land into hard cracks at the shoreline. A small ribbon snake, coiled up, reared his head at me in an unexpected warning.
I leave it be, retreating to the cooler side of the pond to sit under the trees in the shade. My bottom rested on soft, cool dirt as I took a moment to ground myself. My eye was drawn to the light falling on a shimmering flat object in the dirt to my left. I pulled it out of the earth to examine it. It’s a piece of petrified snake skin in the striped pattern of that ribbon snake. I carry this around like a treasure and put it on my altar when I get home, a symbol of the transformation I am going through in my spiritual awakening.
A week or so later, I was walking slowly across a field with a wise woman. We were picking up trash in the park as a form of service to Mother Earth. Our eyes were focused on finding objects white and plastic to scoop up and put into our trash bag. I reached down to pick up something white I saw in the grass, and then realized it was moving. It was a grasshopper in the white molting phase, shedding his oversize paper-thin skin to transform into a new form in the cycle of metamorphosis. This is a fragile time in the life of a grasshopper, where they are more likely to be picked off by a predator, being less likely to be able to get away from them.
Later, I contemplate what it means to be transformed, what skin am I shedding. At Soul Camp, I told myself I was letting go of worrying about what people thought of me, and just focusing on how I feel. As I let this skin shed, I find myself taking more risks socially and creatively. When I care less about judgement, I put my true self out there more.
I am also less willing to put up with bullshit, and I want my friends to be as fiercely authentic as I am now. I used to just allow them to be disingenuous, accepting them where they were. Now I want to press into their wounds, asking them to tell me more, ask them to admit more to themselves.
Change is uncomfortable. Honesty is uncomfortable. Sometimes, so is growth. I want my friends to grow along with me now. I want my relationships to grow with me. I challenge even my marriage in this way, asking my husband to step out of his comfort zone in order to more fully create space for my wants and needs that I am finally standing up for.
If you asked me to put my fingers on that first layer of skin coming off, though, I would say it is the conditioning of my family; the apparent misogyny of my parents, the catering to men and forgiveness of their sins while holding women to an impossible standard. It’s the worry that if I expose my true self to my family, I will be subject to attacks and ridicule, and the recognition that this behavior is their problem, no longer mine, and I will not let it stop me from putting myself out there.
It’s also about letting go of the hold that food has had over me. Changing my relationship with food is a big physical transformation I am currently undergoing. Maybe the shedding of skin is literal, not metaphysical, and this time next year, I will have completed my own metamorphosis.
In my transformation, I will reveal my talents boldly and unapologetically. I will not be afraid to step into my gifts as a creative person. I will share my work in ways that feel right and comfortable to me with other people. I will not be afraid of failure or ridicule. I will simply create the life I want to live with my magic.
On this walk with my son on this October day, the trail ended in a clearing, with a structure at the opposite end. We walked over to it, my son curious about what it was. I explained to him that it was a deer blind, but those words meant nothing to him. I explained further that the hunters would sit inside of it, hidden to the deer, and when the deer came out to the clearing, exposed, the hunters would shoot them. My son was horrified at the idea that something so innocent and beautiful would come to a brutal end, not understanding it was part of a cycle passed down for generations. Birth, growth and death, and then the cycle behinds anew.
On the way back, we took a side journey to an old graveyard, a simple fenced in area with about a dozen marked graves, and possibly several unmarked ones. We admired a huge tree in the middle of the graveyard, tall and sturdy, but with all its branches missing except one, possibly transformed itself by the recent tornadoes or simply just age or disease. My son pointed out that it’s one good branch would make a nice place for birds to rest, and he wasn’t wrong. Its transformation made it ready for a new purpose.
Death is a part of transformation that we don’t like to think about, but sometimes death is necessary to fully complete the changes required. That morning that I was picking up trash with the wise woman, we also found several dead dragonflies. Dead dragonflies can be reminders that endings are necessary for new beginnings, and allowing ourselves to evolve. We have to let go of the old ways and the old conditions to allow the new life to begin.
That same morning, I also found four feathers, three of them white like the one I found on this morning walk with my son. As he and I walked back to the car after finding the deer blind, I had found another feather, this one white fluffy down at the base, but a glittering blue-ish brown along the top. I bring the feathers home and add them to my collection, reminders from the spirit that I am on the right path, even though I am just feeling my way through it.
