With a title like that, you might expect shocking revelations, secret tips, insider advice, or something — anything — designed to titillate or distract a readership. Or perhaps I could offer some variation on “what people want” — if we try to deduce that incoherent impossibility from reports on Google’s most popular search terms.
Instead, I’ll start with the literal. Our west-facing driveway warms up during the day, and on late spring and early fall mornings like yesterday’s and today’s, when we open the overhead garage door, as often as not one or more garter snakes will have curled up on the concrete during the night to warm themselves on the residual heat. Each morning they’re sluggish and need to be coaxed with a toe from their stupor to move and so avoid getting run over by our car. Thus the “serpent under the door.”
But as with all other things (Druids like to claim), coincidences can be teachers, too. Take our power outage yesterday afternoon. I saw a flash of light, heard a popping sound, and our electricity died as I was starting to draft this post. Green Mountain Power arrived a couple of hours later and promptly fixed the problem. With an extensible pole, the line workman loosened something small and dark from the overhead transformer which plummeted to our lawn, and then he apparently reset a surge protector or trip device. Problem solved. When he came to the door to report success — I was watching all this from our living room window and stepped out to meet him — he said a bird had shorted out the line, tripping the transformer. The small dark object that had fallen was the burnt corpse of the unfortunate. Wholly unperturbed, our resident pair of mourning doves resumed their perches nearby on the power line soon after the GMP service truck departed.
Serpents and doves: be shrewd as the former, and gentle as the latter, counsels the Galilean master*. To put it more bluntly, avoid getting fried, or run over — each grisly fate available, significantly enough, through human agency. So it’s fitting that any shrewdness and gentleness I can wring from these two instances should issue from the same animal world.
As I write, goldfinches brighten our feeder, squabbling with the jays and an acrobatic chipmunk for seed. Today’s late morning humidity and temperature already climb toward midsummer highs, just a few days after night-time frost warnings in our area. The serpent under the door is my instinct, the bird on the power grid my arrogant ignorance. No, that’s not it. Something else, something other. Yes, the danger of allegory is its all-too-easiness, its tendency toward glib preachiness. A welcome Buddhist and pragmatic strain in some contemporary Druidry reminds me that sometimes a dead bird is just a bird, a sluggish serpent just a snake. It’s the “and yet” that rears up and insists on making bigger meanings from small ones that is a sometimes annoying blessing.
But why shouldn’t we squeeze every event and experience for all it might be worth? Equipped with overactive brains and growing out of a world we have tried to name and explicate, it’s a natural tendency, one literally native to us, crafted by nature, by natural selection and chance, by the divine at work with these, their alter ego, their personification, their image. Tolkien’s elves, the Quendi, named things and tried to wake them. In this they followed their nature: Quendi** means “those who speak with voices,” the verbal echoes of their name present in words like bequeath and loquacious, query and quest, inquisitive and require. Kweh, kwoh, kw-, kw- … Human deeds, human cries, human needs. The same world that wiggles and flutters in snakes and birds has shaped and turned itself to allow humans to name — and endanger — them. Because we can do something may not mean we should. So we look to our animal kin for direct lived insight into how to thrive in this world, their wordless gestures rich as words. In an early poem, Mary Oliver captures Druidic wisdom:
Sleeping in the Forest
I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
At first we might think it’s death she’s talking about, but as she says in other poems, it’s deeper and more significant than just that particular transition, that magnified human fear and obsession. Death, yes: but there are many more marvelous things in addition to that. We can imagine ourselves different, “better” — what that may mean. “The world offers itself to your imagination,/calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–/over and over announcing your place/in the family of things.” Gratitude to bird and beast; this, my offering.
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Image: garter snake
*Matthew 10:16.
A Druid Way 