Snake Skin

On a woodland path, a near perfect sloughed off snake skin, it scales glistening in bright morning light, its owner somewhere in a new season’s growth. Call it a rite of passage or perhaps it had tired of hauling its old life, with its unpleasant odors, eager to leave it behind for a cleaner one and free to begin a new life. None of these. Only a superficial change and a new growth, a false metaphor. It was still a snake, still carrying the weight and burden imposed on it by an ancient curse and inherited by all of its subsequent kind. Like humans, true change and transformation do not come easily from within or without. At best, ours is a temporary skin of appearances and deceptions we struggle to slough off with a desperation that eats at us daily, but to no avail. For we, too, like the snake, carry a curse, just as ancient, and all means, to remove it have failed. And like that ancient serpent, we continue to crawl on our bellies of hope, our mouths filling with the taste of the dust of our curse until it is sloughed off, its weight and burden mercifully no more.