🐍 EMANATIONISTS

Encounters with Life // Snake

The School of Direct Experience 🐍

Western diamondbacks are pit vipers. This means that they have a heat sensing mechanism (loreal pit) located behind each nostril that can detect differences in temperature, sometimes differences that are only a fraction of a degree apart. The heat given off by an animal is detected by the snake helping it to determine predator from prey. Arizona Sonora Desert Museum.

Plume

Naked in the backyard, feathers falling like confetti from the sky all around us. It was morning in the desert and the sun had yet to sear. Looking up in awe just enough to see a hawk in the tree above our heads; chest proud, eyes piercing like choke cherry pins, beak intently tearing through flesh. More and more feathers continued to rain down from the branch turned lunch table as we paused to witness this magnificent being in full splendor.

Hawks are hawks. They don’t go around struggling to know themselves.

They don’t live oscillating between states of fear and shame.

They don’t question the meaning of life.

They just know.

They just live.

Like a hawk.

Everybody in the animal kingdom knows who’s who and that’s just how it is. They haven’t forgotten. Sometimes a hawk swoops down from the sky to catch a snake in their talons. Sometimes an absentminded hiker stumbles up on a snake and gets struck. It’s not about violence, it’s about hawks being hawks and snakes being snakes.

The naked feather shower wasn’t our only encounter with hunting hawks. Another afternoon with the same woman, sitting on the side of a hiking path, a hawk landed on the ground just a few feet from us, lunch in toe.

We looked at each other and laughed half in disbelief; half in recognition, remembering the feather confetti and our previous intimate encounters with hawks. Present and visionary, the raptor proceeded to rip another bird apart while we watched from arm’s length. Of all the space in the desert this hawk choose to eat with us.

Why?

I can’t say.

Hawks being hawks being.

And If hawks might know themselves as hunters who seize the moment, snakes might know themselves as becoming emanationists. Snakes emanate outward from within themselves.

To be a snake is to be a verb.

Constantly emerging and forever growing out from within. Leaving the past behind, bringing what’s new into view. Making what’s hidden explicit, over and over again.

They grow new skin before shedding the old. It’s that inner pressure of the process that helps push the old external layer off in one miraculous limpid piece.

Snakes becoming snakes becoming snakes becoming.

Ontopoetic Encounter

Wandering away from a sit spot atop a small cliff, alone into the fading desert sunlight, rock hopping and dodging prickly things, I came upon a translucent snakeskin. It was a big one, longer than 4 feet. In the waning purple orange dusk, the spectacular subtle shimmers and fantastic glow of the skin jumped into awareness. Alluring, it captured me.

Intent on the treasure and gingerly putting the fingertips of both hands underneath the fragile dead skin as to pry it gently from the desert flora it was interwoven within. After working it free for about 10 seconds, I froze. Two searing jet black eyes with golden rings around them stared back at me from in between the rocks just 6 inches from my fingers and a foot from my increasingly vulnerable face.

Sweating and stepping back slowly in retreat, I began to make out the markings and colors. A Western Diamondback Rattlesnake began emerging from the crack. Giving up on the skin that initially drew me in, shocked by the advancing snake, my mind turned towards apology.

Reflecting on how improper my protocol had been- no asking permission, no offering, no song, not even a breath, just taking. I felt my belly drop in the recognition of the disrespect and how deadly this mistake could have been and could still be.

The felt sense of being in relationship with this snake in such proximity penetrated to my core. Fingers to toes. They seemed to see right through me and in reciprocity allowed me to see into them. It wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last, but this time was distinct. It was the scariest.

We both knew what had happened and we knew it wasn’t good and all I could do was apologize and wait. Eventually, the snake with their black diamonds emerged entirely, ffoot by foot from the crack in the rocks and approached me. The transmission was simple, “be careful.”

Feeling a sense of relief and expressed gratitude, I continued to listen for some time. There was a melding in which I recognized how snakes dance and come alive in the sun same as I do. And how in-tune snakes are with the Earth and how in-tune I feel when my belly lay on the ground for long periods like when I’m at the beach or the park.

With many thanks, I bowed repeatedly and gently stepped backward one step at a time carefully in retreat. When I left, a humbleness blanketed me like the shedding process but in reverse. To have a true encounter is to be changed and I certainly was.

Rattlesnakes are reluctant to strike. Making their presence known (by movement or by rattling) endangers the snake. Their best defense is camouflage. If pressed (or startled) and needing to defend itself, a rattlesnake may strike. The strike happens in less than a second. Arizona Sonora Desert Museum.

The Floor is Lava

Later that evening, moving boxes into a dark shed, the snake was far from my mind. The pruning saw I needed for removing a branch was hanging on the far wall of the shed. As I started walking for the saw, I was stopped and heard the snake: “be careful”.

Pausing and no’t doing the thing I’d have automatically done. Instead of walking through the door and across the shed floor to retrieve the saw, I grabbed a stick and reached across the pitch dark room hooking the handle of the saw with the stick from where I stood.

When I returned with a headlamp, my hesitation became clear. In front of me was a huge 3D web, messy, thick, unformed, with a red-bellied spider hanging upside down at the center. Frozen for a moment, again. Invisible in the darkness of the night, the web stretched across nearly the entire shed. It only became evident in the LED of the headlamp.

There, right at ankle height, right where I would have stepped, a black widow was spinning. There’s no doubt I’d have walked through her web and become entangled. But maybe I was already entangled? I thought. Heart racing. Listening to the spider. I stepped back, reassessed, and realized my lesson for the day.

In avoiding one web I was reminded of a larger one. Forgetting the web is everywhere. Connecting spider and snake, hawk and lovers, writer and readers, us and everything. Not metaphorically. Actually. Within the web: hawks hunt. Snakes shed. Spiders weave. And sometimes, if we’re paying attention, they teach us to learn like our life depends on it.

From the Summer of 2022 & June 2025,

Patrick