A snake crossed my path, again, today

I saw a snake last week, also; a benign black snake. But this was a copperhead, no less. And big it was too! 

In fact I almost tripped over it through no fault of its own.


New Horizons'
snake bite protection
plan.

One immediate lesson came right away; I better be more careful, now, on my daily (or intended “daily”) mountain road walks. How had I managed to minimize this necessity, I wondered?

Lucky me, I have truly been being protected; on earth and in the heavens these past many years. I walked this mountain road for the eight years of my being blind and recovering without a single snake incident though I could barely distinguish, then, between the earth sides of the road and the blacktop of the road itself, except by using my foot to tell me where I was putting it.

Ouch! I could have mis-stepped just like today.

More than twenty years, total, I’ve been walking this road without almost ever (ever???) seeing a live, deadly snake. Obviously, I’ve been a bit over-confident and lucky, I’d say. 

I had no escape plan in place for this eventuality; snakes lurking by the side of the road (or right in the middle), now become real. Oh dear!

Quickly leaping past my reptilian friend/foe I was out of its path in a heartbeat, telling myself, hopefully, that it was a dead snake -- or I well might have been.

At least for my sake I hoped that it was.

But no, when I passed its way again, it was long gone. Of course, that meant snake alive!

Relieved and pondering my good fortune at having been spared (I mean I actually almost stepped right down on it.), my next endeavor was an immediate consideration of how to safely proceed on future walks.

Rewind, fast forward, whose house could I run to if a snake was to decide to come after me rather than continue on its slithery way? Run faster than the snake and hope to hitch a ride back home?

One thing, for sure, I best learn, immediately, to watch where I’m walking, survey the broader landscape, use my eyes, now that I have them, to take heed of the ground as well as the trees and the sky.

Returning home, safely, my mind was next called to consider the spiritual meaning of my encounter, this day, with that snake.  Of course, google is the obvious source for all things wise, mysterious or otherwise of interest. So search I did.

However, here I found nothing definitive of the snake as a messenger other than “Watch where you’re going, Anastasia!”

Apparently the snake as symbol has a smorgasbord of so many interpretations from the Garden of Eden forward to now that I can almost take my pick of any of these and make a teachable story for myself in any direction I like. Not as simple as a deer crossing one’s path as a symbol of gentleness.

I will continue pondering that piece of my life in the mountains; the animal symbol of things, as another adventure in living today.