MindSpinner

I’m still processing the snake episode. For my children, killing the big snake was some sort of heroic adventure, like slaying a dragon. They’ve even been Sunday-Schooled into associating snakes with evil.

I was appalled at the size of the thing, at the three or four broken places along its length, at the smear of blood and mud on the blade of a machete I bought for whacking overgrown weeds. I can tolerate little snakes, but bigger ones unnerve me to a degree, and cobras, in particular, appall. (Can the story of Rikki Tikki Tavi really effect all this? Or the Habu - Mongoose fight in the sultry tent at the fair in Okinawa?) Whether by instinct or training or both, I have been programmed to fear and out of fear to want to quell the life that animates the snake, for it is not only the form of the snake that inspires fear but the way it moves.

But my visceral reaction to a sizable snake is disturbingly out of sync with how I want to see the world. If Friday’s snake was a rat snake, then there was no reason to see it dead. If it was, on the other hand, somebody’s escaped monocled cobra (a far-fetched possibility), then it was in entirely the wrong place, a neighborhood where children play.

Friday’s snake made two incontrovertible points. We live in a world with snakes, with that which we fear, sometimes reasonably and sometimes unreasonably, and we live in a world where our fears and our instinct to survive can nimbly overtake our judgment and effect destruction.

What is it that appalls me most about the snake - the snake itself or what it discovers in me and in my children? And does not the snake question apply whenever we act out of fear? Is it possible that what we have most to fear is not what frightens us in the first place but instead what we may allow ourselves to become when we feel threatened?