The Serpent’s Embrace

Blood and bone, life and death

Serpent magic, power of breath

Earth belly blessing, grounded and true

The Moon and the Serpent whisper to you.

~

Watching, waiting, shedding, healing

Visions, shivering heat revealing 

The winding path, a sacred spiral

The Serpent calls us back into the Wild. 

~

In silence, Stillness—the gift of the present—

Scales balanced! Strange yet pleasant

Flesh of your flesh, sensual sinew

This is the call of the Serpent to You.

~

Something forgotten in papers and traffic

In digital hustle and violence made graphic—

Soft and silent, still fierce place

Your heart can be found in the Serpent’s Embrace.

~

Their wisdom is medicine, wild and free

Calling forth patterns we’d rather not see

The Earth crying out against untruth

The Moon and Serpent shed within You.

~

Surrender and listen, open your mind

Discover new ways, alive and less blind

Remember this blood-bone dance of Grace

This is your birthright—the Serpent’s Embrace.

~

Dance and play, sing and drum

Honoring life with every hum

At home in the body, again a child

The Serpent’s Embrace is the gift of the Wild.

As we gather this weekend beneath the new moon near Shasta Lake for Serpent Moon, we honor ancient practices and medicines received from our ancestors, and we offer up our gratitude for those who have come before us, with both shadow and light. We will speak their names, to invite the healing we embark upon together to echo back in time. And we offer up a prayer that the Wild children of the Earth feel our gratitude for their medicine, that we may honor the animals alive within us and know ourselves to belong to the same family of Earthlings as all life.

We pray that through the wisdom of our bodies, we can access, as our ancestors have before us, the wisdom of the Wild. And we pledge and commit ourselves to listening to the body, serving it well and knowing that in so doing we also serve our brothers and sisters—the hoofed ones, the scaled, the furred, the soft-skinned, and the feathered.

May they know we are still listening. May they know we wish to learn how to honor them in a good way. We ask forgiveness for the blindness and arrogance—for unnecessary violence, greed, selfishness, haste, and waste. We ask forgiveness for our laziness, when we cannot find the strength to change. And we ask the guidance of the ancestors of the land, the spirits of the Wild, to bless us in this work, as we reclaim what has been forgotten or ignored.

Art by Miriam Wosk

May we become Guardians of the Hive

So the family of Earth can thrive

And the Wild be ever free and alive!