Friday, February 15, 2013

The Year of the Snake - The Healing Power of Venom

Upon learning the Chinese New Year is the  Year of the Snake I immediately thought of a vision I had last August. 

I was shown the fuchsia face of a man in the stars.  Something about him immediately reminded me of former vice-president Cheney yet I knew it wasn't' him.  His face vanished and an elephant's trunk appeared.  It then vanished and was replaced by a huge snake reminiscent of the one in the Harry Potter series.  It crawled into my field of vision in the stars then opened its mouth just like in the movie.

Everything went black.  Then a fuchsia heart shape appeared.  I could feel it pulsing energy to me, feeding and invigorating me, as I recorded the vision and wondered what it meant.

I sensed the snake represented the Divine Feminine enveloping the man as the word transmutation came to mind.  Yet I wondered, 'Who was the man?' 

Twenty-days later I came home from being out of town for a week.  I was sorting the mail and newspapers saved for us by a neighbor.  The story and photos on the front page of the Tennessean from two days prior literally took my breath.

There on the cover of our local paper was the man in my vision sitting atop an elephant he had killed.  The stories heading read: "He takes hunting to an extreme."  The reporter told of a local sixty-year old who after a health scare in 1999 decided to hunt "dangerous" animals.  The story referred to animals of course as 'game' but this was no game to me.  This man hunts my children, an elephant and leopard in Zimbabwe, a brown bear in Russia, a hippopotamus, zebra, fox, every deer imaginable and thousands of fowl.

I did not want to read the story.  Even now to write of it brings tears to my eyes.  Yet to avoid it was to neglect the vision and resist listening for its message.

So I read.  And I have  read the story again and again this week listening, still listening wanting to discern why this was delivered to me by the Universe and the newspaper man. 

The local hunter invoked God in defending his pastime quoting scripture from Genesis where God told Noah that every moving thing that lived was food for him and his family.  I thought, 'I bet God wants to take that back.  Surely he had no idea Earth would become so overrun with people, people who would crowd out and kill off creation with a hunting arsenal like this mans.'

The writer relates how local school children in one village were dismissed from school when the hunter killed the hippopotamus, so they could gather meat for their families from the bed of his truck.  Similarly the elephant fed 100 people in a village for over a month.  I read this yet thought, "Why not use your passion and money to teach these villagers something that would last a lifetime that they could pass on to their children, something that didn't involve killing the endangered animals of God's earth?"

The writer quoted him as saying, "Everything I do, I do to an extreme."

And this is where the story comes around to me - to me, to you, to the snake and the fuchsia heart here in the year of the Snake.  We are here to love to the extreme. 

I knew the August afternoon of the vision that I was to follow the example of the snake, to ingest the traits of this person I find most disturbing in order to transmute the negative in him as well as myself.  The Snake as a Divine symbol says, "Hold the all of who this man is as well as yourself in Love."

Then earlier this week I came across the latest National Geographic buried beneath a pile of papers.  I had not yet looked at it. I glanced at the cover and saw what I knew was a message for me.  A story headline in the bottom corner read: The Healing Power of Venom.  

My breath was taken.  Immediately I knew what I consider poisonous in this man is here to activate the power of my heart creating a healing venom for him and for me.

If I had to rely on myself alone I could not respond to the Call of this vision.  Yet I nor we do this alone.  The Heart of the Universe that pulsed energy to me, whether you call it God, Great Spirit or Goddess feeds us if we are open to holding the abuses and violations of this world that stem from shame, ignorance, arrogance and self-hate.  

Is there anything more beautiful in this Year of the Snake than transforming the poisons in our world into venom that heals?  Is there anything more beautiful than loving in extreme in this profound way?

-Dawn, The Good News Muse, 15 Feb. 2013

1 comment:

Kathy Plourde said...

Wow .. an insightful and powerful message...