“…enchantment, by my definition, has nothing to do with fantasy, or escapism, or magical thinking: it is founded on a vivid sense of belongingness to a rich and many-layered world; a profound and whole-hearted participation in the adventure of life. It’s all about relationship, reciprocity – and doing the work.” – Dr. Sharon Blackie, The Art of Enchantment

I was terrified of snakes as a child. Even though I was taught to distinguish the poisonous ones (copperheads and cottonmouths) from the non-poisonous (corn snakes and rat snakes and ringnecks and racers), the distinction mattered not even a little to me. A snake was death to my young and discerning eyes, and the sight of one meant that I needed to get myself far, far away as quickly as possible.

My mother, on the other hand, was not only unafraid of snakes, she had a reverence for them. She saw their otherworldly beauty and recognized their wisdom, how they keep to themselves, knowing that humans are more of a threat to them than vice versa. I think she also knew that, like the wolf who was made to wear all kinds of human self-loathing and fear, the snake took on the costume of sin assigned to it by human storytellers.

“…and so the serpent carries in itself the sense of both the fascination and the terror of life.” – Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

The snake, like my mother, embodies duality. The person who I went to for comfort and unconditional love was also the person who harmed me the most, whose substance abuse made her unconscious of the full extent of that harm, leaving me alone even as she terrified me.

Part of the sickness of alcoholism is that it imparts denial as it sits in broad daylight, causing loved ones to question their sense of reality. In that way, I spent my childhood on a liminal path, constantly stepping between my mother’s reality and my own knowledge of the world, seeking love through loyalty to her truth, and sanity through loyalty to my own.

“Major traumas are both a death and a rebirth, the end of one kind of consciousness and the beginning of another…After trauma, your mind works differently, and your body has been altered to the extent that an entire new understanding of it must be negotiated. In time, as people enter therapy or simply reflect back upon the course of their lives, on the turning points in the stories of their time on earth, such days grow in power and take on a totemic quality, seeming to contain not only some portion of the mystery of their new being but also some key to the structure of the universe.” - David J. Morris, The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Inspired by The Sleeping Beauty, “The Snakebite Cure” (Pedestal Magazine, 2021), is in some ways the psychic ending to the manuscript of Imagine a Woman. It’s a saga of a poem that sends you back to the beginning of the journey on the last line, as the process of healing is an endless cycle, as is the cycle of death and birth, and the cyclical nature of forming one’s identity or sense of self - much like the ouroboros, ancient symbol of the snake as a circle, swallowing its own tail.

With some poems, I can remember, years later, exactly how they came together. Others, stitched together from many disparate lines and different ideas, linger only in their imagery and intent.

The way into a poem is also, at times, an impossible thing to craft - it has to make itself known - and that’s what the opening stanzas of this poem did, which even now seem to me like a preface or a preamble, not exactly connecting to other parts of the poem structurally or sonically, but having made themselves known to me, became the only way forward into the world that awaited: Maybe I’ll forgive her out of tiredness. I’ll give out and she’ll pick me off the ground. Oh, happiness. Put me inside the trunk of a tree, her treasure. Forget I’m there. Forget I forgave. I’ll forget. My forgiveness will turn to rage…

The narrator in this poem (fun fact: you can also listen to it, recorded from my car during the height of the pandemic) is navigating fear and instinct, both before and after the death of the mother.

Instinct is a powerful tool in creativity, as it is in life. Julia Cameron writes in The Artist’s Way, “Trust that still, small voice that says, ‘This might work, and I’ll try it.’” But fear struggles against instinct, insisting that it can endure with its promise of protecting you with an ultimate fantasy of safety, an escape from death. Meanwhile, a mysterious truth endures: that death is always a part of life, including the many forms of metaphorical death and rebirth that take place in fairy tales and myths.

“Gradually the Prince began to realize that if he turned toward the beautiful visions, the way grew harder and more treacherous. But if he turned toward the monsters and walked through the pools of horrible creatures, his footing was surer. The way grew easier, until finally he reached the edge of the swamp.” - Mercer Mayer, The Sleeping Beauty

Examining the role assigned to the snake by the Bible, I use imagery of the Southern Baptist tent revivals of my homeland - rituals I was never invited into, and was simultaneously curious about and terrified of. But the snakebite cure is not a human ego game of unexamined alliance to a patriarchal god (especially not one who would choose animal abuse in order to recreate a ‘miracle’)…the snakebite cure is the embodied instinct of finding one’s way through the tangled identities and silences until you are finally in enough pain to wake up.

The pain of the arrow shot at the end of the poem is the necessity of realizing that such courage won’t change the course of the mother’s sleep, or of her death. That, in fact, this pain is the gateway to a conscious role in one’s own healing, and to putting one’s faith in something unseen or intangible in order to proceed with the transformation.

“…the snake is the representative of the world of instinct, especially of those vital processes which are psychologically the least accessible of all. Snake dreams always indicate a discrepancy between the attitude of the conscious mind and instinct, the snake being a personification of the threatening aspect of that conflict.” - Carl Jung, Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

Just as my mother told me again and again through childhood to “trust your instinct. You have great instincts,” she left a clue for me in the symbol of the snake. What terrified me in childhood became a key to adult healing. And just as I had to get to the root of some of the lies on which my understanding of god were based, in order to form a sense of my own spirituality…I also had to get to the root of the templates for womanhood I was familiar with - images upheld by the church, by society, and by my own mother - in order to imagine a woman in whom I could see myself.

“Working with trauma is as much about remembering how we survived as it is about what is broken.” - Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score

I want to take a moment to point out that the pressure of being a ‘perfect’ mother is part of the cycle of shame that kept my mother mired in illness, unwilling or unable - I will never fully know - to seek recovery. In all my research, I noticed how the archetype of the ‘evil’ stepmother is a symbol for a failure of womanhood - one of the greatest failures of all, which is the failure to be a ‘good mother.’ (The evil stepmother, interestingly, is a chimera of womanhood in that she is a mother who hasn’t actually given birth. This contributes to the sense of her as unnatural, highly suspect, and, ultimately, monstrous.) 

“The imagination is committed to the justice of wholeness. It will not choose one side in an inner conflict and repress or banish the other; it will endeavor to initiate a profound conversation between them in order that something original can be born. The imagination loves symbol because it recognizes that inner divinity can only find expression in symbolic form.” - John O’Donohue, Anam Cara

The Gregorian calendar page is turning to 2026. Darkness is about to outweigh light, for a brief solstice, before the dawning makes room again for our ideas, dreams, and insights.

I’ll meet you in January with a poem from Imagine a Woman that follows the pathway of every great fairy tale or children’s story with its mixture of the human and natural world, blurring and casting away the boundary between them just as childhood eventually merges with adulthood.

Thank you for reading,

D.

P.S. One more moment to celebrate the Very Exciting news that I am a Pushcart Prize Nominee!!! You can read “Reliquary for the River,” nominated by Crab Creek Review, here or here.

archive

November 9: Seven Stories: Snow White

October 9: Frankenstein Edition

September 9: On Longing

August 9: Productivity and Process

July 9: On Wolves and Women

June 9: Book Announcement

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