As I left our apartment yesterday afternoon, I stepped over a tiny gray snake on our doorstep. It skittered when the door closed. I apologized for frightening it and jokingly asked it to stick around so my son could see it when I brought him home from school. The snake was still there when we returned.

My son loves snakes. He played with our visitor for an hour, taking pictures, touching its back, and gently coaxing it to move. Finally, the little snake crawled onto our neighbor’s door sill and scooted under her door. My son went back to check on it every five minutes, reporting that its tiny head and tongue poked back at him from under the door every time. On the fifth visit he cried for me to come quickly. The snake had shed most of its skin, leaving the translucent casing outside the door. The “new” snake inside was still attached to the last half inch of its old self on the outside. Twenty minutes later it had not freed itself, so my son pulled gently on the old skin. It popped off. He was thrilled. The snake seemed rather pleased, too.

My son and I have seen snake skins in museums, but we had never seen the actual transformation happen. It was exciting. I felt it was more than a biology lesson, though. I had a vague recollection that snake in the Native American traditions holds deep spiritual significance, but I couldn’t remember what. I looked Snake up in Medicine Cards: The Discovery of Power Through the Ways of Animals (Jamie Sams & David Carson, Bear & Company, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1988) and read:

That explanation sent me to the dictionary for the definition of transmute:
to change…appearance or nature to a higher form (emphasis added)

A higher form. That sounded right. If I could change my toxic thoughts, blocking actions, and misdirected desires to something else, something higher, I could get closer to wholeness. And wholeness was my objective.

Writing in my prayer journal, I reviewed my actions, thoughts, and desires to identify those that needed alteration. I started with actions. A few came to mind, but nothing seemed too off-kilter. But when I wrote: “What thoughts do I need to transmute?” Bingo! There they were: “Won’t happen…Not now…Waiting.” My very own killing thoughts.

I realized how much I needed to transmute my perception of time and the toxic language I used to talk about time. I needed to transform: “I’m stuck, I can’t, I’m waiting for” to something higher. Something like: Everything is happening in Divine Time. Everything is complete and perfect in Divine Time. “Well,” I wrote, “What is Divine Time anyway?” That seemed pretty easy. There is no time in Divine Time: no past, no future, nothing but the present. So, in Divine Time everything must be perfect right now. I recognized this language immediately. My minister prays this way. When she prays everything is perfect now, everyone is healthy and strong now, everything is complete now. I confess that, although her words always sound beautiful, there was a part of me that didn’t think they were really possible. Not until I wrote about it. Not until I saw it on paper, saw it with my own eyes, and my own heart.

I finished “Waiting” just before noon. There was something wrong with the ending, but it would have to wait till after my daily dose of Northern Exposure on A&E. In the show, an Inuit shaman was carving a totem pole. Chris, the philosophical disc jockey and resident artist (played by John Corbett), asked the sculptor if he worried about ruining such a massive work with one wrong cut. The carver looked at Chris for a long moment. “No,” he said, “I just ‘liberate the figure from the marble that imprisons it.’” Recognizing the words, Chris sighed, “Aaaah, Michelangelo.”

Here was the ideal image for Divine Mind! In his famous quote Michelangelo explains perfectly how things can be complete in Divine Time and Divine Mind while looking pretty hopeless in earth time. God sees the Pieta; I see the marble. God sees the plan; I see the problems. God sees the perfect me; I see the current me. Thank you Northern Exposure!

When my mother says, “God works in mysterious ways,” I wonder if she includes snake skins and TV shows? I do.