SHEDDING...

SHEDDING… ‘The act of shedding, separating, or casting off or out;’

There is a big eucalyptus tree in our neighbour’s garden, growing next to, and partly hiding, what used to be a radio tower. Over the two and a half years we’ve been living here we had seen the tree grow increasingly weaker. Some of the branches were completely dead and the rest of it looked weak, dry, brittle and lifeless, even in spring. It felt as if something was sitting on top of this tree’s power, like the frog in the fairy tale that sits on the source of the spring. Then this spring I noticed there was ivy growing up its bark, green and lush, forging its way upwards in rapid speed, living off the last sap of this tree ; a lot of crows and doves of the neighbourhood came to break off dead branches and build their nests with it- useful and yet sad. Every day I looked out and felt I was witnessing a slow death. I was not sure whether the ivy was the source of this slow dying process, but it’s suffocating and weakening growth couldn’t be good for the tree, so one day in spring I ventured to the neighbours, introduced myself and asked whether they would mind cutting the ivy so the eucalyptus might have a chance. They were friendly and concerned themselves about the tree, and half an hour later they cut down the ivy by its roots.
Then the rain started – over weeks we had rain, storms and strong winds. And then one day we saw big pieces of the bark come off, in the middle of a storm, flaking, flapping and then falling! Within days most of the bark had shed! The tree was alive and shedding it’s skin!! The most amazing thing is that it is now as green as ever and looks actually alive and kicking. I am not sure whether it was the ivy, the draught of the year before last, a lack of something in the soil that weakened it, but it is back in it’s juice and I believe the shedding was an important part of this enlivening process! What helped we don’t know: water, wind and storm, the release of the ivy, the attention given or simply time?

And then there are the snakes….
When a snake starts the process of shedding its colour begins to dull down and she might become very still and even stop feeding. A fluid is produced under the old skin, which will eventually help the old skin to be shed. Before the actual shedding of its skin, snakes become almost blind because their eyes are covered by a scale that is actually shed too in the process of shedding and the fluid is clouding her sight. During this time snakes feel particularly vulnerable and hence, more unpredictable and sometimes aggressive. Then there is the rubbing: the snake rubs her skin against something, a branch or stone to break the skin. The snake then passes between rough objects until she can move out of it, leaving her old skin behind: inside out, crumpled and in a heap, with her new skin glistening. The actual shedding might only take a few minutes, while the whole process takes between seven and ten days.

So, like everything else, shedding moves in phases. We say we ‘need to shed our skin’, our old lives, jobs, attitudes, things we don’t need anymore. We shed layers that have become useless and restricting for the new layers of our soul to come through. We know instinctively that we need to shed SOMETHING in order to make space for something new and to reveal something new about ourselves, like a new sparkling skin, a deeper, clearer layer of our soul…
It is comforting to see that sometimes, JUST BEFORE this crucial moment of shedding, all might look very difficult: we might feel edgy and unpredictable as a snake; we might seek solitude and feel almost blinded by this confusing process; we might feel dry, scared, itchy or even as if we are dying. And it is good to keep in mind that indeed SOMETHING is dying! And like a birthing process we have really no choice of reversing the process if we want to live: we NEED to shed to reveal the new! This new self cannot show through, nor shine underneath the old; so we need to find the right environment through which we can move, against which we can rub, that will help us to slide and glide out of this old skin- if we are lucky it will be even graceful and ultimately quick at the last stage. Once shed, it seems easy to slither away from this heap of old skin; it moves back into the earth, becomes useful only as fertiliser or as an item for a collector.



Here two poem about shedding, one from Iwano Arashi and one from me.

Shedding

Brushing a cat who sheds
mountains:
It's an endless task, but
she becomes quite beautiful --
upon completion.
Iwano-Arashi

*******************

Slowly, like icicles dripping
years of winter melt
and morph into something like home.

A phantom, almost lost
like treasure hidden under a heap of coals
I remember a place, somewhere
of belonging.

When I return
riding with my hand in the water over a glittering sea,
I step from the plank
onto my old country
in my new, shimmering skin.

PS: You can see some beautiful pictures and videos of snakes on this site:
http://www.arkive.org/species/ARK/reptiles/Coronella_austriaca/ARK005125.html?offset=0pt