Fear I Can Point At

Work that remains

Photo by David W. Levin; Backyard, 2025 (an image taken within days of this writing)

“Can you see it?" my father asks on this spring morning, lifting me up to share eye level.

“No,” I reply.

“Right there,” he says, gesturing into the middle of a short, neatly-stacked tower of firewood ~10 feet in front of us in our woods-flanked backyard.

“No.”

“Here,” he says, adjusting me in his arms so that he can point with his left hand. “Right there. How about now?”

“I don’t see it,” I insist.

“It’s there. You don’t see the snake?”

I am approximately 2 years old.

I never saw the snake.

This is my oldest memory.

Despite his intention to transmit calm wonder to me in that moment, what I remember most is feeling acute fear. Fear of what I could not see. Fear of what could be lurking in places I assumed were safe. Fear of snakes. Most especially a fear of snakes.

My pride in feeling at mostly at ease with our world’s creatures is surpassed only and stupendously by a visceral, primal, life-long fear of snakes. Large or small, poisonous or non-poisonous, foreign or domestic. Doesn’t matter. In their presence, my chest constricts to the size of a baseball. My mind swells with one focal point. I’m capable only of an instinctive flight or fight: get the hell out of there or find whatever tool/weapon I can and destroy it. I once was embarrassed by the former; now I’m far more embarrassed by the number of times I’ve done the latter.

This fear is quite distinct compared with others more abstract, existential, hypothetical, or imagined. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about snakes, but when I encounter one — or even evidence of one, as this story progresses — fear arrives with brute force and an immediacy that is unlike anything else.

Reflecting on this recently, I began to see its distinctions as an asset — something that could be instructive, a gauge, as to how I was progressing spiritually. Does a snake choose to be a snake? Was it born into that body any differently than I was born into mine? Must I assume that a snake’s sole intention is to harm me? Why the prejudice? What does this say about me? The grace, space, and calm disinterest with which I encounter the rabbits and squirrels…why can’t the same apply to snakes?

At that time, admittedly during a lull in snake encounters, I gave myself the aspiration of working with this fear — using it as a yardstick to measure my progress seeing and living in this world non-dualistically. The next time I encounter a snake in my backyard, I declared to myself, I will react differently. I will be calm, unafraid. I will see it as just another manifestation of the one, the universe, just like me. A being. In a body not of its choosing. I will give it space, backing away not out of fear but respect.

With this aspiration, I started feeling more at ease, dare I say even a tad eager, looking forward to my next snake encounter.

Aspirations can be wonderful. And hilarious.

At the conclusion of a backyard visit this week, my sister asks, “what’s with the snake skin?” At first, her words strike me as non-sequitur, yet the moment I begin asking her to repeat herself my eyes rise from the ground to the birdhouse just above eye level a few feet in front of me. There, draped with several loops/coils over the homemade, wooden birdhouse my father had made with my kids when they were toddlers, was a freshly shed snake skin. I’d estimate it to be ~4ft long if stretched out.

Friends, this is the point at which I’d love to report to you how well my spiritual practice has progressed, how my new “gauge of non-dual awareness” gave me high marks as I peered around with calm wonder to see if my new snake friend was still nearby. But that did not happen. My heart raced. My chest constricted. My threat response mechanism redlined. My eyes frantically scanned the scene for a live snake as I plotted a quick path to the indoors.

The gauge worked. And it showed me how much work I have left to do.

I know some would suggest that starting smaller, with a fear one or two notches down from THE BIG FEAR, would be a better, more progressive/forgiving progress meter. There’s logic in that. But in truth and in fairness, I have begun seeing early measures of progress along the lines of not “othering” others quite as much as I used to. Though the Snake Response-O-Meter may be biting off more than I can spiritually chew, I’m going to keep it for now. Cautiously.

Have you ever considered using your response to fear as a gauge for progress?

I hope this has been helpful.