Vachon Imagined

The serpent is not healed by becoming something other than a serpent.

It is healed from the illusion that it was ever separate from its nature.

The serpent is the serpent of our nature.

It does not hide from what it is. It seeks only the expression of itself.

It roams.

And this is what the practice of non-judgment begins to reveal: our dual nature. We are capable of the bite and the balm, suffering and joy, love and destruction. The serpent does not pretend otherwise.

Anyone who returns to the expression of this nature is delivered, not from life, but from judgment. From the exhausting attempt to divide what is good in us from what is evil, what belongs from what must be cast out.

Because it is painful even to be joyous in this world. We know joy does not last. Every beautiful thing carries, somewhere within it, evidence of its departure.

Like the snakebite, we have evidence of its arrival. We have evidence of its venom.

It gets into us.

And we have no mechanism by which to fight life itself.

Our resistance is futile because the serpent roams. It roams the earth. It roams according to its nature. And if it is provoked, you get that nature.

You get the bite.

What we call evil.

What we call suffering.

But the venom itself does not change.

It is suffering.

It is joy.

It is everything that enters us and leaves its mark.

And detachment is the answer.

Not a detachment that says, I am not that, and you are this. Because that only breeds defense. It creates a pride that must be defended forever. It turns the ego into something we must kill, and in trying to destroy it, we become even more attached to ourselves.

So instead, we love the ego.

We love the self.

We make room for its choices.

We make room for the serpent.

The serpent is not healed by becoming something other than a serpent.

It is healed when we stop demanding that it become something else.

And then the snake is healed, not from its nature, but from the illusion that it was ever separate from it.

And so are we.