The morning of New Year’s Day, bleary-eyed and half-asleep, I was out walking my dog when I ran into a neighborhood kid carrying her puppy Chevy home.
“Happy new year!” I said. “Did you make it to midnight?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I had to help my pet snake shed his skin.”
Well, that was just about the last thing I expected her to say.
“What exactly does that entail?” I asked, genuinely interested.
“Oh, I just put him in a warm bath.”
The image of this little girl easing her pet snake into a warm bath so he could shed what no longer fit him seemed so fitting an image for a new year, a new decade–a new beginning.
Releasing old skins—thought patterns, habits, limiting beliefs, toxic theologies—can be scary, even painful. But we are never alone in our letting go. We are loved, held, and comforted by the divine within and beyond ourselves.