I was out walking my dog tonight and as I turned around the corner I saw a group of people looking down at the ground. I live in a wooded section of the city, so I assumed they were looking at a snake. I then saw one of the guys in the group smacking it. When I walked up, I recognized that it was a black rat snake. “Don’t kill it!” I told them. “That’s a good snake!” But I looked down and the poor thing had already been chopped in three places and sadly was still moving a little bit. The group was truly shocked that I thought the snake was “good.” Angrily, I picked it up and moved it over into the woods nearby and walked off. I figured it could die in nature as opposed to being crushed on the asphalt by car or suffer another blow from their shovel.
That whole scene hurt my heart. I don’t know why I have such kindred connection with creatures like snakes. I’m sure a part of it is as a gardener and I understand their importance in our ecosystem. Maybe it’s because I grew up in more of a rural environment and I understand environmental conservation differently than my neighbors here in the city. More than anything, moments like this highlight how out of balance with nature we are.
I do know that my soul is burdened by what I witnessed tonight. Because of my religious upbringing, I can’t help but think of the Adam and Eve story and how humankind was given “dominion” over the Earth. Giving a human being dominion over anything is never a good idea. And of course a serpent is the villain in that story too. But stories have power, and then this Biblical one, God set humankind up to fail. Our original sin was not biting the apple, it was the ignorance born from our ego.
It seems that we human beings have forgotten, or maybe we never actually learned, that we’re a fraction of the natural ecosystem. We don’t control nature, we’re part of it. We need each other to survive and we need creatures like this simple black snake to keep things in balance. Newsflash: The planet will be fine without us! Addressing issues like climate change and responsible resource consumption is about our survival, not the Earth’s.
Being at war with nature and ourselves will be our undoing. Maybe instead of giving humankind “dominion” over the Earth the word could’ve been “stewardship.” But even that fails. We haven’t been good stewards of our planet or each other over our entire history. Some cultures have done a better job than others, but overall, humankind has failed its duty to nature and itself. We have damn near wiped out every thing we have come in contact with. In every news cycle I am reminded of how we seem hell-bent on taking ourselves out. A question I ask myself often is, “Why do human beings have to kill everything we don’t understand?” Ideas. People. Snakes.
The only way we really truly will change our trajectory is by stacking simple acts of compassion and understanding one on top of another. Those seemingly mundane actions are the building blocks of our future. But tonight I’m both pissed and sad, because the wise soul of a black snake was mistaken as a villain and my belief in a better future took another hit.