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It was virgo season when I made my first plant medicine in class, five years ago, during the autumnal equinox: a garlic and thyme honey infusion in a four ounce jar.

i remember watching over it diligently. It had a special place in my cramped dorm kitchen, well in sight so i would not forget to turn it each day. There was something so precious about that process, and everything that jar represented. i was so busy then, busier than my current body could ever handle — neck deep in my undergraduate major, burning myself out with political organizing, doing all i could to keep myself alive amidst my deteriorating mental health. Everything was too much then, but this jar that i tended to each day, watching the honey turn dark brown with medicine, marveling at the trust i felt each time i turned it over… this jar held a memory, a path, a real way of being in this world. it marked a season of meeting the work of my life.

i found the last few spoonfuls of it while cleaning out my apothecary, after teaching the second session of Artemisia Milagrosa: Grandmother Medicine, and all the lessons preserved in it rushed into me at once. One of the endless wisdoms the land has restored in me is a [re]emergent sense of time. It takes the shape of a spiral, reflected endlessly in imprints of our world— a coiled snake, a conch shell, our home galaxy, calendula seeds, an ocean storm.

i had decided, three summers ago, to answer the land’s call to root down in rural New York when my friend who lived down the street called me about a dead snake on the road, and brought them to my house in a basket to bury. it has always worked like that with us— life’s gifts come closely bound in a spiral with death. snake medicine marked my initiation into plant medicine. their presence has become ubiquitous in times of integrating lessons, making decisions, and undergoing transformation.

i see snakes everywhere during Virgo season, slipping through the water, head poking out from the swamp, basking in the sun, weaving through the garden. last week, in catskill, i heard rustling in the kitchen and spotted a two foot garter snake slinking down the baking rack. it might be instinctual to freak out over snakes, but they just make me pause in curious admiration. something about their movement pulls me in—

That perfect progress that poet Jorie Graham writes about, “where / movement appears / to be a vanishing, a mending / of the the visible // by the invisible” is snake medicine, in which “we stitch the earth… each time / we die, going / back under, coming back up…”

In her poem, I Watched a Snake, Graham describes what is revealed by observing a snake slowly “thread the lawn”, musing that their constant disappearing “seemed to have to do with work”. There is indeed something here about work, deep internal work, that is not recognized within a system invested in our spiritual absence: the wisdom of threading the ground slow, of stitching the earth as we descend into, and emerge from, the subterranean. Virgo presides over the 6th house of work, and this is what they bring into focus for me— what is the true work of being alive?

To know it has something to do with accepting death and transformation is easy for me to embrace. I come from a culture that makes shrines to La Santa Muerte in churches and street corners alike. I have always instinctively collected bones, buried animals, preserved insect carcasses. Death is a constant companion and a trusted friend.

To know too, that it has to do with labor is also easy to embrace. Everything about my upbringing taught me to be exalted by duty, responsibility, and service to others. Grit, dedication, tending to, keeping a home, a body, working to provide, devotion to the day to day, is my natural association with the 6th house.

But Jorie Graham follows this musing about work, with a declaration about desire. Desire being, “the honest work of the body / its engine, its wind.”

That work is also about desire… was much harder to stomach. It required my recovering catholic, mexican ass to undergo a deep shedding, as the snakes must do, in order to grow.

Snake medicine is about both work and desire. Snakes, in their stitching of the earth, and their medicine of shedding, have much to teach about the work of being alive.

In a recent interview for her latest book, Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, Alexis Pauline Gumbs speaks from Lorde’s perspective as a theorist of survival on the importance of caring for oneself, “I have a role, and a responsibility in my community. There’s miracles that are supposed to come through [me]. And it’s really convenient if I’m shut down, if I’m not available to be present”.

This knowing, that there’s miracles that are supposed to come through [you] is a source of immense political power, and it requires a commitment to care, creation, connection, and liberation. I have marveled this season at how much is restored in my soul by my time at the canvas, and in the process of writing— how much of the broken trust, self doubt, and betrayal, both internal and collective, that capitalist and imperialist structures have sown in me, se ezfuma, turns to smoke, from the delight of listening to my soul’s desire to guide my hands, to take creative risks and be met with satisfaction, free of judgement and the constraints of perfectionism.

this is a huge reason why it took me so long to start writing publicly; i could not find a reason to do it, other than that i simply wanted to. i wanted to so bad, and i was held back by the belief that everything i made had to be of value, of service, for it to be worth sharing. but Mercury, is inherently valuable work because it is my desire, my Element X1 — To travel between worlds, and brings knowledge from the other side. To make the path by walking.

One goes to the canvas, to the loom, to the pottery wheel, to their instruments, to dance, for the same reason we must feed ourselves every day. The last stanza of I Watched A Snake reads, “passion is work / that retrieves us / lost stitches. It makes a pattern of us / fastens us / to sturdier stuff”. This sturdier stuff, as I see it, is the grounding of our desires in the collective. Knowing the truth of your soul’s desire is of vital importance in liberatory work. That is one of the many reasons, I suspect, that the snake is so demonized by Christianity and Catholicism, both institutions that are entrenched in imperialism. Desire is falsely framed as temptation, corruption, and backwardness when it has to do with sovereignty, when it moves us in any way other than in service of the empire, of systems of harm and domination. But as Astrologer Alice Sparkly Kat wrote in recent a post, “the idea that desire is selfish comes from individualism and individualism is an illusion that fails as soon as you want something true.”

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Snakes shed their skin several times a year. They do this to accommodate new growth, to release parasites and damaged skin, and they do it before reproducing and after giving birth. It’s something that young snakes especially, must do constantly to maintain their health. Snakes have the blessing, the medicine, of ecdysis— of being able to shed their entire skin, all at once.

humans, trees, insects, all partake in cyclical sheddings. it is necessary, it comes wether or not one is ready.

when is it time for shedding?

here’s what the snake in my window told me — you know your skin is too tight when you are both overwhelmed and underwhelmed, when everything is too much and not enough, when you know you could be doing so much better but somehow this is all you can manage.

though it looks different for us, we shed for all the same reasons snakes do.

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Virgo season belongs to the seeds, the snakes, and the compost piles. It is both the warm days of high summer and the growing chill in the night. It is seed saving, harvesting, preserving food for winter, and putting beds to rest all at once. This year, Virgo brings us right up to the autumnal Equinox on September 22nd.

Equinoxes are special, sacred time. The autumnal equinox in particular, with its mutable signature holds the balance of many phases and energies that make up life: creation and decay, expansion and contraction. Tiny brave seeds ride the wind far and wide, while dying plants feed the soil, giving their bodies to the next generation.

It has been a rough season for shedding. As much as i desire to move with the grace of the snake in Jorie Graham’s poem, i have felt less like i am easing out of an old skin, and more like an awkward adolescent bird, bald patches here and clumps of maturing adult feathers there. but here we are.

What is in your compost pile?

In mine — ferments that went bad, the tomato sauce i failed to can, art projects and ideas that were scrapped, applications i did not even begin writing, catholic shame, perfectionism, harvests times that passed me by, and the knee jerk response to look at my creative desire and demand, “what are you worth?”

what you’ve done this season is enough, says the snake in my window.

no, really, it’s enough.

any accolades and accomplishments are superfluous.

there’s the feeling of new skin to get used to.

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