Alley - Deadlines

DEAD LINES: A lesson from snakes about deadlines

Last updated: March 4th, 2019

One day, several weeks before my column was due, I pondered the upcoming topic: deadlines. I tried to remember if any animals—other than busy humans—had ever mentioned deadlines to me. I didn’t think so. Did animals even know about deadlines? Deadlines are time constraints, limits that must not be passed, target dates we humans set for ourselves. Historically, a deadline is a boundary around a military prison beyond which prisoners cannot cross for risk of being shot. The more I thought about deadlines, the stranger and more outlandish the concept seemed.

Then I had a dream:

It is early morning as I walk through a small desert town. Lining the street are tourist shops designed to look old and Western. Because it is early, all the shops are closed. It’s quiet and peaceful and I’m enjoying walking alone, down the centre of the dusty street.

Up ahead two small dead snakes lie in the road. They are slender, maybe a foot long, and lying side by side, totally straight and equidistant apart. They look like this:  ll

I stop in front of them and one of the snakes asks, “What are we?”

“Snakes?” I say, wondering if this is a trick question.

“No,” says the other, “We’re dead lines!”

Both snakes start to laugh—Ssss, ssss, ssss. They laugh so hard their bodies wiggle and they become curvy and serpentine, alive once again.

I laugh too. It’s a silly joke but it’s infectious the way the snakes keep laughing and wiggling. I feel my whole body loosening up with laughter.

The snakes say if I want to understand the real meaning of the joke I should go over there. They point with their heads to an alley between two tourist shops. Then the snakes wriggle away.

I head down the alley. It is dark and narrow, obviously not meant for tourist passage, but at the end it opens up to a huge, red, rocky expanse. Of course—this is why I have come to visit the town: to see the red cliff mountains! How could I have forgotten?

The sky is bright, the air is glowing and the rocks shimmer in the heat. There are some Mayan boys sitting on squat pony walls fashioned from the red earth. The walls line the far side of the road, to protect people from falling off the cliff. The boys smile and joke. They talk to me about the land and how the walls were built.

I move to one of the walls and look over the edge—the drop is sheer, but I can see all over the valley below. It’s exhilarating, though a little scary too.

Then the boys tell me to look at the lines of the walls—see how they are curved? There are no straight lines here, they say, just curves that follow the flow of the earth.

“That’s how it really is,” they say. I nod and realize this is a good secret to remember. Then the boys laugh: Ssss, ssss, sssss.

I love this dream. It speaks to me of the interplay between humour and wisdom and the sly, graceful ways that awakening can occur.

I love the snakes, clever tricksters who pose a riddle and then wiggle themselves alive with laughter at their own answer. Snakes are big medicine—powerful figures both in waking life and in our dreams. Often we feel scared or threatened by snakes, but here the snakes are obliging, helping the dreamer laugh her way to remembering.

Two snakes pretending to be dead lines is a visual pun of an answer to my question posed in waking life, but it also makes a point. How easily we forget the beauty of the present, how dead we become by losing ourselves in tourist traps of the mind.

The dark, narrow alley is like a birthing passageway, leading the dreamer to the glowing space of remembering. There are no tourist shops or deadlines here, but open skies, shimmering red rocks and walls that follow the curves of the land. Here we find small Mayan boys who laugh and inform. Perhaps they are Mayan because the Mayans revered the snake so highly. Perhaps they are boys because they embody old wisdom expressed in a young, playful, light-hearted manner.

Some dreams are personal, only for the dreamer. Others are for sharing. It feels to me this is a dream not just for me, but also for my readers. After all, the topic invoked the dream. Or, perhaps the dream was waiting for the invitation.

Sometimes it is best not to say too much about a dream. In a quiet space, we allow the magic of the story to unfold as it will, speaking to each of us in the way we need to hear, offering us the unique insight, message or teaching we need to know. For example, how straight, deadlines tend to hold us in predictable patterns and how generous both snakes and small Mayan boys can be when we allow ourselves to loosen up and laugh.

[su_panel background=”#f2f2f2″ color=”#000000″ border=”0px none #ffffff” shadow=”0px 0px 0px #ffffff”]Dawn Baumann Brunke is the author of Animal Voices; Animal Voices, Animal Guides; Shapeshifting with our Animal Companions; and Animal Teachings. All four books explore the deeper nature of our relationship with animals, nature, each other and ourselves. For more, see Dawn’s website. This article first appeared in Timeless Spirit.