Shedding Old Skin in the Year of the Snake
Plus, how art helps me process the anguish I'm feeling in light of the recent political developments
Dear Ponders and new subscribers,
January has, as many have observed, felt like the longest month ever. The 20 years days since the inauguration coup were filled with such intense chaos, cruelty and lawlessness that I hardly had any room to breathe. As a result, I’ve been feeling like the stick figure below—quite the opposite of the “embodied” state I described in my last post.
Year of the Snake
January is also a typically super busy month at my job. This year, I’ve volunteered to lead the employee impact group for our Asian American and Pacific Islanders staff, so my workload has doubled. This is part of the company’s DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging) initiative. I decided to take on this role after the election last November, because I recognized the importance of banding together in community at perilous times.
One of the activities I helped organize at work was the Lunar New Year, which started on January 29 this year. It’s the Year of the Snake. It’s an animal on the zodiac that generally elicits more fear and dislike than admiration. I remember vividly how I ran for my life after encountering a 6-ft long King Cobra in the village where I lived in Hong Kong. As well, I’ve adopted the metaphor of the snake as someone who’s sleazy, cunning and predatory.
But then, the distinct nature of the snake—the shedding of its skin, known as molting—reminds me of the concept of renewal and rebirth.
As the snake molts, the damaged old skin along with its parasites are removed. The shedding allows the snake to grow larger. In addition, the new skin is usually brighter and more vibrant in color.
What a perfect metaphor of the nature of the inevitable passage that I must walk through after the trauma of betrayal. While the transformative shedding can be painful, the vibrancy and expansion of a new life is worth all the anguish of losing what felt so comfortable in the past.
As a physical expression of this shedding, I had my long hair chopped off. (Having a haircut before the Lunar New Year is a well-practiced custom in my culture as well.)
Speaking of shedding, the Melanesians of Vanuatu have a creation myth that goes like this: In the beginning, human beings were immortal. They cast their skins and emerged as reborn youths. Some time has passed, and a woman (the “Change-skin of the World”) went to the stream to shed her skin. When she got home, her child did not recognize this young stranger. Crying, it insisted that its mother was an old woman. To pacify the child, the mother went looking for her old skin, which was caught on a stick by the stream, and put it on. The child could once again recognize its mother. From that moment on, human beings stopped to cast their skins and became mortal beings.
I read this story in Mark Nepo’s “The Book of Awakening,” which serves as my spiritual guide and part of my morning rituals. In it, Nepo writes:
When we cease to shed what’s dead in us in order to soothe the fear of others, we remain partial. When we cease to surface our most sensitive skin simply to avoid conflict with others, we remove ourselves from all that is true. When we maintain ways we’ve already discarded just to placate the ignorance of those we love, we lose our access to what is eternal.
This interpretation matches what I’ve learned about human attachment. When we hide our authentic self in order to please a person we love, appease their fear or protect their ego, we sever our connection to our true nature and our need to grow.
Anguish: Named and Tamed
I mentioned earlier about the feeling that I could hardly breathe as a result of the dizzying intensity of trump’s nonsensical executive orders and musk’s blatant theft and destruction of government institutions (a.k.a. coup). This breathlessness was gradually followed by a sense of dampened hope and depression. My mind was so overwhelmed by the immensity of the cruelty of the ruling broligarchy that it became numb...
Until I came upon the entry on “Anguish” in Brené Brown’s “Atlas of the Heart”:
Anguish is an almost unbearable and traumatic swirl of shock, incredulity, grief, and powerlessness. Shock and incredulity can take our breath away, and grief and powerlessness often come for our hearts and our minds. But anguish, the combination of these experiences, not only takes away our ability to breathe, feel, and think—it comes for our bones. Anguish often causes us to physically crumble in on ourselves, literally bringing us to our knees or forcing us all the way to the ground.
Before I even finished the few pages devoted to the exploration of this emotion, I started sobbing. I felt a sense of validation and relief, that someone named and mirrored exactly what I was feeling. One of the ways Brown illustrates anguish is through a double-paged spread of the photo of “Dark Elegy,” a group of sculptures by Suse Ellen Lowenstein. You can see a photo here on the artist’s website, but the impact is bigger if you see it printed on glossy paper, and I imagine even bigger if you see it in person.
This work of art contains 75 larger-than-life-size sculptures, each portraying a mother or wife expressing grief, rage and hopelessness at the moment when they first heard the heartbreaking news of the death of their loved ones to the terrorist act that struck down Pan Am 103 over the Scottish village of Lockerbie. The artist lose her 21-year-old son, Alexander, to this tragedy, which prompted her to create these sculptures.
For me, seeing the emotion of anguish physically embodied by these sculptures allowed me to channel my stuck and unnamed emotions outwards via my tear ducts. I gave myself a good cry and felt less alone.
Art is vital to our emotional and spiritual well-being, and we need it all the more in hard times.
Art as Resistance
The orange little man with a fragile ego made a ridiculous announcement that he would become chair of Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. It’s a slap in the face for all who appreciate and understand the vital role that art plays in our life.
But, as Mary Trump so sharply points out:
Fascism kills art, and art kills fascism.
To my fellow artists: Let’s keep doing art! It is our best form of resistance.
Dear Ponders, let’s chat! Here are some questions for you to ponder in the Year of the Snake:
What old skin have you been carrying that you’ve been called to shed?
What do you think shedding that skin will bring you?
Please leave you comment below.
Amen! Lamar yesterday proved the power of art to subvert tyranny. We’re rising ❣️❣️❣️❣️
YES to art as resistance!! I’m inspired to create pieces inspired by joy and hope because 😮💨 do we need it more than ever right now!!