Snakes on St. Croix and the Nightmare in Paradise

I had a nightmare last night.

The actual retaining wall, minus the snakes.

In my dream, I was peering into the darkness, trying to see what was there lying in wait for me on the retaining wall in our backyard. It is very much what I write about in my blog post, "The Monster in My Garden" and here it is confronting me. I lean closer to the rocky wall, and just as I had suspected, there is a snake looking back at me. It is a brown patterned snake with large unassuming eyes. It looks back at me, but is not afraid or menacing. I back out of it's space, not wanting to confront it or make it angry when I notice the taut torso of a large silver snake hanging over me. I brushed past it when I leaned closer to the brown snake. I thought it was a tree limb. Now, it hung before me, it's face eye-level, suspended, muscles rolling ready to...

But before it could do anything, I backed away. I literally pushed myself back in my bed, my body recoiled as far as I could go before banging into Peter who was sleeping beside me and Dorothy pinning the blankets down by my feet, I didn't get far, couldn't get away. 

I was hyperventilating, even as I lie awake. I could still see the two snakes looking at me. I was awake but the feeling of danger kept coming back to me, making me breath short shallow breaths. I had to fight to keep from screaming. 

Peter and I have a history with snakes.
He actually bought the kids a snake
for Christmas and I freaked out because
I couldn't believe he never knew I did
not like them?!? In all of the years we
were together, he never noticed that
I would bypass them at zoo exhibits?!?

During the course of the remaining hours before dawn, I saw the images of the two snakes again and again and each time, I hyperventilated. It wouldn't be until I had gotten dressed and taken Dorothy outside, as I sat in front of the very retaining wall, was I able to recall the image of the snakes and not panic with fear. 

Why? What was I afraid of? 

I think the one snake, the brown snake, is my fear of abandonment. It is there, I know it's there, I recognize it, I see it. 

The silver snake, though, is a mystery. The thing about that snake in my dream is that it startled me. I didn't know it was there. I ducked under it. I brushed up against it. I was so frightened by it, could it be because I didn't know that I was in eminent danger? I just didn't know. I didn't know how close danger was and that's what scared me. 

Also, I think I hyperventilated because I tried to get away, but Peter was holding me back. He was in my way. He kept me from fleeing. And Dorothy, she pinned me down, she was weighing heavily on me, keeping me from moving. 

Did they prevent me from getting away or were they there to tell me I don't need to flee. I don't need to want to run from my problems, they have my back?

This is the rescue we had gotten for Macallan. Macallan
called her Otse (Ooh-T-see) for a small town in Botswana.
She was covered in fleas and the BSPCA didn't know if she
would make it. Born a stray, she had no idea what love was, at
first, she wouldn't let us near her, but then when she realized
we were only trying to love her, she was the best dog ever!

Or was the dream my genuine fear of living in St. Croix? I have this normal fear and then I have this very large menacing fear that I have to duck and brush past if I want to remain here. It scares me but I can't get away, get out, get going, leave because of Peter and Dorothy. What if I am not facing my intuition to leave because that would mean I can't face leaving Peter and Dorothy behind? 

Now, the emotional fear, while it's pervasive and sometimes detrimental to my mental and emotional state, it is something I can deal with. What scares me is that there's a very real danger that I know about, like the feeling I got in Africa when we left for a fundraising event we were managing and we returned home to find our neighbor had shot our dogs. I knew we shouldn't have left them. I knew we were being instructed by the universe to leave Botswana, but I didn't listen, and our dogs died as a result. Is this another one of those times when I am not heeding the call of the "gods" and then something catastrophic will happen? Is it? Well? Is it? (I ask you - the reader, or my dad and brother who have passed on or the universe in general.) 

I just don't know. 

The Monster in my Garden

My actual garden at our home in St. Croix.

Do you believe in monsters? Because lately, I've had this nagging feeling that there's something bad out there. Just out of reach. Watching. Lurking. Ready to pounce. 

I don't think it's really there...But it could be. It's like the monsters you believe are under the bed, in your closet, or in my case, an evil being standing behind me that I get a glimpse of in the bathroom mirror just as I'm stooping over to wash my face.

I am quite intuitive. I'm an empath and believe me, I know your pain. I get sympathy cramps, headaches and nausea. I can't watch particularly violent movies because I can feel each blow from the hammer or the bullet tearing through flesh and bone. I also retain sadness or confusion and pain from people I know and love.

And with that said, you should also know that I have a record of  "feeling" when something is a good idea or bad. If I'm particularly hysterical, you better listen. My feelings are never wrong. I have insisted on cancelling plans or giving my wholehearted "OK!" to random invitations based on them. My kids (and husband) think I know the future, or can predict it, but that's not really how this works.

What I get are signs that I can read efficiently. Or sometimes I get a warm feeling of love or cold feeling of evil that I respond to appropriately and adamantly. On occasion, I've had words enter my mind that give me a complete thought, lets me KNOW something without me garnering any facts. I say that words come to me because the sentence is not vocalized. I don't hear a voice, I kind of "see" the sentence. Some call it intuition, but I think it's something more tenable. I think it's being in-tune with the universe.

While living in St. Croix, I've learned to identify when a hummingbird will come by our porch. I hear the whir of its wings at a distance and as it gets louder, the sound arriving before the actual bird appears, the buzz is the "tell," like in poker.

Well, I am getting that "tell" right now. For me, it is a darkness, a hollow inside me that says to me there is something to fear. It's particularly strong lately and so I look for it to manifest in physical things.

During the day, after my husband leaves for work, I have about seven hours to myself. I can do whatever I want. Sure, sometimes I want to change the sheets, do laundry, sweep, but most days, I am free to read, write, journal, post on FB, take pictures of our garden, walk, pet and feed our dog, Dorothy, whatever.

Dorothy is our Foster Fail. We were only going to care for her for a few days but when I identified so strongly with this shy, wary, scared dog who had been abandoned twice, I couldn't let her go.

Dorothy is skittish, afraid of most men, jumps at loud noises, is tentative and ever vigilant. We don't know what she had to endure during the hurricanes of 2017, but she retains her cautiousness, insecurity, fear.

In our garden, where Dorothy and I wander during the day, I notice that she also looks for "evil". The other day, she stuck her small short snout under some plants and quickly backed away snarling, frightened. I brace myself, expecting to find a snake, one of the few hundred pets illegally brought to the island and even worse, released into the wild. But no, it was just a hermit crab. Just a cute crustacean oblivious to either Dorothy or me.

Another day, she explored a portion of the garden I couldn't reach because of the overgrown brush. I started to walk over toward her to make sure she was OK, when she came tearing up the driveway with her tail between her legs. Turned out she had gotten stung by a wasp, there were so many, it's a wonder neither of us had been stung more often. She spent the afternoon licking the spot, I of course, sympathized and could almost feel her pain.

Like Dorothy, I confront these things that could cause me harm. I peer into the dark crevices and cracks of the retaining wall that surrounds our property. I search the branches of the mango, Ginger Thomas and date palm trees in our yard. I focus on the vines wrapping their way up and around hibiscus branches. What I'm looking for, I don't know. But I expect to find an iguana, the size of King Kong, just waiting to lunge at me; a python dangling from above, ready to drop on me; a monster, never before seen or named, ready to bite, claw, and eat me whole.

But instead, I witness rainbows arching overhead. I see flowers like little paper lanterns dangling flirtatiously. I find lizards so tiny they don't make a sound or bow the leaf they have just clambered over. And lately, there are the hummingbirds, spunky speed demons that hover inches from my face questioning my existence. Some buzz past me, so close my hair flies up from the wind their whirling wings have generated.

My conscious self knows my fear is not out there, but within. I think I'm afraid of committing to this life in St. Croix. I'm afraid that this new found belief that I'll have a forever home with Peter is scary because I'm afraid I'll do something to lose it. I'm afraid I will give myself over to my writing and be disappointed with what I find. That I'll think I'll get my book published. That I'll want that and it won't happen.

But why? Why be afraid of any or all of those things? I'm enjoying the life here, the life with Peter has never been better, the writing and the idea of being read is exciting. Maybe it's time to realize the "thing that is bad" isn't really there and put the fear where it belongs, categorized as mythical, illusionary, ephemeral, unlike these hummingbirds and rainbows that I keep finding.

But then, I've lived with this monster, this evil, this fear since I was little, since I was four. And while that abandoned girl has been brought out of the crevices. She's been identified and named. She has not been banished from our garden. She lies dormant, lurking, waiting to pounce. Like the whir of the hummingbirds' wings, I must learn to see her coming before she actually appears.