The Snake at the Door: A Meditation on thresholds, Loss, and the Quiet Ache of Becoming.
Yesterday, another Mojave green snake came to visit me.
I was out watering the courtyard garden, the water fountain was full, and the cement pathways held standing water from the hose.
When I first stepped outside, there was no snake. A few minutes later, when I wanted to dash back inside, there it was, a coiled pile of hissing energy, resting about six inches from my foot. The arrival of poisonous snakes is such an otherworldly event. They always mean something.
Original photo by B. Littleton
It’s been fifteen years since a snake like that crossed the boundary into what I’ve always thought of as my inner sanctuary. For fifteen years, the borders held, the unspoken agreement between the wild and myself remained intact. But two weeks ago, the spell broke.
The first green Mojave arrived at dawn, stretched long across the cool courtyard, contemplative as only a reptile can be. That one startled in surprise more than I did, and seemed confused I was there. But I knew what it meant. The arrival of a snake here always decries a shift. Swift. Immense. Non-negotiable.
And now, the second one. Yesterday morning. Coiled tight, head lifted, barely six inches from where my foot had been, holding its ground with quiet authority.
And so I pay attention.
In the desert, the arrival of a snake isn’t just a wildlife encounter. It’s an annunciation. A whisper from the unseen world. It’s easy to dismiss that language, that old knowing, but my bones have carried these patterns across lifetimes. I’ve learned the snake’s arrival always precedes a threshold. And thresholds never come quietly.
Three times over three years, Grandmother Kingsnake came, winding through the horse paddock, curling beneath the courtyard bench. Each time, within days, one of my horses died. The last death was three years ago.
I know the pattern: The threes. They trace themselves across my life like threads pulling tight on an ancient loom.
When I was three, my maternal grandmother died. She was my first anchor, my first love. Bedridden for a year, she let me crawl into her quilted world of books and paint and stories. It was there I learned to dream, not the kind of dreams you tell at breakfast, but the old dreams, the ones that root you to the Earth and braid you back into the Unseen.
When she left, no one explained why. I only knew the ache. The sudden, shattering quiet. I filled it with books and wild blue skies, stories spun from the wind of Faries and dragon wings. Solitude wrapped around me like a second skin.
And then came the ache’s echo. My mother, newly pregnant within two moons of the funeral. Our family carried Druidic threads, old-world animistic beliefs about death and return, about how the soul circles back when the invitation is made with love and ceremony.
When my brother was born, the house softened. Light threaded itself through the floorboards and the rafters were full of joy again. But within days of the first anniversary of my grandmother’s death, he was gone too. Crib death, they called it. But everyone in the family understood. We had broken the pattern, or maybe fulfilled it, and something ancient needed closing. In the closing lived a call for change.
We moved 1800 miles south, across a border, into the strange kaleidoscope of 1960s Southern California. A world where ancient rites were traded for Disneyland, for bleach-blond beaches and sexy sunshine. Reality and fantasy bondeded together. I learned to keep my stories to myself.
But thresholds never ask permission; they arrive like snakes.
These days, my mornings are quieter. There are five roadrunners that patrol this land, their crests sharp, their legs like ancient bones, pecking at shadows. A six-foot Grandmother Kingsnake claims her jurisdiction too, sliding silently along the perimeters, reminding me that protection doesn’t always look how we expect.
So when the Mojave appeared again, I didn’t panic. I paused. Because I’ve learned, when the snake shows up, so does the threshold.
It’s happening again. I feel it in my blood, behind my dreams, in the quiet ache that longing masquerades as loneliness carves when we’ve outgrown old skins but haven’t yet stepped fully into new ones.
Loneliness and solitude, two words we tangle up, but they live in different rooms of the psyche.
Jung taught that when we pledge obedience to the mask, when life revolves around the persona, that polished surface we show the world, we starve the deeper, hidden self. The unconscious becomes unfamiliar terrain. Slowly, the ache grows. A longing looms. We hustle harder. We attach our worth to status, success, approval. We try to fill the hollowness with performance, with overwork, with distraction.
But the void remains.
That void is the birthplace of loneliness. It isn’t just circumstantial, it’s existential. A deep, gnawing emptiness that arrives when we live divorced from the soul, when the mystery of who we really are becomes a stranger at the door.
I’ve lived there before. In the space where the ache echoes louder than the voice of the inner self. Where the mask feels safer than the rawness of becoming.
But there’s another path.
When we say yes to the Unknown, to the trembling, unlit places beyond the edges of ego, the ache reshapes itself. The void doesn’t vanish, but it evolves. Loneliness softens, alchemizes, begins to compost itself into something fertile. The space that once held hollow ache becomes wide enough to hold mystery.
The ache becomes invitation.
And with that invitation comes friendship, with the Unknown, with the soul, with the quiet rhythms of the unconscious. It’s here that solitude arrives, not as isolation, but as a steady companion. Solitude fills the spaces loneliness carved out. It invites us to inhabit our own interior life, to walk the landscapes of becoming with curiosity instead of fear.
That’s what the snake tells me. That’s what the roadrunners honored when they stayed away yesterday, giving space for the snake to stretch long in the cool water, to drink, to remind me thresholds require presence.
Change is coming. I feel it in my body the way animals feel storms brewing before the sky shifts. Prescience has returned, as she did when I was three, and when she surfaced in all the other three-year thresholds of change, deliverance and departures.
And so I watch where I step. I listen to the rustle of leaves, the hum of morning, the old language that rides on the wind. I stay present, even when I’d rather sprint back inside, slam the door, pretend nothing’s shifting.
Here’s what I know.
The thresholds that matter, the ones that change us, crack us open, reorient our lives, they rarely arrive with clarity. They come disguised as loss, uncertainty, quiet ache, or a snake sunning itself on your doorstep.
But if we meet them with reverence, if we risk saying yes to the unraveling of old skins, they carry us across to something richer than safety. They usher us into friendship with the unknown, into the rooted, soul-led quiet of true solitude.
And maybe, just maybe, the next time the snake arrives, we’ll already understand. It isn’t a warning. It’s an invitation.
by Bren Littleton
Original photo by B. Littleton
Tin Flea Press c. 2025