The Year of the Snail

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It’s been a while since I’ve submitted anything to the site where I can say my writing journey began. The last article I wrote was posted on June 24, 2022. During the interim, life has come and gone as it usually does and I can honestly say that I haven’t done much writing. It’s been tough to get back into the swing of it. Work has been busy, new projects have arisen, I went through a move in August and I’m now even planning a wedding! So it’s been tough to find the time to sit down at my desk and type out my thoughts, much less organize them into anything semi-intelligible and worth reading.

But there’s still just so much more that I want to write! I’ve got ideas and opened files for chapters that might someday become the sequel to my first book. I’ve got a story board all laid out for a little fictional story taking place right here in Venice Beach. I even spent half the summer taking an online class and trying my hand at world building in the hopes that I could create some sort of fantasy world to rival that of Tolkien or George R.R. Martin. There are tons of open files on my laptop, and no work is near completion.

Lucky for me at the time of this writing, the new year is fast approaching. It’s an absolutely perfect time to get organized and prioritized and set the stage for this to be the year of the completed project. After all, it was this very time in December of 2019 that I resolved to utilize 2020 to write my book, and by 2021, it was published. Why not go back to the old well and make the same pact with myself to get it all done again? I’ve got my goal written objectively in my little leather-bound journal where only the most sacred and important of ideas will go.

The second the ink hit the paper, I could tell just how special this was going to be.

It’s all about intention and calling in what you want. Dream big and the Universe will answer you! Energy attracts like energy and it’s time to take the next big step and level up. I’m feeling wired and inspired so I reach for my cosmic creatures animal oracle deck. I hold the deck close to my heart, imbibing it with all that is me as barely a whisper. I ask the question, “What creature should I embody as I step into my goals for the new year?” I shuffle the deck some more, blindly feeling but knowingly seeing the magic of the deck until I’ve got a card that is so clearly calling to me that it couldn’t possibly be any other card in the deck. I cast the rest aside, turn the card over and………..…..

The Snail.

Womp. Womp.

But hey, let’s explore this cosmic slap in the face from the Universe to yours truly.

Typically when I turn to my deck, I’m looking for a slightly cooler animal to align my goals with. For example, prior to heading out for a night with my partner, we pulled a card together to see how the night would go and wound up pulling the mythical Phoenix. It was perfect! We’ve been gearing up for a dry January run that will stretch out further this year into February and March. I’ve always done dry January as a self reflection tool, but this will be a push forward together as a means of connecting and exploring our present and future together.

That being said, the lead up to January through the holidays can get a little, well, unhinged. There are a lot of holiday parties and a lot of free time and a lot of cocktails and a lot of desserts and a lot of a lot of things I guess you could say. So to pull the Phoenix before one of our last nights out feels so aligned that it paints a picture all by itself. Two beautiful magical creatures flying out into the night sky, hearts on fire and wings outstretched to burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night sky and explode into a million tiny freckles of light only to come back down to earth and re-emerge from the ashes stronger, faster and better in the new year.

Admittedly the ‘burn burn burn’ line is Kerouac’s, not mine, but you can see how it’s easy to get psyched about pulling the Phoenix card. It’s a little bit harder with the Snail.

Snails live about ten years in the wild, and can go about twenty-five if in a terrarium, depending on the species. Nothing too special about that. It’s not a long life, but it’s not so short to be considered fleeting. In cartoons, snails are typically depicted as living inside of their shell, but a quick little trip to Wikipedia will tell you that the shell is actually an exoskeleton so it’s more like armor than a home. If we’re reaching for metaphors, I guess we could say that as we get older, home becomes more of an idea that we take with us than a physical place where we live. Not a bad connection, but I wouldn’t call it my best work. So rather than reaching for something deeper, let’s just stay at the surface. The first thing that I think of when I think of the humble snail is that it is slow and that it is boring.

And that’s it right there.

New Year's Resolutions are like the holidays themselves, bright and shiny. We dip into some self-indulgence at the end of the year and then set great plans to turn it all around once the calendar restarts. Seldom are resolutions as common as I’d like to eat better or be kinder. Those ideas aren’t sexy or challenging like running a marathon or making a million dollars. In reality they are a bit more snail-like. The humble snail can’t see all the shiny things across the sidewalk that it’s taken a great risk to cross. It can only see a little bit of space directly in front of it. If it were to get sidetracked, even a little bit and only for a second, it would never achieve its goal. So it has to stay focused on that little bit of ground that is directly in front of it. And the snail doesn’t leave great battlefields or works or conquered foes behind it in its wake. It just leaves this little trail of slime, perhaps its own version of sweat, behind it as it goes.

There are always going to be times when we need to be a Lion. Times where the fight or the hunt is right there in front of us and we need to be ready for the moment where we pounce with all of our might and make the kill. But lions also spend a lot of time just sort of lounging about. I’ve seen more clips of lions yawning on a rock, lazily swatting flies away with their tails than I have seen them running and chasing and killing. 

You can have a Lion approach tomorrow. It could be a workout or a beastly day of writing, a gut cleanse in which you don’t eat solid food, or a silent day of meditation. All of those require Lion energy, but will undoubtedly require lion rest the day after. But the snail is tireless. He sticks to the here and now and just keeps going each and every day.

What can we all do today that takes Snail energy?

Something that is so doable right here right now. Something that is so doable that we do it once, and then we do it again. And again. And again. We do it so many times that nobody seems to notice we are doing it because it just seems to be the norm for us. It doesn’t exhaust us because it is within our day-to-day abilities. Sure it’s not as sexy as burning up like a phoenix or hunting prey like a lion, but since the Universe dropped that slimy Snail card into my lap, I’ve been sitting with something. Whenever I see a snail on the path, he doesn’t seem to be moving at all, but he’s never there when I get back. At most I might just see a slimy little trail of the work that needed to get done. Maybe this year it’s time to ditch the shiny for the slimy.

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