Shedding Skin

I’ve been thinking a lot about our recent visitor, the Beluga whale. (See blog entry April 13.)

When speculating why a whale would venture into the Delaware River, one expert said freshwater—while not the normal habitat of Beluga whales—can help them shed their skin.

Shedding one’s skin. Hmmm. I don’t know about you, but that’s a concept that resonates with me.

Personally, I think the way reptiles and sea mammals do it seems so much more dramatic and appealing than our human process—one dead cell at a time.

On a soul-searching sojourn to Sedona last summer, I was sitting among the red rocks meditating when I noticed a cute little lizard beside me. While these little creatures are a dime a dozen out there, this one caught my attention because it was dragging behind it, attached only by its tail, its complete outer skin. Ready to be shed.

The first step to shedding one’s skin probably has a lot with accepting that a lot of what we are still carrying around with us we outgrew long ago.

That lizard knew he was carrying around a shell of himself. He turned around to see, his little head darting this way and that. I watched as he found a rock sharp enough and scratched, rubbing, rubbing, rubbing his tail until he was a little further along in the process.

The second step, I’m thinking, has a lot to do with figuring out why we want to do the shedding in the first place.

In my own life, when seeking to make changes, I often focus on what I want to become as if it’s “out there”—just beyond my grasp. Time and time again, however, I am reminded that everything I seek, I already am. Everything we want, we have within.

If that Beluga whale really traveled up river in pursuit of shedding his skin, he must have known that making a bit more space for the new version of him would be worth it, in spite of the risks he faced along the way.

Perhaps the third step is something the Beluga whale also knew—that shedding one’s skin requires getting out of our comfort zones, taking some risks, swimming against the current, and being willing to step away from the way everyone else is doing it, if only for a while.