Snakes used to make me freak out.

I thought they were vicious agressive creatures waiting for me to fall asleep and bite me in my own bed.

It makes zero sense when you confront this to reality, but fears aren’t here to make sense.

When I arrived in Bali, I heard of a crazy called Rex Sumner, who has an obsession for snakes (besides being a great story teller and a wise man).

Everybody knows him as the person to call in case of a snake issue.

As I consumed his content on social media and read more about snakes, and how he loves them, I went from phobic to curious (yet still scared).

Fast forward to last week.

We started to find a few baby snakes passing by the beach, here on Buka Buka Island.

I sent a picture to Rex who confirmed those were reticulated pythons, non venemous and non harmful specie.

I thought, fine, let’s just those snakes pass by and live their life. After all, it’s more their home than mine anyway.

But yesterday, one of our worker catched one, and put it in a water bottle.

When I asked, another worker say he wanted to kill it, because it’s dangerous (if you ask me the most dangerous specie on the planet is only human beings, but I didn’t debate).

In Indonesia, reticulated pythons can be two things: a pet, or food.

And more often than not, it becomes food after being a pet.

In many other cases, they would just kill them.

So I told them I would keep it as a pet.

But at this point, I was still scared to even touch a snake.

After talking again to Rex, watching videos about pythons, learning a few basics, I took a leap of faith (or so it felt).

I wrapped a t-shirt around my hand, and put it in the jar where I had transferred the python, and tried to pet him.

Surprisingly, he didn’t try to bite, at all.

He seemed just shy and scared, just as I was.

When I tried to grab him, he let me.

So I took him out from the jar, and started to connect with him, looking at him wrapping his body around my arm.

This is where it happened.

The fear instantly disappeared.

I understood that it was of no interest for him to bite me.

Pythons bite when they defend themselves or when they want to eat.

I am obviously too big for him, and as the connection happened, he didn’t feel threatened.

I realized how incredibly beautiful pythons are, and felt a bit stupid for being so dramatically scared of snaked for all this time.

I find him fascinating.

The colors, the texture of the skin, the way he moves, the way he wraps his body around my arm, the way he rests his head on my arm and stays like this.

So many people find snakes disgusting, scary, and would kill one if they encounter one.

So much of this comes from lack of information and understanding.

I was there as well until yesterday.

And I am so grateful I learned how to get rid of the fear, and I am surprised by how simple it was.

We all have deep fears within ourselves that we keep inside and live with, without realizing how irrational they are.

Sometimes, it doesn’t take much to overcome them.

We just don’t take the time.