Turtle Medicine

This morning when I woke my son up, I noticed his turtle was dusty.

A couple years ago I gave him a hand-sized, carved laboradorite turtle. It was cute—he didn’t have spectacular color as laboradorite goes, but he was very sweetly carved, and my son likes turtles … in the right light he does have what look like dark blue lights in his shell.


I rinsed it off and cleared the turtle’s energy with my Clearing essence, and later sat down with it for a little meditation. I’ve always liked turtles myself, and wanted to get to know this one a little bit. I’ve never worked much with carved stones (other than spheres), so I was looking forward to my meditation.


I started out by channeling a little more Clearing into it, before switching to Love/Healing. The energy just poured through the turtle, it became saturated and then just exuded it powerfully. Interestingly, as soon as this happened, I was drawn in my mind's eye into a beautiful nature scene ... as the turtle. I was swimming around underwater, looking at the legs and bodies. I recognized just where I was, too—it was this freshwater pond on Cape Cod I was familiar with. I’d been camping way out near North Truro with friends, and one day we’d found this sweet spot to play and hang out for a change from the beach.

There were maybe only 10 other people there, at various places in and out of the water when we arrived. We went right in the water, enjoying the cool respite from the heat. After a little while there seemed to be a bit of a commotion amongst the swimmers. I heard the word “turtle,” and we all started watching the water. A man in the water started talking. He was a local, turns out, and knew this turtle rather well, it seemed. “He’s a snapping turtle,” he warned us, “but he likes being social.”
“What?” he was questioned.
“Well, his nest is over there,” and he pointed across the pond. “And his feeding grounds are over there,” pointing to a spot over to the right. “He has no reason to come over here, except for the people. And, he does!”

About this time the turtle came over near me. He wasn’t small—his shell was probably 12” in diameter or larger. I was fascinated. And the man was right, this turtle just swam around us for at least 45 minutes, checking things out. I watched him off and on as he swam about saying hi to folks in the water … he wasn’t aggressive at all, just curious, it seemed. At some point he came back to me. I wanted to commune with him up close, and without thinking, I put my hand in the water in front of him. I just opened up my energy to this little creature.

The next thing I knew, he had grabbed my pinky finger with his mouth. He didn’t bite it! He just held it, gently. It was crazy. I couldn’t believe it, but it didn’t occur to me to be scared either, I was just excited at this connection. I didn’t move for a minute or so, just let him hold my finger and I beamed angelic energies to him … then I said to my friend, “Look!” and I lifted my hand a little out of the water. The little guy held on, and came up out of the water hanging from my hand while my friend looked in astonishment.


He was heavy on my finger, so I put my hand back down, and gently held his jaws with my other hand and took my finger out of his mouth. I channeled him a little Love energy and said goodbye. Off he went.


The local guy looked at me as if I had 3 heads. “You know,” the man said, “He could have taken your finger right off—I usually warn people to not put their fingers in the water when he’s around.” I must have looked at him rather blankly, because he said it again—“They’re called Snapping Turtles because they can really take off a finger. You were really lucky.” It just hadn’t occurred to me—I was in a totally different head space, thinking how cool it was that I was holding hands, sort of, with a turtle. Turtle energy is awesome. That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it!