It's Spider season

In the world, and in me.

It’s been the spider for me lately.

Maybe you noticed it in previous writings, that spiders keep coming up. Since spring arrived, they’re constantly showing up in my life.

Why not the butterfly? I wonder. There have been plenty of those too, both at home and on my walks. Just a moment ago, an orange butterfly came to my window, flapped there keeping its body suspended for a while.

Countless times, butterflies have followed me on walks, alighted right in front of my path, halting my next step. Each time I’ve paused. Am I due for another cocoon experience already? This time last year, the butterfly felt significant for me. I was undergoing a big transformative period after many months, maybe years, of feeling “stuck in the cocoon.” I feel like I’m finally out of that now, my wings no longer so fresh and damp. I’ve learned the basics of flying on these new wings, yet I’m still putting them to the test. Still learning what they’re truly capable of.

Yesterday, I even saw lots of butterflies at the beach. Right along the shore. It’s a place I often see dragonflies, but not butterflies.

Actually, why not the dragonfly? There have been tons of tiny blue ones zipping around here. In the meadow, along the forest, certainly by the shores. Always small, shiny and cobalt blue.

Some weeks ago, I was working in the garden when I heard Bastian scream MAMMAAA! I dropped my tools and went to find him. He was standing under his bedroom window. Perched on the outer ledge was an enormous golden body. A dragonfly that was at least 20 centimeters long and several centimeters thick. It’s wings so large they could have belonged to a bird, except that they were opaque and clearly insectile.

The big golden dragonfly laid there in such a restful state that we wondered if it was okay. Usually dragonflies are in movement. They are aerodynamic specialists, masters of flight, known to even eat their prey in mid-flight. This one, however, was not interested in leaving the windowsill. We stood and observed it for a while. As amazing as it was, I moved on with my day. Bastian, however, could not move on. He was transfixed. Kept calling me back to golden body. “I think it moved,” he said. And got really upset when I described it as orange. “It’s not orange,” he said. “It’s gold!”

I don’t know much about dragonflies, but a bit of research reveals that they, too, are associated with transformation. They spend most of their lives under water as nymphs. There, they molt many times, shedding old bodies and forming new ones at least 10 times, up to even 20 times, before they finally emerge into air and take flight as dragonfly. From water to air, this insect moves between worlds with incredible agility.

The thing is, that dragonfly perched itself at my son’s bedroom window. Not on the ledge of mine. It was Bastian who found the dragonfly, who could not peel himself away from it.

Why not bees then, pollinators of the planet, sustainers of everything beautiful and industrious? A colony of bees have made their home just below our back deck. All day long, they go in and out of the cracks between wooden planks. We don’t disturb them, and they don’t disturb us either. They go about their work, and we go about ours.

I know it’s not Bee. Not Butterfly either, not now. And not Dragonfly, not for me.

It’s Spider.

Dark, mysterious, complicated Spider.

A big part of me recoils. I’m afraid of spiders. I might even go as far as to say I don’t like spiders. They frighten me, and I don’t actually know why, but I’ve never appreciated their presence or their role here. When I think of spiders, some words that come to mind are darkness, creeping, tricked, entrapped.

Now they hang over me. Every time I walk outside or even look out of the window, they are there. They’ve taken up residence in our greenhouse, which I wrote about previously. I find them crawling up my arms and my bedroom walls. Around 10 pm last night, I went outside to watch the evening sky becoming the most magnificent shades of pink. When I turned to walk inside, an enormous black spider hung in the air, mere centimeters from my face. I swear it had not been there when I walked out, just a few minutes earlier. How and when had it gotten there?

I know what you’re thinking. Of course spiders are everywhere. Just like bees and butterflies, dragonflies and regular houseflies, ants and all the other insects. It’s summer for gods sake. So how do I know it’s Spider for me in this season?

It’s the feeling in my body. It’s the discomfort. The fascination too. I’ve become almost mesmerized by spiders like never before.

It’s the inability to pass by a spider. The need to stop and watch them as they weave. Watch as they wait in the middle of their webs. Watch them suddenly dart off to mend a hole in their web and then settle back into their spots, dark and patient.

It’s the relief I feel when I see a newly woven web outside of my bedroom window at night. Because it means less mosquitoes will get in to feast on our blood. When, for me, did the presence of spider begin to feel protective?

It’s the urge I have to go outside every morning too, to study their webs left behind. Their incredible patterns, shapes, strength.

It’s the awe I feel as they weather a heavy rainstorm. A few evenings ago, strong gales came off the sea and right up to our house with gusts that flattened small trees and bushes. I stood at the back door watching one spider suspended in the air. Its web vibrated forcibly yet the spider did not crawl into hiding. It endured the storm, never leaving the center of its web except to repair repeated damages.

It’s the voice in me that yells, Don’t harm them! while my partner carefully removes some big ones from our social areas. In the past, I wanted all spiders gone. I didn’t care what happened to them. Whenever I saw a spider, I shrieked and called for my partner to smash the little monster. Now I’ve become someone who pleads with him to handle them all gently.

It’s the sheer enthusiasm I felt when a colony of flying ants decided to exit our greenhouse, and on their way out, got stuck in spider webs. Thousands of ants, only a few spiders. Or so I thought. But more spiders crept out from their dark crevices. The ants put up a mighty good fight, but the spiders worked slowly, artfully. It was not a pretty sight. It was gut-churning, heart-wrenching. Yet I couldn’t pull myself away from the scene. I was in the middle of cooking dinner yet kept finding excuses to slip outside and check on things.

What is Spider trying to teach me in this season? What might it represent? 

Until a few weeks ago, I didn’t know much about the significance of spiders. And so I have turned to stories, myths and lore.

I’ve been devouring all the stories I can find, as well as the science. Unraveling the myths, following the threads, trying to wrap my head around why Spider has always evoked such fear and repulsion in me.

Louise Bourgeois created so many spiders that she earned the nickname Spider Woman in the 1940s.

It’s an ongoing process. I’ve found myself facing my fears and acknowledging a lot of misunderstandings.

I’ve also begun to embody the creative process in a totally new way. I’ve never felt more embodied, actually. Never so attuned to the monstrous in me (in us all), to the nurturance in me (in us all), to the liminalities of time and space and being, to the possibilities inherent within patterns that are already here, and have always been here.

Whatever’s been unstitched is starting to be rewoven.

Disentanglement seems to be leading back to re-entanglement.

“I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.”

– William Stratford

More on this in my next newsletter. I’m doing my best to put all of it into words now. I’ve been working on this writing for weeks, often frustrated by how words keep failing, or rather, how they keep spinning out this way and that, beyond my control.

Finally I thought I had it. I planned to send it out this morning, but then something happened yesterday. I finally cleaned the greenhouse. I’ve been avoiding it all spring and summer. In other words, I’ve been avoiding the spiders that live in there. In all of the crevices and cracks, big black and brown spiders. Their old sticky webs clumped in some corners, draping loosely in other corners. But it was time. The glass panes were too dirty to see through, and green algae was starting to spread.

In the process of cleaning, I came even closer to the spiders. I entered their homes and handled their precious sacs of eggs. And I realized, Spider isn’t done with me yet. Also, I ever really done?

As I watch spiders weave their webs each evening, I see no sign of finality, of “doneness” that we worship in our product-based, utopia-seeking culture. I, too, am always anxious to get there. To arrive somewhere or be finished with something. You know, wrap-it-up, put-a-bow-on-it done. Maybe, though, there is only the ongoing endeavor. Arriving and un-arriving, like the ocean on the shore, or the shore to the ocean. Like spiders weaving webs that are constantly done and undone. Trusting the process as they go.

At one point yesterday, I destroyed one web but led the spider to safety just outside of the greenhouse. Not even five minutes later, I moved to the outside glass panes, and that spider had already re-woven a new web. Extravagantly designed, perfectly symmetrical, floating in the air yet anchored to earth, spider balancing right in the center.

Thread by thread, a pattern is emerging.

xx

Beth