The Webs We Weave, by Molly Remer

Each year, as fall peeks around the door tasting the air and sending cool tendrils of change slipping across the horizon and skimming across our shoulders, I feel clarity descend, a sharp and sudden certainty that I do know exactly what I want to do and where I want to focus. 

In early September, we watched an orb weaver spider make her web by our studio. Much faster than we might have imagined, she tumbled gracefully through almost empty space, connecting long strands from porch gutter to hydrangea bush, returning to the center often to stabilize before launching into the next direction. The sun was setting and we stayed captivated by her dedicated intention, moving next around the middle and expanding from the center rapidly connecting her many threads. Finally, we walked on the road, watching the sunset illuminating the bluestem grasses in the field as the nighthawks darted bat-like above our heads on their annual migration. We returned to the web at dusk surprised to see how much finer the structure had become, each strand now laid very close to the one above it in a radiating circle. As we watched, I felt a sense of liberation chiming in my bones, freedom that comes from knowing with firm and dedicated awareness which way to go, trusting the threads of my own life to hold me as I make my way with both purpose and grace.

In early October, an orb weaver spider built a web across the sliding glass door to our bedroom. “Eyes on big prey,” we laugh as we go out the side door instead leaving her there in the center, waiting. I look at her at night when I close the curtains, thin strands illuminated by the golden moon. After a few days, when I open the curtains one morning, the spider is gone, the web a bit bedraggled. I slide the door open for the first time in a week and start to detach it wondering what happened. Then I spot her, crumpled into a small, dry ball barely hanging from one rim of the door frame. I don’t know how long spiders live, but I guess her life has finished already and I feel a pang, just yesterday I watched her wait, and now this small brown husk.  I call my husband to look and he blows a gentle breath on the spider who improbably extends her long limbs and reanimates, not dead but cold on this fast chilling October morning. “Now I’m sorry I wrecked your house,” I say, sticky fibers still clinging to my fingers. “It’s okay,” my husband reassures, “we do need to be able to use our door again and we can’t really change our whole lives for a spider.” As I sit on the swing with my prayerbook and pen I think: but we did change them for her and it was okay. I think of the countless small ways in which we cooperate with the other beings who share our home ground.I choose my prayer card for the day and smile to see the message:

Watch carefully. 
Remember to laugh. 
Sit in the center 
as often as possible. 
Feel how it all spins.

Indeed. 

I do. 

Next, I choose my rune of the day and this time I laugh out loud to see the Wheel, the web of life, the symbol that can only be inked with evenness if you are willing to start in the center and move outward. Life is like this. Webs are like this. May we be places of refuge for one another, big and small, two legs or eight. May we sometimes accept minor inconvenience to ease another’s way, our lives interwoven with countless, nameless other lives. I pause thinking and draw a coloring card for today. “I am grateful for spiders,” it says and I laugh again surrounded by such a delightful web of connection and magic. 

October continues to unfurl and we continue to watch the spider, ducking under the web to reach our porch. I look up facts about orb weaving spider, learning they will live for two years and sometimes longer. I read that they don’t get “cold,” but they do enter a period of stillness and dormancy when the temperature drops. I read that they don’t sleep, but they do have a period of quiet, motionlessness each day. These things make me chuckle a bit at human hubris and our insistence at distancing ourselves from other species. What is dormancy during winter if not “cold”? What is a daily time of motionlessness if not “sleep?” I wonder why we are so quick to refuse to see commonalities between our lives and the many small lives that surround our own.

In early November, I found a tiny snake on the bedroom carpet while I was doing yoga. When my husband was releasing it outside, he accidentally put his head through the spider web. We have been sharing space with this spider for more than a month now. Never in more than forty years of living have I had the opportunity to observe the life and behavior of a spider so closely for such a sustained time. I feel like I am living next to an aquarium or a zoo, somewhere where I can press my nose against the glass each day and observe how another being spends its days. She does not behave as we thought spiders did, spending long silent hours crunched into a tiny brown ball and then suddenly reanimating and reweaving her graceful silver web in the night when we’re not looking. We peek at her in the darkness, our bedroom lights shining on her slender legs and shiny eyes. We watch her clean her legs and even can see her jaws open as she grooms herself.

As November continued to unfold, I was looking for a book and found a black covered journal from more than ten years ago. Sometimes I feel brand new, as if I’ve settled and softened, just the right shape for my own life. Reading my old words in colored pencil from more than a decade past and looking at my small sketches: a woman curled inside a uterus inside a tree, I marvel at how I have been feeling my way through this life for years, listening and trusting, listening some more, trying again, beginning again, yearning toward a nameless wholeness that I am fortunate enough to know when I call my spirit back and inhabit my own life, when I step back in over and over again. Self-discovery is a slow process of unfolding, of forgetting and remembering, of listening and choosing, of starting over and finding you are in the same place you wanted to be. 

Several summers ago, I knelt by creamy white pokeberry flowers each forming a small cup that will tenderly cradle a poisonous blue-black berry by August. I was charmed to see a delicate web woven there, a tiny, nearly transparent spider in the center in a poignant representation of interconnection. Suddenly, the goddess figurine I had set by the blooms tipped and fell, caught only by a single poke leaf and teetering suspended over thorny ground. The movement of the leaf tore the web and I felt a pang of shock to witness such an easy destruction of harmony. But, as I watch, in the space of one shaking breath, the tiny spider, translucent and alone, gathers one shining thread and slowly, gracefully, without hesitation, begins rebuilding what is damaged.

Now, it is December. The spider remains above our doorway, increasingly still. She has made a tinier little ball of web in which she hangs. Sometimes she rebuilds the larger web, stringing it from door frame to wall in the silence of the night. Today it is cold and dreary, the morning shrouded and gray, much needed rain pattering slowly onto the thirsty ground. I feel clouded and stilled too, face drawn and shoulders tight, conflicted between producing and performing and resting and renewing as I always am as December dawns. I am thinking about all that conspires to fragment and destroy, the many forces that attempt to co-opt our time and power, our energy and attention, that silence our voices and our creativity, and encourage us to numb and consume. We become dangerous when we resist the fragmentation, the occupation and co-optation of our minds and hearts, the things that hijack our attention and our time. We become dangerous when we slip out of these bonds, through the spider webs and into the rain, faces tilted up to a gray sky, hands against our hearts, the slow and quiet whispers of a new song drifting to us across the chilly winds of change.