It is the season of small spirits.
The insect world is slowly coming to life again, along with their cousins of myriad other classes. Most of the local spiders have yet to make their presence known, but two black widows have already taken up residence here, spinning webs in warm spaces of solitude, corners protected from the elements and from predators of a more deliberate sort.
We let them be, and they return the favor.
in actuality, they do us far more favors than merely ignoring our outsized presence: They keep our lives from being overrun by pests that, while benign themselves, carry all manner of pestilential baggage. And they are beautiful, in their way, particularly in the case of the black widow — glossy jet in color, perfectly symmetrical, a tiny marvel of evolution’s engineering.
There are other reasons to respect her, too, of course. For many of our peoples, Spider plays a significant role in the old stories, from origins and cosmologies to trickster lessons to healing and medicine to guidance for daily living and beyond. In some traditions, it is spider who sits at the threshold of other worlds, whether the one of dreams or the one that lies beyond the door we so casually call death.
That’s a lot of power for such a diminutive being.
It is easy, at times, to feel weak and ineffectual, as though we have no power of our own, no control over our world and our lives. To some degree, there is truth to that, of course, but it’s true for everyone; there will always be circumstances beyond our control, will always be powers greater than our own, no matter how much we mortals delude ourselves into thinking that we can harness every force at will to serve our own ends. Perhaps the most consistent hallmark of the human condition is hubris, but out of the humbling that inevitably follows comes information, knowledge, occasionally even wisdom.
It is, as always, a question of perspective, and of balance.
Grandmother Spider knows those questions intimately, and knows the answers, too; she lives them out daily in her own life. Eight legs to keep her grounded to her own plane of existence, even when it wavers like a high wire and holds her aloft in defiance of the laws of gravity. A self-spun home with all the symmetry of a silken snowflake, and its fragility, too, and yet it serves her better than well.
Spirit has given her specific gifts: talents, skills, abilities, powers — call them what you will. The fact remains that, despite her small stature, a size that makes her vulnerable to predation and to dangers both deliberate and utterly random, she wastes no apparent time in worrying over it. Instead, she turns her attention to those powers that are uniquely hers, and uses them to construct entire worlds: her own, and one for the many future generations for whom she will be matriarch.
We could do worse than to follow her lead.
I have found myself, in recent weeks, feeling completely overwhelmed — by the larger world, and by individual circumstance. The human instinct for resistance seems to manifest not so much in any sort of revolutionary opposition, but rather, in the form of resistance that is denial, a refusal to accept the reality of the world as it is. It is easy to feel small, to write off one’s own power as insignificant and impotent. It is also easy to search for a savior.
Much harder to do the work of one’s own part, day to day, minute to minute.
One need not accept the current reality’s inevitability as a permanent condition, but there is and can be no improvement without first changing what is. And that requires a clear-eyed and comprehensive understanding of the world as it is and how it arrived at this juncture. There are fundamental truths embedded in the seemingly careless and castoff locutions of “pipe dreams” and “castles in the air.”
For this week, my plan is to try and heed the lessons of Grandmother Spider. I will fail, of course; such is the human condition, to fail more than we succeed, particularly at that which is aspirational. But for this week, I plan to try to put my head down and do my work with such small powers as have been granted to me.
In the larger world, I am a small spirit, too, but that does not excuse me from my own responsibility to do my part in the work of making that world what it should be.
It is, after all, a season of small spirits.
~ Aji
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