If you don’t like spiders, you might want to skip today’s post.
And tomorrow’s. Tomorrow’s will feature a stunning work of wearable art, though.
It’s been raining off and on for three days now, and the forecast promises more of the same for the whole of this week. It’s a powerful gift, the water from the sky, and it’s summoning all sorts of summer spirits to the surface now.
Spiders among them.
We make their kind welcome here. In our peoples’ many traditions across this land, Spider holds many identities and performs many roles. In some, it’s an essentially masculine spirit; in many others, distinctly feminine; in still others, gender binaries seem irrelevant, and indeed, most probably are. After all, in many of cultures, human gender is rightly recognized as far greater and more complex than any binary; there is no reason why our spirits should not hold to the same great sense of possibility. To Wings, her presence has always been connected to notions of prosperity and abundance.
In some traditions, she is a gatekeeper or sorts: of dreams, of roads, of ways and paths to worlds beyond our own. It is how I choose to regard her presence; I have always felt that guardians and guides of visionary paths are themselves markers of spiritual abundance. And she gives us so much more in practical terms, as well.
There are, of course, Spider’s well-known habit of capturing flies. At this time of year, especially with the return of both high heat and monsoonal patterns of a sort, that’s an especially welcome trait — and, in point of fact, the flies have not been quite so bad this year as they were over the last several summers.
But there’s another gift that some of her kind provide, particularly those of the sort shown above: the gift of beauty.
Have you ever seen an orb weaver’s web after the storm, with the setting sun illuminating the raindrops caught on its filament strands?
It’s one of those moments that takes your breath away — like a portal, offering a glimpse into other worlds, or a waking moment of dreaming beauty.
The orb weavers mostly show themselves here in fall, taking up residence in the corners beneath the upstairs deck, small spaces of safety out of reach of most predators. At that time of year, it’s vanishingly rare to get rain, which makes the appearance of waterdrops on their webs all the more beautiful, but we do occasionally see snow, and fairly often an early frost. These are remarkably hardy spirits, and they withstand the weather well until the temperatures lunges consistently below the freezing mark.
The image of Grandmother Spider above, though, was taken after full dark as winter was closing in. Wings shot the photo in the tiny enclosure he had built around the steps outside the ancient RV we occupied for eight winters: small, cramped, that corner also shielded by the piñon and juniper trees that had grown up against the plastic shell. She had spun one of the extraordinary geometric webs common to her kind, and sat there comfortably, waiting. She seemed to sense that we were no threat, occasionally dropping down her web as though to peer at us more closely. And on that cold and crystal-clear night, the light picked up every strand of hair on her fully articulated legs and her body, all the subtly muted stripes that gave her her golden glow.
She was beautiful.
For now, we are largely limited to ordinary house spiders, the occasional jumping spider, the odd black widow. Climate change has seen their numbers reduced, too, so every visitation is a welcome one; they help keep the flies and our newly-omnipresent mosquitoes under control.
But they, too, are capable of spinning the sacred geometry of the spider’s web. Perhaps they are indeed heralds of protection, of prosperity in more tangible forms, too. But if they are simply guardians and guides to dreaming beauty, that would be enough.
~ Aji
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