Tag Archives: spider

So a spider walks onto a train…

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I had to go to Sydney today for a meeting. It’s tedious, especially when you take into account the three hours’ train travel either way. Especially when that six hours’ travel (for a three-and-a-half hour meeting) comes after a mere four hours’ sleep.

Really, there are times when having PTSD truly sucks.

Anyway, I was lucky enough to fall asleep on the train on the way down to Sydney. I think I slept for much of the journey. I certainly slept through much of Bach’s Goldberg Variations which was playing on my iPod. I woke in confusion, to find different people around me, different scenery out the window, and a thumping fear in the pit of my stomach that I’d somehow missed my stop (at which the train was scheduled to terminate; missing it was therefore highly unlikely) and would end up being late to my meeting. Once I’d woken sufficiently to pull myself together, and realised that I was still about half-an-hour from my destination, I noticed something else: a movement, a piece of fluff hanging by a thread from my hand.

I reached up to brush it carelessly away when I registered that the fluff seemed to be moving upwards, at a slow but determined pace, towards my hand. Fluff doesn’t normally behave like this, so I looked closer – only to find a tiny greenish spider calmly abseiling up a single thread of cobweb connected to the side of my finger.

I quite like spiders, so I had a closer look, and the best word I can use to describe it (especially after four hours’ sleep; I’m not particularly eloquent when in a state of sleep-deprivation) is pretty. This small arachnid was pretty. A light greenish colour, but with a yellow streak down the centre of an abdomen so small that it could have sat quite comfortably on the lid of my pen. Legs a mere hair’s-bredth, each one moving in its own small delicate arabesque as the tiny creature pulled itself gracefully up the cobweb to the sanctuary of my hand.

I let it wander around my hands for a while, passing from finger to finger, navigating its way through the fine hairs on my wrist, tickling the skin on the back of my hand. Then it decided that there was nothing more to see on these human hands, and – I’ve never actually seen a spider to this – simply bungee-jumped from the edge of one finger and onto the seat’s armrest. In the moment in which my attention was caught by something else, the minuscule soul had gone.

I don’t know what a tropical spider (as far as I have been able to work out, it was a green jumping spider – so pretty) was doing on an inter-city train. All I know is that in my fatigue, my grumbles (I hate travelling to Sydney at the best of times; in an incredibly demanding time and with a to-do list the size of a short novel, I was even less enamoured with the idea of taking a day out of my real job to attend a pointless meeting), the speck of a creature, this little piece of delicacy, this tiny fragile soul, made me smile. It made me give thanks, just briefly, for the myriad beauty of a creation that surprises me every day I remember to open my mind and heart to its wonders.

And for that I am grateful.

The small wisdom of arachnids.

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It’s a small life,
sitting on the bathroom wall,
but the spider loves it.
To him his life is worth
a great deal.
So when someone tries to kill him
he scurries
to preserve it.
Mindless spider fear:
how like human fear
it is.

 

One of the things I’ve been questioning recently is the value of who I am. My worth. My worth as a friend; as a daughter; as a chorister. As a social worker. As a writer. As a person.

My friends seem to think I have value. Those I love and who love me seem to think I’m worth something. Sometimes I wish I could see myself through their eyes. But I can’t so I have to trust them, and try to work it out for myself.  Slowly, I’m starting to come around to their point of view.

Because just as the spider scurries to preserve its life, so I struggled to preserve mine. I kept myself as safe as I could. I stayed safe, and I stayed alive. I chose life: I took my safety and my future into my own hands and I escaped. I faced that danger and I took my freedom.

So my small life is worth something to me, just as the spider’s small life is worth something to him. And my life is worth something to others: the fish and the three guinea pigs who rely on me for their daily sustenance; the cat currently stretched to her full length across my sitting room floor, who relies on me for cuddles and company and an occasional session of the String Game. People too: people who take the skills I offer; people who value my friendship, and who offer me the immeasurable gift of theirs.

I know that my life must be worth something to me, because I fought to keep it. Now I get to live the fact that I must have value to the world.

Mundane perfection.

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This evening my twenty-five-ish-minute walk home from work took closer to forty minutes. The reason for this was simple, small and fascinating: I stopped to watch a small furry spider construct a web.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to see all of it. He’d already started by the time I arrived, and he had the main structure already going. But I watched him walk down the web’s main supportive threads, reeling out a spool of cobweb behind him, stretching out his web from the centre point. Some spokes of the web he doubled up; others he left as single strands, presumably following some inner engineering logic of his own. Then, once he had created the spokes, the structure, he returned to the middle of the web. Carefully, delicately, he travelled in ever-extending circles out from the middle, filling in the triangles between the spokes with roughly parallel threads. He did that about six times, then he moved from the middle right to the outer edge and did the same thing, working his way towards the middle. Again, some threads were double-strength; others he left as single fragile strands. When he had finished he stopped for a well-earned rest right in the centre of his brand sparkly new web.

I stood, transfixed, watching this tiny creature’s mundane act of creation. Spider webs are things of beauty, and to watch one reeled out into being right in front of me was a blessing. Like watching prayer, or poetry, or music. Tomorrow this hard-working little spider might catch a fly with his web. He will be safe there, until wind blows or a thoughtless bird plunges through it or it starts to rain, or until for some reason he decides he needs to move on. But today I got to watch gentle perfection being created in a hedge on an industrial street in an everyday city.

Although in hindsight I would have looked pretty strange to a passer-by, standing and staring with fixed intensity into a hedge. Right now, I’m kind of hope that no one I know drove past…