1 post tagged “nature”
SPIDER RESCUE
A personal narrative
Early dawn, I stumbled to the bathroom and found a flat, brown spider scrambling around the bottom of the sink. It wasn’t the usual oval gray, daddy-long-legs whose wispy webs wave across the ceiling, curtain rods and windowsills of my cottage. It was a hobo spider.
“Well, Miss Arachnid,” I said, watching the rhythmic tap of her limbs, “Did you fall into the sink or crawl up the drain?” Yes, I’m an eccentric who talks to spiders.
My visitor’s mouth appendages, “pedipalps,” resembled both pronged forks and pincher claws—useful tools for nibbling my flesh. But with its claw-like mouth paws, the spider is busy munching gooey green toothpaste; much like my friends eating basil-pesto pizza—heads bent, lips abutting cheese, finger tentacles shoveling in mushrooms, pepperoni and sausage.
“Do you want to go back down the drain?” I question the creature. I’m rarely this chatty at 6 a.m., but I want to help. My spider is an amputee—four legs on one side, three on the other, one limb lost perhaps in her efforts to escape the slippery basin.
“Shall I play God and send a deluge?” No answer. To avoid the croak and reincarnate option, I decide not to brush my teeth and let the spider be. I suspect life choices for arachnids differ from those for Homo sapiens. I’ve read that by the time a human being makes conscious choices about life and death, he or she has reached a transcendent or enlightened state.
I know nothing about the spiritual evolution of arachnids. A biologist friend once told me “all organisms gather information and make choices.” He hopes everything will evolve to the place of doing no harm.
Where do spiders come from, I wonder? A mythology book told me that long ago, a Greek woman named Arachne challenged the Goddess Athena to a weaving contest. The goddess dealt with the dare by turning the woman into a spider, and since then there’s been a
worldwide escalation of the eight-legged weavers. Although spiders live everywhere, my slice of the Oregon rainforest is prime habitat.
By eight o’clock I really needed to brush my teeth. However, the spider still crawled about in the sink. “OK, Miss, this is your relocation phase.” I scoffed at myself for the time I spend rescuing spiders, worms, snails and slugs. Do I have some neurotic save-the-critters compulsion? Where, I wonder on the Karpmann triangle of victim-rescuer-perpetrator does human-insect intervention play out?
From past experience, I knew that this spider could return from its lair and bite me in my sleep. I’ve also learned that by asking nature for guidance, a co-creative safety is offered to me and to the creature in question.
In the kitchen I grabbed a glass and an index card—my bug trapping equipment. Back at the bathroom sink, I cupped the glass around the spider and slid the card underneath, allowing time for the critter to scramble onto the flat surface. One shaky move from me and the arachnid could bite. Its mouth-claws appeared eager. Finally, I raced the captured creature to the door. Outside, on the porch, I tipped the glass and Miss Arachnid slid into the hydrangeas.
“Where will you go?” I asked. “To a new home? A new mate? Or will you return, called back by instinctual longing to lollygag in the bottom of my sink?” Spiders rarely give up their habitat.
Driving to work I wondered if I had left the spider in the sink, would it have acquired new climbing skills? Would its survival need, over evolutionary time, have helped the species of arachnids develop suction cups on their feet, like spider man, thus enabling future spiders to leap out of slippery sinks?
Had this spider been caught in the web of my life, I wondered, or were we both part of a universal network, what Gregg Braden calls the “Divine Matrix.” Friends think I spend too
much time thinking about such things and that I should worry instead about global warming or the war in Iraq. But I believe the microcosm affects the macrocosm. When we offer compassion on a small scale, ripples of kindness flow out to the larger world.
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shinan.barclay [at] gmail dot come
