Spider

When hurt, frustrated, or sad, it’s easy to resort to spider stratagems, spinning webs of fantasy to make things right, to settle the score.

With the spider’s roving eyes, we discern shades of darkness and feel our way around our victims. Our pincher-fangs stun and immobilize them deeper within sticky webs fastened to our sense of truth. And like the spider’s quick retreat on a silky thread, we can deny our involvement in a nanosecond, unaware of its drain upon our energies. It’s easy to stay stuck in this bondage.

Yet willing to dialog with our inner spider, as old as humankind, affords a way out of this impasse. Its dark energy loses its grip on our psyches. It becomes stale, useless, absurd.

Just as spiders are known for eating nuisance fleas and insects, we can engage their skills to expunge our dark stuff and restore us into the sunshine world.

Indeed, other cultures, wiser than ours, have honored these eight-legged trapeze artists, etched in stone, embossed upon coins and seals, woven into blankets, and designed on pottery.

We, too, do well to honor them.