People have an innate fear of spiders and arachnids in general. There is even a clinical term, arachnophobia, for people who experience a paralyzing fear of spiders crawling under their bed sheets, in their closets, hiding between clothes.
In our human eyes, spiders look ugly – scary predators that weave their webs and wait patiently (weeks, even months) for the prey to stick to their web. I was never scared of them but I would also get startled when I saw a spider in my car or in the corner of my closet. I also screamed several times when I saw spiders crawling up my hands or legs in my vegetable garden. So I am definitely not immune to our primal fear of the hairy scary eight-legged creatures.
Nevertheless, I discovered over the years that I have a very close relationship with the spider kind. Sometimes, when I am lonely and under the weather, a tiny spider will drop down in front of me on its silvery thread. I remember a particularly difficult week when I saw spiders almost every single day in the most incredible places that you would never think a spider can live. Another time I would be anxious and nervous about a big event unfolding in my life and I would see albino (yes, albino!) spiders crawling on the stairs handrails or on my car’s windshield. I would often see spiders in my dreams and they were always watching me (with their alien multifaceted eyes) and I would feel calm and content after I woke up.
In some of the Native American stories, the Spider grandmother (or the Spider woman) is revered as the one that has created the humankind or the one that is weaving the fabric of life. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about people being interconnected and being in the nodes of a massive spider web. Our closest family and friends are the first degree of separation from us and sit in the neighboring nodes one thread apart, their families and friends are two threads apart from us and so on. As we live our lives and do our good (or bad) deeds, we send vibrations across the spiderweb fabric of life to our immediate neighbors and they, in turn, do so to their own immediate human nodes. And so goodness (or evil) gets transmitted through humankind from one human node in the spider web to another. This is why it is so important to stay positive as you go through your life experiences because this positive attitude (or energy) is transmitted to people around you and down across the spider web. The more people nodes vibrating with good positive energy means that more other nodes in the human spider web will pick up the positivity and spread it around.
The spiders are wise, patient and crafty creatures – next time when you see one don’t panic, they have the right to be on this Earth as much as we do. And, they are here to weave their webs and to tune us to the Universal fabric where all creatures are learning and experiencing life.
K.D.