Spiders Pt. 2: A Brief Update
Photo by .curt., Flickr
Since I received such a tremendous response to my Spiders post I wanted to write a little follow up as to how things are evolving over here between the spiders and me. During the last couple weeks I’ve been moving from resistance to acceptance with these little eight-legged dudes. I am finding myself just watching them and leaving them be, rather than vacuuming them in a rage.
Last night was a turning point. I was gone for most of the day and when I got home at night and I opened the door to my place and turned the lights on, I immediately saw a repugnant slithering centipede go scurrying away in an attempt to hide. But his efforts were thwarted. He got caught in a spider web and he went from sixty to zero in an instant, frozen in place by the web that had been spun while I was out. The spider that was hanging out there didn’t move. It wasn’t time for his midnight snack yet. But perhaps he just giggled to himself and thought, JACKPOT! Because a centipede is much meatier and larger than his standard bug fare. In the morning, both the centipede, the spider, and the web were gone.
And so, in witnessing this insect drama play out, suddenly the spider had switched roles from bad guy to good guy. Because on the scale of bug repulsion, centipedes trump spiders any day. And suddenly, the spiders had become useful to me. I understood their benefit. I saw them for the first time not through fear and loathing, but in a more objective, whole form way. Their role in the ecosystem made sense to me.
This reminds me of a quote I just read:
What is a bad thing anyway? A bad thing is something that is different than what I want. Who gets to decide what the bad thing is? Jerry and Esther watched the mother bird lay her eggs in the nest, and then the neighbor’s cat ate the baby bird. Esther said “bad cat!” And the cat said, “good bird!”
— Abraham
Is your illness a bad thing or a good thing? Maybe it’s different than what you wanted. But if we look at it outside the lens of our fear, could it be what we needed? Or at the very least, could it be something we could benefit from in some way? Could it be our calling to live, I mean really, really live?
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