Spider Women
SPIDER WOMEN
It’s those quiet moments in the garden, when there’s no other human but just you and the outside world, where our greatest gifts and shifts occur.
Spring time for me is that special time of the year when I so look forward to just touching the sweet scented cold soil, swirling it around with the tips of my cold fingers … just because.
It’s simply too early to plant. Too early to uncover the beds, but just being there with all the early spring scents to just relish in our dynamic relationship with all garden beings. One never knows what experience lays ahead.
Well, this one happened to me some years ago when I was doing my usual early spring garden stroll through the shaded protected beds, taking notice of who might be sending up its first spring shoots so that I could be the first to say hello.
Sitting down on the stone wall that my friend Yemana and I built, to get a closer look at the wild ginger patch and you know, to just touch and swirl the soil around. No words are necessary here, I just surrender my wants and needs to the needs of the Nature outside of me.
As I sat on this cold damp stone wall, I touched the leaves that covered the soil and began moving them aside to see who I might find under its cover. Slowly and methodically I gently moved the leaves and maybe a little too quickly too, as before the next stroke of my hand, I stopped because my eye caught the movement of a tiny rolling white spider egg which belonged to a garden Wolf Spider. And there she, spider, went, scurrying in the other direction, surely wanting to save herself from my clumsy freezing hand. But then, she stopped. Turned around and looked right at me!!! She said to me ‘give me my egg’ or maybe she said ‘that’s my family there’ or maybe even, ‘I need my egg’. Whatever she said, I knew that she wanted her egg.
She looked at me, then at her egg and then back at me again. Yep, she wanted her egg.
Okay well I did not doubt any of what I heard, felt, saw. So I followed her requests. Did what she had asked and here’s how it all unfolded. I slowly moved my hand over to her egg to carefully pick up its delicate white casing. Holding it carefully between my thumb and fore finger, I slowly moved my hand towards her. Stopping a moment to show her that I had her egg between my fingers. I did this first from a long distance from her so that she could see what it was that I was doing, and then I got a little closer and showed her again. She then walked a little closer to me. Oh my goodness I thought. She understands. Darn it. So I advanced my hand a little closer to her. She advanced her body a little closer to me. Gradually we both got closer and closer.
As my giant hand approached her tiny body I rested it on top of the soil so that it would be right at her level. Still my fingers were carefully holding her egg. Cautiously she came up to my two fingers that were holding on to her egg.
She reached up.
Clamped on to her egg with her front legs.
I did not put it down on the ground.
I actually gave her, her egg!
She let me hand her, her egg !
Spider picked up her egg right out from my fingers.
She then scurried away.
My life changed forever, from that moment in time with a light stricken sonic boom went my senses, to the farthest east and west, and my crown center opened to the heavens and my feet were grounded in every earthly sense. We shared that white egg for one flash of a second. My pink flesh to her hairy pedipalps (her two front legs). Is this love? This is love.
We both followed and trusted our feminine instincts – mother to mother. Creator to creator. This was about us knowing our place in the garden. We are from the same mold, some where’s in our distant connections. Mothers. Both givers of life, dynamic forces in deep mutual relationship.