Web Weaving

Every intention, interaction, motivation, every colour, every body, every action and reaction, every piece of physical reality and the thoughts that it engendered, every connection made, every nuanced moment of history and potentiality, every toothache and flagstone, every emotion and birth and banknote, every possible thing ever is woven into that limitless, sprawling web. It is without beginning or end. It is complex to a degree that humbles the mind. It is a work of such beauty that my soul wept…
~China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

Once upon a time, when I was a little girl, I was fascinated with spiders. I would spend hours outside hunting for spiders. Mom wanted to make sure I wasn’t picking up poisonous ones, so she got me a pocket guide to spiders to carry with me. One day, I hit the jackpot-not only did I find spiders, I found spider egg sacks! I did what every 5 year old does when she comes across a treasure, I collected them ALL in an empty half gallon ice cream container. Let’s just say, I had enough eggs to cover the bottom. If each egg sack had about 100 spider eggs inside X 30 egg sacks, 3000 baby spiders were captured by  this tiny little girl! I remember clearly taking them up to mom’s room to count them, but, of course, it was dinner time. So, I hid them under mom’s bed and promptly FORGOT about my treasure….until ….they ….hatched.

The room was filled with thousands of ballooning spiders, all spinning silk kites, leaping and letting go, allowing the wind to carry them. These tiny little creatures just knew that in order to survive, they needed to jump. Ever since them, I have been fascinated with spider’s webs, the interconnectedness, and how so much about weaving can transfer over into daily life. The spider sends off its silk, looking for a new place to settle, and then uses the web to pull itself towards its new destination. What a wonderful metaphor for living. Don’t we each send off threads, intentions or dreams outward, hoping that it will latch on somewhere, pulling us forward? We are all spiders in our own way, weaving our stories, going around and around our web. Our stories become intertwined and tangled. Sometimes, it becomes hard to disentangle ourselves without destroying the web. Sometimes, it is just time to make a new one.

I have also come to realize the inter-connectivity of personal relationships. If you cast your web wide enough, you find how one event, one smile, one hateful outburst of emotion has affected people you may not have met yet. Weaving, Weaving, Spin Spin, time passes, and then you meet, by chance someone who knows someone who knows you and you have completed that portion of your web. That was me 2 years ago when I was approached by a stranger who remembered my cooking from The Tea Grotto. Free cookies and a smile created an invisible web connection for her.

We affect people with who we are intrinsically whether we are conscious of it or not. When we say that everyone gives and takes a little bit of everyone else, it means that how we communicate or interact with each affects their moods and interactions with others and so on….Our emotions stick to friends and strangers like a sticky spider’s web entangling us all. If we are to be all woven together, let it be love and generosity, not in anger or hate.

So, take moment before your think that judgmental thought or say something unkind. If that thought was a silken spider’s tread attaching that emotion to another, what would that feel like? After awhile, the web between you and others becomes so strong cemented in negativity. Imagine how it would feel to send out more kindness. By sending out more kindness, building the web around you with Kind Connections, How much more love and strength would you feel moving back and forth across your web?