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A SPIDER'S CREATION MYTH

12/28/2020

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(This story was inspired by discovering that the tiny lights reflected by our flashlights in the grass, which we thought were droplets of water, are actually the eyeshine of spiders.)

    When a spider lays the eggs of her thousand children, she wraps them round in steely filaments of light. In that wrap is folded the pattern of their ancestors, the pattern they will emerge already knowing how to weave. That pattern is their creation story. It goes like this:


      In the beginning, there were two blades of grass.

    These two blades of grass felt themselves to be utterly different from one another. One was frondy and one was slender. One was sharp-edged and one was round. One was wispy and one was heavy with green. One lay flat and one quavered back and forth, when the wind blew. 

    They thought they had nothing to do with each other. Each thought the other was ignorant and wrong. They were two polarities, opposites. They could not communicate or agree on anything.

    Now God came crawling along and climbed up one blade of grass. The grasses knew She was God, because She had eight legs, the number of infinity. And so the first blade of grass, eager for a divine listener, told about all the strangeness and wrongness of the other: how the other was too frondy or wispy or round. And then God crawled down and over and climbed up the other blade of grass. And that blade of grass, just as eagerly, told about the strangeness and wrongness of the first one. 

    Then God, curious, crawled back and forth, back and forth, listening to these complaints over and over, until the two voices merged in Her mind like one river, and She understood that really, they were one. Really, these blades of grass were longing to connect, but did not know how to do it.

    Now the mind of God is very wise, and can perceive the sacredness of space, space that might seem to others like just empty nothingness. She can perceive the potential in that nothingness. She can perceive the tension there, and in that tension, the meaning of existence. So after meditating for a long time on that long, lonely space between the two blades of grass, going back and forth, back and forth between them until She understood in Her round, holy abdomen the shape of that space, She began to weave the meaning. She wove the longing itself. She wove the question. It was a pattern of delicate complexity and geometrically perfect beauty. Yet it was invisible.

    Then She spiraled in to the center of this pattern and sat down to wait. The blades of grass were silent, in awe of their newfound connection, made sacred and real by God’s web. 

    Over time, dew collected on the spokes of this wheel She had woven. Little particles of all the matter of the universe stuck to the dew, and made colors in the light. And as life collected on the web, these became the waters and plants and beings of the world. And this is how the world was formed. 

    The principle of the world is connection. God taught us that all things are connected. She taught us to see meaning in space. She taught us that connection is longing, and longing is connection. 

    We spiders are made in the image of God. We are the keepers of space, and the keepers of silence. We are the consciousness at the center of the spiral. We connect the spaces; we bind the forests and the meadows together with our spirals and nets and funnels and cups and veils, and we give places meaning. We are the dreamcatchers.

    And the other beings of the world—they are not immortal like us, sitting infinitely patient, reweaving the pattern again and again forever. They are the ones who stand separate from one another, and whose shapes inspire us. Or they are the ones who fly into the web and get caught, not understanding the bigger picture, unable to see it. We are the artists, and they are the ones who live and die. They inspire us, because when they fly into our webs and destroy them, they are our answers.

    Remember that the whole world is a dream woven, a longing between two opposites, given shape.

    Remember that this web was woven for a reason: it is a prayer waiting to catch an answer. Every now and then the answer comes. An asteroid, perhaps. Some change so massive, it destroys the web of life itself. But do not be frightened, because a spider never gives up. God will always weave the web again: it will be there in the morning. 

    That destruction was the answer God built the web for: the fly that finally got caught. What was the answer? What was the question? Only God knows. She swallowed it up, tucked it away into her great round abdomen, and wove a new web from there. Whatever it was, whatever it is, we are living it now, until the next answer comes.

    The sacred pattern is never going to be lost. You can see it sometimes, if you pay attention, like a symbol, or a holy word. On the backs of beetles. On butterfly wings. In the way ants move. In the way water turns around a stone. Each thread of this life is touched at all times by one of the eight sticky fingers of God. She is always aware of everything. She senses each tiny motion. She is awareness itself.

    One more thing, baby spiders. Some creatures in this world are very large, so large you can hardly imagine them, much bigger than we. They are too big, really, to matter. They will not survive long. And yet sometimes they will blunder through your web and destroy it. They are not the answer you are waiting for. And you cannot stop them from their blunders. This is impossible. All you can do is make your web of beauty. Startle them into awe with the dew. Let your filaments collapse upon them—frighten them with threads and wispy fingers, or better yet, make them tingle, so that they stop and learn to feel again, as delicately as spiders do.

    This is all you can do.

    But it is enough. 

    And those of you who live among the grasses and never make webs, who spend all your lives in exploring the different blades, running back and forth between them, you hunting spiders of the night—you too are sacred. They will shine their flashlights in your eyes, without knowing it, and you will shine back rainbows.

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Help for the Wayward Adolescent

11/28/2020

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If you have the chance in your life (lucky, yet painful) to walk into virgin forest—that confident silence, empty below, wide and wondrous above—and later walk out of it, and if you then enter again the forests you know—I mean the forests you used to think were forests—you might notice they don’t seem so anymore. These familiar “woods,” made of the young beginnings of trees, most of them no older than we are, scramble and tangle their way upward trying to reinvent the concept of forest with no elders left to guide them after the last clearcut, brushy with desperate growth. There’s no space for breath. And you realize that in the whole rest of the world, even where there aren’t any buildings at the moment, the earth is just frantically trying to recover itself from denuding. From constant trauma. That’s all it is— the thing you thought was “forest,” the forest of today. Just a rough, temporary scab. Just the chaos of ongoing emergency. 

    That’s what we’re surrounded by, and so maybe that’s what we feel life to be: just youthful, constant crisis.

    Do you think the beings who are older than we are— I mean ALL the other beings in the world, that is— might shake their heads at us? As you would at a teenager who alternately charms you into submission and drives you crazy? Because maybe that’s all we are, humanity. Just a teenager rebelling against the confines of life and death. Disrespecting our elders. Desperate for meaning. No sense of responsibility. Constantly changing, experimenting, challenging every traditional ecosystem, every natural law.

    You know how teenagers are. They fascinate, and they rock your world for good and for ill. They’re so passionate, so endearing, so intensely alive, so fierce in their feeling, that they suck all the attention out of a room. It feels as if they’re the most important ones—they feel that way, they feel they can take on the world. They hardly know what to do with their own power, and yet they think they know everything. They think they don’t need anyone, that they’re completely independent of everyone else.

    And they’re so stupid and greedy and selfish and aggravating. But so brilliant, so creative. They hold the original fire inside them. Sometimes it feels like they invented fire itself. Isn’t there hope for them still? Don’t you want to know what they will become, one day?

    Maybe everyone else, all the older beings, are thinking what a beautiful young person humanity is, at heart: how much potential! If only humanity will pull itself together! If only it will keep from falling into addiction and bad habits before it’s too late. Before it destroys itself and everyone else. After all, isn’t adolescence the most beautiful time of life, in a way? It’s the only time when we get to look darkness in the face, with that particular rawness, that insistent question. Dear humanity, what is your deep, tormenting question? Because counseling is available all around you! Look up and the treetops seem to cover you, a jigsaw of comfort you recognize in your bones. Even the young ones are bigger than you still. They cocoon you, they root you in, all over the world wrapping you in their arms against the earth, so that you are not bare all the time to the open universe and the terrifying dream of limitless power. So that you don’t float away.

    You know how teenagers are. We talk so tough. But we need someone to look up to. We are still only children, needing an ancient pattern of green leaves over our heads that feels sensical to our souls, a grownup example of integrity we can believe in.
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A Message from Death at All Hallows/ Samhain

10/30/2020

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From out of the mouth of Autumn (when they say the living and the dead are so close, we can hear each other breathing on either side of the veil), a bear came like an angry spirit and snatched one of my goats over to the other side. My youngest female, a virgin sacrifice. Blood on the wall in the morning, her body uneaten, the other goats huddled wide-eyed in the the corner. I had never expected it, the gate broken, the fence ripped out. And maybe the bear needed her over there, on the other side, for some reason. Or maybe the bear was just angry, like those bear hunters all around us, with their vicious dogs, or like the humans who are angry all around the world, all the time lately, making violence without rites. 

I haven’t learned yet about anger, or evil, or why. Or how to understand bears differently (who came to me in nightmares all my life but whom in real life I always loved and never feared, until now). I will soon learn, perhaps, how to properly electrify an old and awkwardly built barn. But what I first learned is, where we are trapped is where we die.


For seven years, it felt so cozy, as darkness fell, to know the goats were locked up safe. This was my evening ritual, before I could go out, before supper could be finished: get the animals in, lock up the barn, check the latches. They were safe, and I felt safe. Locked up in the innermost stall, the room they were born in, the place they always ran to, their only concept of home—we all breathed a sweet, hay-scented sigh of relief. 


Now every night, I just let the goats out. I open the barn doors. I open the gates to all the pastures. Sometimes I see them looking back at me, eyes twinkling in the flashlight glare, huddled high on a rock across the field, the vastness of the cold night their only security. And I can’t tell them, ever again—you’re safe now, you’re safe here. They are never safe. But I tell them, you’re safer than you were. Because now you have your senses and intuition joined together with your long legs and sudden leaps. You have your running and the space to run in. Your freedom is your safety— that’s the only safety you’ve ever had, only I didn’t get that until now.


So I don’t feel any better, and I dread every night, but I’m grateful for the lesson. That all this time, maybe I’ve tried to stay safe by building walls. By trying to control and enclose and hold tight what is precious. But really, I made myself a death trap. Really, living without fear means walking into the night accepting the unknown, without limit or security, and trusting only to my own capabilities in the face of whatever happens. Abilities which I only have access to, it turns out, if I am free.

Last time I posted about the sacred hunger of gods. But this turned out not to be a story about hunger, or even about predation. The bear, stuffed with corn, wasn’t hungry enough to eat her kill. She came for curiosity. Then she saw, and heard, those trapped things panicking. It got her blood going, triggered a frenzy within. Unnatural containment triggered unnatural violence. She felt she was called there, to set something loose, to break up an illusion of safety, to shake things up. Well I feel shaken up. Good. So I feed the goats at dusk and let them go. The bear took the youngest, shiest one. The innocent. I walk with a prayer for her. I walk back up to my house with nothing separating me from forest but a thin sliver of autumn wind. 

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When Our Gods Were Tigers

10/1/2020

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​Remember when somebody hunted us? Remember when we paused in the forest to listen, with awe, because we had to? Remember when we walked among gods, secret and deadly, whose inexplicable and unpredictable power haunted us all our lives, and gathered us home unto darkness at the end?

I don’t really remember. It was hundreds, millions of years ago, and I was dead. But now I’m alive and I pause in the forest to bush-wack my way out of my own vining thoughts, reminding myself to appreciate birdsong. And I can imagine—what it was like to live with tigers, wolves. Remember? We used to listen to the birds with unbroken attention, because their tones and silences told us what lurked unseen. Every voice, every breaking twig, every scent signified something about what we hungered for and what hungered for us. Everything meaningful, everything necessary. We could never lose ourselves. We were bound by life and death to all the beings. 

But now, civilization. Now we have done away with the old gods. We have fought so hard to preserve life at all costs. 

Now we are so mighty, our death can only come to us in forms too small to see.

Now that we refuse to fear any gods greater than ourselves, whom else can we fear but ourselves?


We don’t recognize the new predator, which evolves out of our new, invincible humanity, our going everywhere and populating everything and laying waste the old—the virus of the moment, unknown and alienating. Our new death doesn’t connect us with the living world. Our only safety is to mask our faces and keep our distance, because what we fear now is each other.


But remember when death was conscious? Remember when it knew us, and watched us with eyes as feeling as our own? That contract was so ancient. And our lives were at risk, all the time, but we were alive. Surviving was a privilege, not a right. It meant not only a listening, a humility, a knowledge of community, an attention so profound there are no words or even thoughts to describe it—it meant also such intimacy. 


What if death were still so pure, so boundless, so beautifully inevitable—whiskered and pawed, with eyes of laughing darkness, sides sleek with stripes of fire? What if its constant possibility awakened us to every subtle thing, so that instead of locking our doors, holding our breath as we walk past another masked human, hiding our smiles, we got bigger in our souls? What if death were a noble adversary, and trying to outwit it made us beautiful, the way the deer evolves to be beautiful, instead of making us small, conflicted, and alone?

They say the old gods are never truly dead, only awaiting the honor that is due them. Maybe like the grizzled heads of prehistoric creatures now rearing up from melting permafrost, our gods come back to haunt us now, in these days of strange reckoning. Maybe they slip into our bodies in a piece of stray DNA, on the breath of a forgotten animal in the last remnant of some forgotten forest across the world. Let us not, by trying to be greater and better than death, make ourselves so small. Let us, instead, make for these ghosts a temple. Fill it with levels of tangled greenery, raptor talons and python jaws, night-light eyes and shadow tails. Most of all, let us fill it with space. The kind of space a predator needs to roam.

And if we cannot imagine where to begin, if there seems no place left in this world for such a temple, then still we honor the old gods in the best way we know how. 


We build the temple where the fear is. We build it within.
​
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