Spider Season

About three weeks ago I started seeing orb weaver spiders everywhere, and finding spiders in the house again.

I’m not sure why it is that I go months in summer without seeing spiders outside of the garden, or why it is that they all of a sudden reappear in my awareness. Maybe the orb weavers are there, only just behind the dense foliage that begins to thin in August. Maybe they do something different then. And maybe the house spiders are busy when it’s warm out with other things than turning up under the shirt I’ve left lying on the floor.

Finding a reason doesn’t really matter, so much. I just know, when I start to see spiders everywhere, that we are winding summer down and turning towards autumn and the cooling and shortening of the days.

Spider season is a time of wondering, for me. Wondering what it is that I will create during the darker months, what I will invite into my life. It is especially those orb weaver woven webs that catch my eye: long stretches of web built overnight to huge proportions, joining and connecting pieces of the landscape and making it hard to walk Teddy in the mornings without getting a face full of spider silk.

How will you connect the threads of who you were this summer with who it is that you will be this fall? Do you know in your bones that the thread of your life is continuous and that your kind attention is required? What will you bind to you to take into the dark time? What have you been holding tight to, with a sticky mind, that you can release?

Weave well.