I have this whole love/hate relationship with spiders. Well, actually that’s not true at all; it’s more of a respect versus freak-out relationship.
On one-hand I totally admire their skill and determination. Back when the store (Raven’s Flight) was open every summer we would find these huge spider webs…sometimes five to six feet wide in the garden. We always left them because you have to admit…there’s something really witchy about spiders. Then of course pretty much all the weavers that I know love spiders; but then again all the weavers that I know are witches.
Then there’s the whole Web of Wyrd thing and then there’s Ariadne and well I think a lot of you get what I mean.
As a wort cunner I love them in my garden; not spider mites…..that’s something else all together but garden spiders are a great help when it comes to those nasty little creatures that would mange` my plants. In the summer I happily leave them alone to weave their delicate webs all over our breeze-way and I have to admit to a certain sense of satisfaction when I see all the tragic victims of their industrious web weaving and vicious feeding. I have even been known to leave the much feared black widow to her own on occasion because…well I think they’re sort of awesome.
On the other-hand I was bitten by a brown recluse spider when I was a teen-ager in Texas. If my mother hadn’t been dating a doctor at the time who realized that the mosquito bite on the back of my leg was not actually a mosquito bite my life might have been a lot different. I know lots of people who have been bitten by spiders and although it is usually not that big of a deal sometimes it is. Spider are poisonous you know….all spiders to some degree or another. I remembering reading some where that no matter how clean your house is, you are never more than three feet away from a spider. Then of course there’s the whole thing about how many spiders we inadvertently eat while we are sleeping.
From a very young age I kind of had a thing with spiders. I remember a dream I had when I was very little, living Houma, Louisiana. I remember that in the dream I was sitting on the hard wood floor leaning back on my hands watching a spider crawl up my arm. I wasn’t scared or freaked out; it just kind of felt like there was some reason that I was supposed to let the spider crawl up my arm. That’s always stuck with me; it’s probably the dream I remember best of all the dreams I’ve had in my life and I couldn’t have been more than four years old. Weird, huh? Or maybe not….considering I grew up to be a witch, maybe it was some sort of spider/Goddess initiation into the magickal world. One can only surmise.
Here in the mountains there can be two things that you can count on every spring. One is the alternating days of spring sunshine and spring fog and even snow that can make a gardener’s life very frustrating. The other is the spring population explosion of baby spiders. Every year I marvel at how at the most inconvenient moment tiny spiders will drop down on their tiny silken threads often only inches from your face; and that’s only the ones that you see. This could be disconcerting to some people even if it was an event that only happened outside but these merrily descending spiders drop down from trees, from the ceiling and even from your visor when you are driving. My usual course of action is to grab their little threads and set them down somewhere out of the way; it all happens very fast with little thought and it is usually no problem. Then again the ones that drop down from the visor while you’re driving are always a little more dramatic…. especially when you are driving on mountain roads.
As a general rule I don’t kill them; in fact I usually don’t tell my husband when I find one somewhere in the house because I know he will, but mores the pity for him. You see the truth is, and I have never told anyone this before, I have this odd belief that when I die I will have to go to spider court to be judged and there will be a great scale to decide my fate. On one side will be all of the spiders that I have willfully killed. You see I think that they are smart enough to realize that being the great lumbering giants that we are we occasionally accidentally murder some of their number and they give us a pass on these. On the other side are all the spiders we have saved from an untimely death. When the day of spider judgment comes I will not be judged harshly. On the other hand I can not be so sure about my husband or my dog my Bearly who seems to regard them as a tasty doggie delicacy.
The only thing that might weigh against me in spider court is the recurring drama that I experienced again tonight. Have you ever seen a spider in the bath tub after you’ve turned the water on? You see it vainly trying to climb up the slippery sides of the tub in a desperate attempt to escape the quickly approaching water. When this happens to me I always do the same thing. I turn off the water, grab a piece of cardboard or a cup or something else dry to put in front of them so that they can crawl on and I can transport them to safety. Every time I have done this the same thing happens. Just as I turn from the bath tub and am getting ready to set them down in the corner or on the floor they always test me. Even if their little legs have gotten wet and no matter how exhausted they may be from their panicked attempts to flee the oncoming torrent of bath water they always test my true spider loyalty and admiration. With lightening speed they turn around and head straight for hand!
So with all of my reflection on their importance in the world of witchcraft, with all of the admiration and gratitude I have for them not to mention my sincere belief that they may indeed have a great deal to do with my immediate afterlife…..why oh why do I always freak out, scream and fling them across the bathroom in manner which must certainly result in serious injury if not death.
Spider court may not turn out that well after all!
Raven
