Spider on a Glowing Web

It was only a few nights ago that I went out into my cement yard at night. The water in the pool hardly reflected the little light that shone down from the moon, but the solar lights in the garden illuminated a sight I had never imagined could be so perfect. Between a wilted rose bush and a stray grape vine, was a web spun so flawlessly, it seemed as if it was designed and planned and executed by a human. It sat, suspended, in front of the solar light, as if a person had put their bed directly under a window. It was perfectly symmetrical, perfectly translucent and perfectly clean, and the spider sat perfectly in the center of the web, where all the silk threads met. The light shone through the spider so that he looked like a membrane and so that I could see all his hairs, glowing like a paranormal phenomenon. I couldn’t walk away from this image of the sleeping spider on the perfect web, I was transfixed. So I sat there for a while, watching the motionless scene as if it were an intricate movie waiting to be unraveled. Sitting there, watching the illuminated bed, I realized that nothing a person could create in the circumstances of this spider could be so beautiful. A person could not wake up one morning, grab a rope, and by sundown be suspended safely in a glowing cradle. Everything we create, we plan for. Every impulse we have, from a very young age, is eradicated from our list of actions. Yet, this spider sits, quaint and awful, but free and happy. And we sit, obligated and wonderful, asking our selves when it will be our turn to spin our own webs. At this moment, with my eyes transfixed on the magnified light from the spider’s silk, I realized that whatever we may think, however we may act, we are not the superior race. We walk the earth from top to bottom and everywhere in between. We have even walked on extra terrestrial land, but we still cannot beat the magnificent power of any given animal. We watch with our minds and not with our instincts, and this makes us not alive, but human. For if we really lived, we would be walking until we fell asleep. We would be smelling the plants and drinking from rivers. We would crack acorns with stones and weave clothes out of hide. Who does this today? Nobody I know, probably no body you know. There is, I am sure, some family of lives out there in the Amazon or another tropical place, who does live in this way. And they truly do live. But you and I sit here, writing and reading, laughing and dreaming, sleeping and learning, and we do not live, because to live is to truly experience independence, to know one’s self before you know how to crawl. Today there are people who will die soon, people old and people young, people with experiences that could fill a thousand pages, but they don’t know themselves. They still fall asleep asking god to tell them what to do. And outside their door is a spider spinning a translucent web, who does not ask questions, who does not do what he is told, who does not live in a wooden house and who does not wear fabric clothes. This spider, though, is happy because this spider is alive within himself, he can do what he wants when he wants. He eats when he can, he sleeps when he’s tired, and he creates something so spectacular that the mind of an unliving like myself can’t even absorb it in one night. So I come back the next night to see the spider sleeping in the same spot, the very center of the web. But the third night I come to try and tell the spider I admire him, he is gone. And the web is gone. And there is no trace of him. And I realize that he was bored with this spot so he left, simple as that. He just wanted to. And I still don’t know what it is I work for.