Orb weavers

A week ago, a young man speaking of orb weavers in a deep ditch, hundreds of them, golden-yellow, their webs in clusters, a massive aggregation. He’d travelled a long way in that ditch, walls rising twice his height, before stopping, the spectacle of spiders and strung silk, part awe, part revulsion.

It was years earlier, just a teenager in that ditch, though he could have been a gazelle, vulnerable and fierce. I felt his longing to get away, the risk, the unnamed danger, his curiosity taking him far beyond his fear.

I know orb weavers, I thought as he spoke, my mind lighting up with iridescent threads strung everywhere, big bulbous spiders with long spindly legs suspended in air, webs reaching from handrail high into the tops of rainforest trees. In darkness, I’m walking to an elevated, thatched cabin above a flooding Zambezi River in Zambia. I’m careful where I place my hands, shimmers from the rushing water illuminating the filaments, a gossamer map, breathing and pulsing all around me.

His story and my story are speaking to each other.

This is how a moment opens. And now you, reading these words are in it, too. You, and all your stories.

We’re part of a virtual gathering, and he’s off screen, pure voice, so it’s easier to imagine the 15-year-kid amazed and aghast before the wall of webs and spider bodies big as silver dollars, the blur of legs working fast.

He didn’t need to go any farther. By then, he’d already passed through so much.

A line from poet Muriel Ruykeyser enters the mental conversation, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.”

I’ve always loved that simple line, and it’s truer than a poetic idea. We are all bits of humming energy, this storyteller, the spiders, the screen, the river still streaming through me. Everything is story.

Who hasn’t looked at the smeared light of a galaxy caught in a photo, a spiral web of stars simultaneously small and vast, wondering what it’s seen after so long surging away into space? What stories could those old stars tell, indeed are telling in the absence of words?

The story keeps coming back to curiosity and danger, the inner drive to explore “the culverts of life,” his words, which I understand literally and metaphorically. The storyteller speaks his truth and, Surprise, mine, too.

This moment is a tiny architecture, little galaxy, necessary web, I think, in that silent space after his voice stops.

Looking out the window, light and shadows are moving in half-green ferns. A hummingbird flutters at the still-blooming fuschia. A low thermal rustles the dried-brown grasses—or maybe just a hidden wave of hungry Juncos?

In my notebook I write, “What spins, keeps on spinning.”