Relationships

New Love in a Spider Web

Reflections on nature and love.

A giant garden orb spider web lays sprawled over a busted out window in my garage. When the sunlight hits it at just the right angle it illuminates the perfection and fragility of this spider’s home.

This spider needs a home; something to capture nutrients for survival, and a place to lay in the center of its known universe. A place where singular devotion is paramount. When I look at it every morning I can’t help but mesh its wonder with the experience of falling into the web of new love.

The perfect symmetry of every commonality discovered between two people. The expansiveness of terrain encompassed by new love; how it stretches to create new surfaces in mid air. The way it anchors itself to established points outside of its new empire. It’s also peculiar how both are created in highly vulnerable spots like an open window and an open heart.

The garden orb weavers remove their webs each dawn and reconstruct them at night in a ritual akin to the good mornings and good nights of new lovers. The weavers do this to provide safety from predators. Lovers employ their rituals to do the same — to establish safeguards against the predators of countless past mistakes.

It is said in the lore of our ancestors that a garden orb spider appears in your domain to herald change in your life and I believe a lover most certainly does as well.

Yet this world of the web and of new love is incredibly fragile. It could be easily destroyed by one careless wave of the hand or misspoken word. I watched the other day as the spider, perched in the center of its creation, scurried up a main line of the web to take refuge elsewhere on my approach. It so quickly abandoned its nest at the slightest threat, as if to admit it was vulnerable to quick destruction. I wondered why it would abandon the beauty of its creation so quickly? Was the fear so great? Did it do so because it knew it could easily build a new one, on a new day, with the next potential lover in their match queue? Or maybe to leverage caution. After all, should the danger pass without incident the spider can just return home. Perhaps it is the perfect survival strategy. Protect your weaver-self so the next web can be constructed for the next day. Is this not the ultimate mandate of the weaver — to keep weaving?

I do not know how long this beautiful creature will stay in my world, building their home again and again; with good mornings and good nights. I don’t know why, in fact, it picked my world to build one of its own in the first place. And I will not know when it will to scurry for safety or find a new place to home all together. In truth, the spider is as elusive as a new lover’s heart.

All I can do is observe its ritual, protect this wonder to the extent I can, and wish it well when it no longer lives in my garage.

Kathryn A. Dickel 2023