Flip a spider on its back with your fingers and you think its over. Who couldn't feel pity for a crop of gangly legs desperately wavering in frustration? Fingernails snap back into the palm. Slowing shaking into fascination you are still too close to eight legs and a tiny jaw to feel safe. Even after a bite, paranoia about the second attack meters out a long sunset. I did not get bit and that is where my pride lay. I feel hubris to brandish the same emotions if I had overcome a brown recluse or captured a black widow in a tight netted noose. Still, my triumph is happenstance in the midst of an outdoor nest.
Eternal mother wedged in an Oak leaf hole; arms wavering feigning an attack by a dervish wind. A slight push of the pile and she recovered her stead. Crawling onto leaves jarred without anger, she, the gardener, appeared calm covered in gray and brown hair. Sudden sounds from a choir echo in the last of the clover echo. Harmless gardener, I'll let her find company in the leaves. The real loss occurred dumping her in the plastic lawn and garden bag. She'll climb over a fortnight to find her way out. Filled to the brim, I tie it off and walk away. Come nightfall, I have moved on and grown stout in my pride. One thing matters. I did not kill. I feel fear damns her and her kin. Still they are the only ones who would eat the E. coli carrying flies and the Zika laden mosquitoes from around the neighborhood. I did not bury my face in the bag to look if she was still there. Retrieval due to a sensitive heart would be futile.
Her children are no doubt to take over the Terra Cotta pots with vigor only matched by a finch's habitual eye. Why I fear her fecundity. I do not know. Maybe I do not want to brave inundation to the point of being overcome. Why I am jealous of her tenuous grasp; I do not know. Maybe the fear sources in not letting passions die. No children and left to my arts I know teeming possibilities of a spider's reality. Great Creatrix may never leave us. Manifesting that reality comes with mentored wisdom and time's forgiveness. Is it all in reflection and letting go? I see she is as me living out the expectation of an eternal line. Watching the divinity of fecundity rendered vulnerable makes my back ache no less. I have to ask, for now, what is tension to the weave during productivity? All in all my efforts may come down to constructing guidelines to make sure my art lives. The give and take of using space is what Creatrix shows me today. Leave me to my work. I'll feed myself.
As ever, stay hungry and curious.
~N.A. Jones