Spider Season

a devotional for autumn

Thank you for joining us! Before we begin our devotional, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from last week:

Our devotional, discussion, and other materials last week were all about nostalgia, something that seems to go hand-in-hand with autumn. There were SO many insightful comments from you all, about your relationships with nostalgia. But I thought this one from Arjan Tupan really summed it up nicely:

A lovely poem, S.E. And a beautiful thought. I prefer the gratitude (and learning) from looking back. I don't like to stay behind in the good old days. I'm grateful I lived them, and took learning from them into being who I am now, Just as I am grateful for today and what I take from that for tomorrow. It's all about growth.

A very healthy perspective, Arjan, and beautifully expressed! Arjan posts about poetry here on Substack, and you can find lots of new inspiration at his newsletter, The Triple Effect! If you love poetry, I highly recommend it!

If you want a chance to be featured in next week’s Comment Highlight, all you have to do is post a comment on any of this week’s posts or threads. That’s it!

Now, on with this week’s devotional…

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when september finds you
passing through
a doorway
a gate
a forest trail
a threshold,

sometimes you feel
the telltale tickle
of someone's woven web
upon your face;

and instinct takes over,
turns to shrieking
gasping
reaching up to brush it away

and we carry on
into the day
but marked
by delicate lacework;

the gatekeeper
(often unseen)
must begin again
weaving
as every one of her mothers
did before, 

undeterred
she creates from her being
somewhere deep.

the road through autumn
is paved with such thresholds,
such flimsy woven gates
such dew-anointed geneologies

of eight-legged bards
who remind us:
there are some stories
you cannot miss.

Note: to the dear arachnophobes in my audience, if the very mention of spiders makes you antsy, you may want to sit this one out. :)

I have a confession to make: I love spiders. I really do. I find them fascinating companions in this strange and sacred life. They are creatures with unspeakably miraculous powers—weaving, jumping, hunting, swimming, gliding through the air—but somehow exist beside us in our mundane daily lives. I think that’s fascinating.

We’re entering a season when spiders are going to experience their annual trendiness in Hallowe’en decor and trinkets. You can put plastic spiders around your house or bedeck your yard with fake cobwebs. Spiders show up on Hallowe’en mugs, pillows, and clothing. Spider jewelry. Spider costumes.

Tim Burton’s entire aesthetic, essentially.

Spiders have this association with autumn largely because of their seasonal habits. In temperate climates (such as Western Europe, where most American Hallowe’en traditions started in some form) the common garden spider mates in the autumn. To do this, she builds a web, catches insects for food, and waits for the male to find her. Most spiders build their webs at night, so the longer early-autumn nights are perfect for increasingly elaborate and large-scale webs in prime locations, like right outside your front door for you to walk into when you’re in a morning rush (yikes!).

Because of this Hallowe’en/autumn relationship there is an association between spiders and the macabre, the dark, the gloomy, the gothic. And while I think I understand, mostly I don’t.

While there are places in the world where spiders are decidedly dangerous, and I am not diminishing that real fear, there are just as many—if not more—species of spider that simply want to do their thing. And “their thing” is catching and eating some of our more pesky insect pests, like mosquitos and other biting bugs.

All of this is leading up to a second confession: I let spiders run fairly rampant in our house. I am terrible at wiping down cobwebs. Miss Havisham would love my aesthetic.

But really, my reluctance to evict them is because I find spiders poetic. Many of them weave with thread they create with their bodies. Isn’t that incredible? Jumping spiders have genuinely soulful eyes. Have you ever noticed? The spiders who hide in the shade of the garden plants watch me while I work with polite interest. I appreciate their silent companionship.

And while it’s often unpleasant to be surprised by a wayward web in the face, there is something irreplaceably holy about the way the hedgerows look in the cool autumn morning, draped with webwork and bejeweled with dewdrops.

Perhaps the spider has a romantic soul, and not so macabre after all.

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