When I was a boy I visited the Museum of Natural History whenever I could. I was as interested in saber-tooth tigers and wooly mammoths as I was in frilled lizards, dung beetles and spiders. They informed my dreams and fired my imagination.
I grew up outside, sunburned and salted, callow and calloused, all denim and dungarees. I wandered streams looking for treasures in sticks and stones, and forgotten bones.
I still collect things on my walks. Across the years I still spill them from my pockets into heaps like dusty tomes.
One day, fifty years ago, I brought home a precious spider in a box.
. . . . .
On a retreat into sacred sites our caravan had stopped in a place known as Smuggler’s Notch. Mount Mansfield has a long history as a sacred mountain to those who lived here before. A vision quest would connect us with the ancestors through great stones and trees resting in its shadows.
Perched on a massive boulder beside the road was a towering pine. I had chosen it to help me open to the spirits of the past. I slowly began to drift into my thoughts and open into visions of subtle mists of light and dark playing across my eyes, and for the first time, I began to see Clara Belle.
I had never met my grandmother. I had only known of her through the stories my mother had shared. Although it was clear she loved to cook, in my heart I suspected that she too was an artist at heart without an outlet for her gifts as a housewife in early 20th century Washington, D.C.
In my vision I had come to her house as a boy, to the tall and narrow white door, one of many on her street. Without having to knock, the door opened and she was there to invite me in without saying a word.
I followed her into a smallish white room filled with photos on shelves, and all manner of things filled with an embracing motherly love. It was as if she was one with the space, indistinguishable from its trappings and contents, an image of love and remembrance.
In the center was a table and two chairs. As I sat down, she stepped forward with a gift she wanted to share.
She gently placed a circular white doily before me on the table, and then stepped back again. There were no words between us, just the warm silence of the room that hung around us, holding me, free from the world like a cloud.
I had never thought about domestic comforts, the intricate heart touches that transform a space into a home brimming with love. It was just the way it always was, a given, something taken for granted and never mentioned.
As I sat with her gift I must have huffed a puzzled sigh.
Then behind me a wisp of steam rose from her kettle and the room began to vanish into shards of fog and light, white on white away from sight.
. . . . .
Grandmother Spider is the weaver of a world where everything is connected. The builder of the matrix, stoking the fires of the grid and turning the wheel of life. In a silent way, through hearth and home, through the love of family, the art of love is ever present, part and participle to the greater work.
Her love is not auspicious or showy. It is subtle, rarefied, and refined.
There are threads of stories that remain unfinished across the years, across lives, and generations. Each day we are given the opportunity to address their challenges in a new way, to find a different solution toward relieving the burdens of the past and redefining the future.
History repeats. But our actions do not have to, and we can always choose another way.
We are all connected to the work.
. . . . .
Today the sun beams in my graying hair and I carry the box to the headwaters of a stream. With incense to mark the four directions and a bottle of water to join the brook, the four elements will honor our ancestors of the past and those to come.
Like the mist rising on the water, some of us dream, and others of us build and tear down like the brook tumbling below. As the stream threads its way, from sun to shadow, through stones and roots, above ground and below, a gossamer thread unwinds.
I place the spider over the spillway and offer water to the brook.
In steeping seeds and turning smoke, past, present and future rise together into a new stream.
Here and then gone again, wizening ghosts like white on white, the web of a doily in a dream.
