The spider web

This morning's gift: a tiny spider web in my backyard.

It is an eight-sided world all to itself, maybe three and a half inches across. It is a single plane that bends and curves in the wind. A long single strand of spider silk connects each vertex to a leaf or stem in the wilderness of the 50-year-old grape vine next to the patio.

I am lucky to be sitting here, at exactly the hour, exactly the right angle of the sun, to see the web glitter. The camera on my phone can't see it, and I may not have seen it either were it not for the breeze that gives it motion to refract the light this way and that. The strands that weave from radius to radius are packed close together. They'll snare some mighty tiny bugs for
 the worker who built this glittery trap.

I brought my knitting outside with me this morning, along with my coffee, thinking to redo the unsatisfactory work I ripped out last night. The openwork lace, the bright pink yarn, the shiny chrome needles look like materials for Jack's giant above the clouds compared to the delicate craft and threads used by this tiny arachnid.

From Wikipedia: 
Spiders (order Araneae) are air-breathing arthropods that have eight legs, chelicerae with fangs able to inject venom, and spinnerets that extrude silk. They are the largest order of arachnids and rank seventh in total species diversity among all orders of organisms.

How does she do it? How does she warp her loom among the leaves? How long does it take to spin and stick together so many tiny threads? I noticed the beginnings of this work yesterday, but I didn't pay close enough attention to answer these technical questions. Robins and rabbits are much larger targets for observation these days in my weedy, wormy yard. I'm glad I walked only on the fence side of the patio table yesterday, however unintentional this was. Walking around the other way, brushing between the table and the grape leaves, would have destroyed this web before it was so perfectly. Mistress spider would have taken her business elsewhere, begun again, just another day in the chanciness of nature. But I would have missed this morning's moment of magic.

When I wake up in the morning, slowly, I inevitably reach for my phone. I wish I didn't, I vow not to do so the next day, but there it is. A press of my thumb, a touch, scroll and soon I'm reading the morning's news, not that much different from the news the night before. And last night's news was about looting, protest, fires and the angry, hurt, frustrated voices of black Americans who have waited far longer than anyone should have to wait for justice, freedom, prosperity. Does it do any good for me to linger over the details? To tweet, or retweet, or lecture others, mostly like-minded, about the evil I see, the change that needs to happen?

If I am to live mindfully, faithfully, filled with the Spirit, I must weave those things into my living too, be as mindful of the pain around me (and within me) as I am this morning of the wonder and beauty of nature.

The spider spins, needing nothing from me. In God's kingdom, lilies of the field and plain brown sparrows receive the tender care of their Creator and the rain falls on the just and unjust alike. God desires life and love for the created world.

I must invest in that creation.

Green, green, everywhere

Green, green, everywhere.

I have a friend whose favorite color is green. This friend is also someone who appreciates hand-made gifts, so I have knit things for her from green wool -- socks, a scarf. I've made them from hand-dyed yarn whose depths of color add warmth to the sock and invite the eye into the twists and turns of lace in the scarf.

Green is on my mind because this week everything outside looks about 80 percent greener than it did last week, if that's possible in spring. We've had so much rain that living things seem sodden with new growth. Leaves on maples are flourishing. The tips of the branches on the evergreens in front of my house are bright with new needles. The grass in the parkway is green under the haze of dandelions going to seed. The blue-green of the lilac leaves shows off what's left of the clusters of tiny purple flower. Nature's riches turn out, turn over, float on the breeze. My living room window is so crowded with green that it seems less a color than a condition, like water to a fish.

I finished reading "The Overstory" last night, a novel with human characters that is crowded with the voices of trees. So it's not surprising my morning imagination peers into maples and looks for mystery. I listen for voices, but only recognize my own irrelevance.

I'm older than the trees around my house. In the time when I was a child this street was likely lined with elms, lost to disease. The maples that replaced them were flourishing but young when we moved into this house. How much they've grown is evidence of how long I've lived here. The corner maple has to lean out over the street to find its light and keep growing.

No moral here. No wisdom. Just this one life form,  me, in a beige sweater made of plant and animal fiber, contemplating others.

What does your day look like during -- what exactly are we calling this? The springtime of eternal snow days?

I wake up in the morning and try to remember what I was dreaming. But before I can grab a mental screenshot of what will surely help explain me to me, reality steps in.

Oh. This.

I grab my phone and scroll through email. Devotions from Luther Seminary sent shortly after midnight. Junk. Charity appeals. Headlines from the Washington Post -- should I read them?

No.

Another day stretches before me of trying to do meaningful things in a vacuum, without brushing past other humans at less than six feet of separation, avoiding something, scrubbing away something -- a virus -- that I can't even see.

I don't know where it is, I don't know where it is not. I don't know if I'll have symptoms. I don't know if I'll get sick.

My brain is not wired for this. Nor has it evolved over the last six or seven weeks to meet this challenge more effectively. It will take effort to stay in balance again today.

Sunshine helps, and warm socks, and days when you go barefoot in your shoes and remember that summer will come soon. Masked strangers who nod as they walk past my fence with their dogs. A sister who brings chocolate cake and stands at the gate to talk. These things are real, if altered by isolation.

Screens on the other hand -- it takes effort and imagination to see real people and personalities inside the Zoom boxes online on a screen. We have all flattened out over the weeks of isolation. The lags and bumps in wifi are spontaneous, but we are not.

My living room has little piles in each of the places I sit. The book pile, the cookbook pile, the wooly yarn pile rich in blues and greens, browns and golds, the abandoned project pile. It's the way I lived in graduate school, with papers due at the end of the semester: the theatre history text on the floor, with 19th century plays and notes; the script for playwriting in the typewriter on the desk; the seminar project strewn across the bed. It would all be cleaned up, the room restored to order, when finished.

What does your day look like? This post was started yesterday, abandoned because it seemed to be going nowhere, with no appropriate tone or take. The day went downhill from there, and then climbed back up. Today, on a brighter, sunnier morning, my fingers and brain are itching to cast-on caps and shawls,

and words are flowing with less disappointment into my notebook and onto my screen.

I begin again.