Okay actually spiders are only really scary when you find them inside your home. Outdoors they're interesting. This is from my walk journal in January of 2021:
By some accounts, a walk is a time to chant your mantra, let it go in deep, to still your mind and enforce your intentions, but I find mantra repetition irritating, and it detracts from what my monkey mind likes best. Monkey likes to smile at the squirrels. If I go out late in the morning when the sun is fully up, I'll watch two of them scampering along, about 4-6 feet apart, one following the other across the library grounds. Do they look both ways before crossing the street? One day I watched two little ones travel across the grounds, keeping that 4-6 ft. social distance between themselves, one ahead of the other, but they stopped together at the street for a few seconds before crossing. Hmmm.
But today I went out at 7:30am, before the world was fully awake. I saw no little flocks of birds, no squirrels, no cats, no dogs, no humans. It may have had to do with the rain. The ground was wet, and a light mist remained in the air. I love a rainy, gray winter day. Nature spoke to monkey anyway.
I didn't walk the library grounds. At that early semi-dark hour, the densely hedged hiding places for malfeasance seem too sinister, so I set off on the straight path down my block. I collected a few acorns, pebbles and twigs from the sidewalk. Whatever is on the yard or the island next to the street, belongs where it is, but anything on the sidewalk, where someone can step on it and twist their ankle, belongs to me, to fill the trench in front of my living room window. Hands full of treasures, I continued to the estate that has my high stone wall sidewalk altar, where I stood listening for birds to chirp at me. Silence. I watched gray clouds drifting northwest.
As I set out to return home, a shower of brown oak leaves came down on the sidewalk. I looked up and said "thank you". That was when I noticed one leaf dancing in the air. It seemed to be suspended in the air, but I'm sure it was attached to a thread of spider web. I couldn't see the web. I stood watching the dancing leaf for a long time, thinking it might fall down into my hands, so I could keep it as a souvenir. It never did. It just said "contemplate me, understand me, I am speaking to you". I left, intending to look up oak leaf symbolism later.
So returning home, the next property on the way is the one with the lower stucco fence. It has a narrow trench of dirt in front of it. In that trench I noticed a spider walking right alongside me. It was a big one, maybe half as big as my hand, black, with a cross on its back, a beautiful beige gothic cross, like something you might see on a biker t-shirt. I've never before seen one like that. I watched and watched, hoping spider would start up the white wall so I could get a better look at her and the portable art on her back. She never changed course, and continued alongside me. I believe she knew she was being watched. I believe she knew she was safe.
So, the oak leaf symbolism: The symbolism of the oak leaf is inseparable from that of the oak tree.
1. Strength and victory: oak leaf often has a place on military uniforms.
2. Long life and endurance: "mighty oaks from little acorns grow".
3. Value: the hardness and long grain of oak wood make it a symbol of value. It is desirable for making things meant to last.
4: Refinement of music: There was a differentiation, in the making of the earliest musical instruments, between reed and wood, before metals were ever used.
5: The circle of life: a fallen brown leaf always represents the end of a cycle, while I'm also finding fallen acorns, those little phallic symbols of fertility and the continuation of life
Spider symbolism: I did look up the spider with the cross on its back. Under google images I didn't see any black cross spiders, only brown and gray ones. Of the ones I saw online, what I could read about them is that they are not considered very threatening, nor their bite very dangerous, but as always, if you see one, do your own research. As a child I was afraid of spiders. I think most children are. I had nightmares about them. They are scary looking, and they bite. They are used for effect in many a horror movie. A spider never survived once I laid eyes on it. To walk into a spider web is panic inducing. Even now, when I walk out in the morning, spiders will have built webs from one hedge across to the opposite one, so I'll pick up a long twig, to brandish ahead of me and clear the webs. The bite of most spiders is venomous, whether mildly so or deadly. Now I understand them better, but still not well. Spider tends to occupy an elevated place in the mythology and symbolism of older cultures.
1. Creativity. Spider creates elaborate, intricate webs. Remember "Charlotte's Web"?
2. More specifically, creativity by writing. That's for me. I write. I can't help it.
3. Patience. That speaks to me too, for patience is a virtue I lack. It takes a while to create the web to trap the food or write the message.
4. Secretiveness. This one is intuitive for me, since I know spiders like to build their homes in abandoned corners, up high inside a garage, or in a derelict box of tools on a low shelf, or in the back of your closet. They live and let live, if they can, if they are left undisturbed in their secret agent location.
5. The circle of life. Don't all creatures represent that? But spider has 8 legs, the number which, in numerology, symbolizes infinity, the infinite cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth.
6. Fate: spider's weaving symbolizes the external and internal influences on each life.
7. Anxiety: the appearance of spider in a dream may represent the dreamer's worry and fear
8. Protection: Many of the native American cultures decorated their weapons with spider, and painted her on their bodies, for success in conflicts.
9. Motherhood, the ultimate sacrifice. When my apartment was being renovated a few years ago, when furniture was moved and walls were drilled open, creatures appeared. It was all pretty harrowing, and one day I saw a big old black spider on the floor of my bedroom. I couldn't be merciful. It was too far from an exterior door to shoo it outside, and too big and scary to scrape up on a piece of paper and take outside, but I found out it was already dead anyway. Konan, my handyman, touched it with his paint scraper, and tiny baby spiders scattered everywhere. They'd been eating the mother. He told me this was normal behavior in some spider species. Gosh, I wondered, did that mother spider know her own hatchlings would attack her and consume her life force for their own?
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Date: August 5
Time: 8pm EST
Where: 
