The spider weaver's gift
Dear friends,
Last time, I wrote about love as an action, not just a feeling. This week, I have been exploring storytelling as a practice of stretching and deepening my own capacity for aliveness - a rigorous and continuous practice of living in a living world.
Working with a story is often a call to life. It is an invitation to dive in and get messy, revel in entanglements, follow pathways that are continuously opening to the unknown, and be changed by every new encounter. Immersed in the story, one is always being challenged to make deeper connections, see things from new perspectives, weave intricate new webs of understanding.
This week, I am focusing particularly on those stories that highlight our relationships with the more-than-human. Recently, when I was working with The Spider Weaver, a folktale from the Ashanti Kingdom of Ghana, I felt myself becoming intimately attuned with the sensibility of a spider.
In many stories from indigenous wisdom traditions, plants and animals are teachers. Sometimes, humans have to learn to open their minds and hearts, or shift their point of view, in order to receive the lesson. In this particular story, a generous spider teaches two young men - young weavers from the village of Bonwire - new techniques to develop the beauty and mastery of their weaving.
The young men are spellbound when they first spot the spider’s web glistening in amongst the leaves of a banana tree in the moonlight. They carefully try to unfasten the web from the tree where it is anchored, so they can take it home to study. But of course, if you’ve ever stumbled into the sticky threads of a spider’s web, you’ll know what happens next!
The young men feel terrible when it sinks in that they have destroyed the spider’s home. But she is ready to start over and spin anew, and is perfectly willing to share the genius of her weaving with them. She looks pointedly at the two young men, as if to say, ‘are you paying attention?’ - and then she begins her complex dance of spinning and weaving, forming dazzling new shapes and fractal patterns.
Watching the spider complete her masterpiece over an entire day, the young men are deeply humbled. Not only do they learn new technical skills from watching her weave, but, receiving her gift with open hearts, they learn to live in right relationship to life, with generosity and reciprocity. Grateful for what they have been gifted, they return to their village and go on to develop Kente cloth, bringing legendary fame to the Asante Kingdom.
In fact, the town of Bonwire, from where this legend springs, remains the hub of artisanal Kente cloth weaving to this day.
It is a beautiful origin fable of reciprocity and knowledge sharing between different species, between diverse ways of knowing and creating. In my humble opinion, it is an origin story fitting for a textile that is steeped in symbolism and story. In fact, the particular combination of rich colours, fractal patterns and symbolic motifs on a piece of Kente cloth often tells a story about the wearer or his or her clan. ‘When worn, it is more than just a piece of attire, it is a visual representation of history, philosophy, ethics, religious belief, political thought and oral storytelling,’ proclaims the Contemporary African Art website.
Meanwhile, as I worked with this story, I found that it invited me to become more intimate with the spiders in my own surrounds. When a small black spider danced out from amidst a pile of books on my desk one day, she stopped in her tracks and I had the distinct feeling that we were watching one another, with an intense sort of mutual curiosity.
Locking eyes with this creature (or so it seemed to me), I wondered: what would it feel like to be dwarfed by a leaf or a blade of grass? To walk around on eight legs, and to see the world through eight eyes? How would it feel to produce a substance of a molecular strength greater than steel in my abdomen? How does a spider learn her weaving skills? How does it feel to dangle acrobatically on the end of the thread? Does she get tired whilst weaving? Does she ever stop and marvel at the beauty of her creation, or is it simply her meal ticket?
In my garden, I began to notice all the intricate spider webs billowing softly in the bushes. I was struck with a new sort of admiration for the sheer strength, endurance, cleverness and artistry of spiders. Their nimble ability to produce structures and patterns of such complex, fractal beauty that are so vast, from a spider’s point of view. Their sheer ability to just keep spinning and spinning.
One afternoon in particular, I happened to be in my garden at just the moment when the sunlight caught the glistening threads of perhaps a dozen different spiders webs anchored in the bushes. Suddenly, the most glorious array of shining circular geometrical patternings lit up like constellations, burning brightly for a long moment before gradually fading back to invisibility.
I had been paying attention at just the right moment to catch this dazzling, momentary display of magic and wonder. Completely star-struck, I felt like I, too, had received the spider’s gift.
And then, working my way slowly through David Abram’s glorious book, The Spell of the Sensuous, I discovered this passage:
‘If the worlds experienced by humans are so diverse, how much more diverse, still, must be the life-worlds of other animals - of wolves, or owls, or a community of bees! And yet, despite this multiplicity, it would seem that there are basic structures of the life-world that are shared, elements that are common to different cultures and even, we may suspect, to different species. Husserl’s1 writings seem to suggest that the life-world has various layers, that underneath the layer of the diverse cultural life-worlds there reposes a deeper, more unitary life-world, always already there beneath all our cultural acquisitions, a vast and continually overlooked dimension of experience that nevertheless supports and sustains all our diverse and discontinuous worldviews.’
Abram, as I wrote previously, reminds us that we are not separate from the more than human. ‘We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.’
In other words, there is always so much more to perceive and understand. Our perspectives are so limited. And so different. As we learn to perceive things more deeply, though, our experience perhaps brings us into closer communion - perhaps bridges the boundaries, just a little - with something infinite and universal that we can sense and tap into, but not fully grasp or define.
Paying greater attention, we discover a greater capacity to see a little beyond the scope of our ordinary, conditioned, routine-dulled, workaday perception. This takes us to places that are truly magical and new.
Working with such stories as the Spider Weaver, I am reminded to stay open and awake to the invitations of the greater living world of which I am part. Stories, I find, are always inviting us to richer, juicier ways of life. Tuned to the particular living sensibility of a story, I believe that one naturally discovers resonance in one’s experiences of the real, living world. Through our art, we are continuously discovering life anew, and stretching into deeper, richer, fuller dimensions.
This week, I am practicing staying fresh, sharp and alive. I’m paying careful attention to the more-than-human, and wondering what may lie just beyond the edge of my perception. I will keep stretching to meet it. How about you? As always, I would love to hear from you!
With love,
Megan
P.S. Did you know that you can access the full Living Stories archive, by visiting https://meganlindow.substack.com? You can always re-read your favourite pieces, or catch up on any dispatches you may have missed. My own favourite pieces explore why we humans truly are the 'storytelling animals'; the art of deep listening; freedom of expression through the body; soundscape ecology and the evocative qualities of sound. Have a look, and if you enjoy reading Living Stories, please share with others who may also enjoy it!
Edmund Husserl (1859-1930) is known as the principal founder of the philosophical discipline of phenomenology, which is essentially concerned with the study of direct, embodied, lived experience. As Abram writes, phenomenology ‘would seek not to explain the world, but to describe as closely as possible the way the world makes itself evident to awareness, the way things first arise in our direct, sensorial experience.’ You can read all about Husserl and phenomenology in this comprehensive article from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.