Spider Grandmother Teaching

At risk of appropriating, I gather the stories that mean the most to me, from Western dogma, Eastern philosophy, and Indigenous wisdom.

I feel a great pull to the idea of the Spider Grandmother, especially after learning about the Dreamcatcher ritual from an Ojibwe elder, Asinaabe. Spiders were here long before us on this earth, after all. She is our collective creative force, expressing through indiscernible threads which connect us all in the darkness of the subconscious, like the mycelium network under the decay of the forest floor carrying messages between trees.

She teaches me that we can influence each other in non-physical ways. We resonate, we attract, we repel, we fear, we love, and we learn together. I get intuitive pulls all the time, but in childhood I learned well to ignore them. I was punished for being too sensitive, for challenging authority if I thought I knew better for myself, I was punished for trying to have boundaries. Turning my boundaries off, I became receptive. Receptive to pain around me, sadness, neglect, powerlessness, lack, manipulation... I proved to myself very early how much pain many Americans endured, and ignored!

In my Pandemic Paranoia, other wounds became even more obvious, arriving to my mind and heart through a sort of telepathy: visions of sexual abuse, human trafficking, drug abuse, psychosis, schizophrenia, extortion, unethical experimentation, war tragedies. Spider Grandmother was giving me other peoples' nightmares or lived experiences! Even in the immediate confusion of experiencing these visions and emotions, I was told by Her that these people felt less alone by me simply experiencing that with them. By resonating with their powerlessness, isolation, and pain, I was able to tap into their experience.

Spider Grandmother often gave me signs of weaving, wave forms, ebbing and flowing, elevating moods, depressed moods... She hinted at the idea of meeting certain people in certain moods and being able to elevate it by offering them some loving words. She taught me how to weave. How to hold hands with somebody's heart and love them in their pain, not to wallow. I was also humbled by others who did the same for me, validating my pain and offering safety and comfort as I spoke about a difficult emotion. Spider Grandmother held my heart with these encounters, showing me how to accept love and allow being held by others.

One cannot give without also receiving.

Reciprocity.

Holding each other in love.

Weaving our destinies together, even if through a brief encounter of love, an oasis, in this journey of life.

Nowadays, with each memory of those traumatic experiences, either mine, or the visions I received, I often dive down into the dark resonating with that pain. I am beginning the weaving process, as my heart connects to the heart of that pain. I link with it, and on my way back up, I elevate myself by experiencing gratitude, or beauty, or nature... Each time I do this, I also elevate the memory, cinching tighter the net that I've been weaving: a network of both dear and toxic encounters. I see every soul as a thread, and Spider Grandmother is having me pull on them, fishing some from the isolating pain. I'm not at the top, I certainly have those encounters with angels on earth, offering me unconditional love, pulling me up from the muck, too! Because Grandmother knows that we don't succeed unless we walk together. We don't evolve, unless we all lend hands in the Garden. Each time I dive, I don't have to dive as far down. Each time I come up for air, my heart stretches a bit wider, talks a bit louder, beats a bit more purposefully.