always remember, the light cast onto us is neither the beginning nor the end
Tonight, while sitting here working I encountered a spider. It seems thinner than most of the others I’ve found inside. So I offered it water, but the spider continued on its way without drinking.
It was at first the spider’s shadow I saw along the wall. Having turned on a nightlight, the small spider seemed bigger than most spiders of its kind are and I went over to observe it. Finding the spider uninterested in me, and wondering if it was attracted to the light or heat, I left it to be.
A few hours later, still sitting at the computer I caught sight of something dust-like just out of the corner of my right eye. Leaning back, since the particle was not moving or flowing down like they usually do, I caught glimpse of the spider’s body and legs. I moved over several inches and blew before ducking incase I’d blown to hard and the spider was slated to end up on my face next.
After regaining its stability, the spider walked back up its thin thread. Wanting to make sure it got all the way up and wouldn’t soon be in my hair or on my desk in a danger zone of moving objects, I turned on the flashlight from my phone and watched it ascend.
As the spider climbed, I watched as it grew closer and closer to its less and less distorted shadow on the ceiling. As its paws touched down (up?) I noticed it had again become one with its shadow. Moving together seamlessly and constantly in contact. I wondered what lesson this might teach about my own life, my own shadow(s), and the distance created between me and it.
But as I reconsidered this viewpoint, I realized that the spider and its shadow had indeed not merged. They were still separated by some layer. The spider remaining on this side of the world and the shadow forever attached to something beyond, something intangible but nevertheless able to be interfered with. The human, at a whim, can cause the disappearance of the spider’s shadow from being visible, can wave a hand between the spider and light source and obscure it, cover it within a different shadow.
After stepping its way across a small stretch of cieling, which for the spider seems quite a greater distance, again, the spider began its slow and meticulous descent downwards. Twice it paused for some length of time. The first likely halfway down, and the second time just a foot off the ground. Trust. The spider I see now had so much trust in this delicate strand of webbing. And the fear of being swept off it or the web detaching from its anchor point never once stopped it from accomplishing its goal.
Because I am warmer than the walls, the light of screen is attractive, or the desk and my seated body is higher than the floorboards…I do not know why first the spider came down and likely would have landed on my shoulder. I am thankful for its foresight in avoiding my hair though. I doubt it saw a likeness in the blown glass spider of my straw or in the finely painted white spider of my phone case.
Instead, I watched as it crawled along the floor, finally on the ground and off the cieling. And as it crawled back up a foot to tie something (a flurry of dust? a knot?) into its thin strand of safety, and then back down again. It takes spiders quite a bit to make webbing, so I’ve left it hanging down like a firepole from my cieling to the ground in the hopes that the spider will wander back over to it, and that I won’t walk into it opening my window or straightening out the stained glass moon with its pair of spiders next time.
It is not that we are the shadow, nor that the shadow is us, but that together we are the self and the dark reflection (casting) of that self.
Paraphrased (Dantalion & Sitri)