I saw a spider building a web yesterday. It may sound kind of shocking, but that was the very first time in my life I had the chance to witness it.
It wasn’t a very big spider, only about the size of a quarter, but it totally caught my full attention. At first, I thought it was panicking, being blown around in the wind, spazzing out. I would be acting crazy too if I thought I would fall from a very high place. In Spider distance, the ground was probably thirty feet away (3 feet in my distance)
And then I realized something; it was moving in a circle, along a path. I stared at the arachnid for a while, figuring out its pattern and carefully laid segments of silk. It would spin some web, connect it to a line that pointed to the middle, and then move on. Once in a while, the web would get tangled, and the spider would stop to fix it.
After about four or five minutes of my child-like fascination, my little brother Cruz walks up to me and asks,
“Is that a mean guy? Is he gonna bite you?” I didn’t want to scare him and tell him to back off, being four years old and all. Someone acting like that can cause a child to hate all bugs. As the saying goes, we are the product of our raising.
“No, he won’t bite you. He’s making a web.”
“Oh. Is his name Joe?” asked Cruz.
“Sure, his name is Joe.”
Cruz walked away, leaving me to ponder over the gossamer threads this spider was weaving. I started to think about how the spiders’ web was a lot like life in many ways; it had to be crafted, it took time, and when someone destroyed it, you had to redo the entire thing.
I felt bad for the little spiders that built these webs and had to reconstruct them over and over again, just because humans are careless and didn’t think a little bug could a difference.
That little bug made a difference to me.
The spiders I see every day teach me that life can be hard, but it can be rewarding as well. I mean look at how the morning dew makes that web shine as if it had caught the stars! Think about how strong and durable that miniscule webbing really is; it can stop a jumbo jet in mid flight, only using two centimeters of its awesome power.
Yeah, life can be pretty tough, but just like spiders, that means we get the chance to create masterpieces over and over and over again, using our special talents that no one else has.
So the next time you see a spider web, don’t knock it down; Joe will be very thankful for it.