Webs

Summer hangs thick on the trees, blankets this part of the earth with lush evidence of life, how thickly it overlaps these days. The earliest gold and crimson leaves fall on the road and lane. Cicadias sing out loud, and spiders weave huge, complicated, fabulous webs.

I ovserved one of those remarkable webs this morning as I walked. It brough to my mind the seventh principle of the Unitarian Universalists: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part.

The actual spider designed-and-built product I saw this morning could stand as a microcosm of that whole of existence. Huge, and here and there a thread may break free yet the redundancies in the web design mean the web continues to function.

A group of my friends and I recently talked about how individual relationships open and close, how sometimes the closing feels sad, and I mentioned how sometimes I work harder and longer to maintain a connection than the other involved party works. I don't like that.

One friend said she thinks of each individual friendship as a spider web strand, how sometimes a thread will break free and flutter. When that happens in her web of friends, she said, she's not so quick to rush in with an attempted fix. I heard the ring of wisdom in her words: things end, dear heart, let go, let go.

I've also observed, year after year, that as hours-days-weeks turn into months the webs disappear. I don't remember ever running into one as I walked in the mid-winter woods. A spider's web holds many metaphors.