A coy glitter, like the thickness of wind flashingly visible as it turns sideways. Something stitches in and out of the visible along the green flame of the telegraph weed. It is only when this specter stills at the summit that she solidifies into a small dust-colored spider. Looking at her, six feet aloft in the air, taller than me, I wonder what inspired her to climb? Is there food up there? A mate? Or is this impulse beyond the narrow bounds of survival and reproduction – emerging from that aesthetic realm that science can only point to but never properly explain. Why do we climb to summits? To see the valley? To taste the fraying oxygen of our mortality? I think it is to enjoy the authorial pull of gravity, pulling us into the ease of descent. When else do we feel the invisible compulsion of something like a god more intimately, more bodily? I’ve never felt more “authored” than when I start to run downhill a mountain. The earth pulls me back to her. She hurries me.
Ah! No. The spider inverts, exposes her abdomen to the cosmos and then extrudes one long, spit-silver thread into the still air. No wind. Not even an exhale. And yet she rises. Floats. Begins to follow a flightpath not visible to the human eye.