Spider Dreaming Country

Since moving to my new home, I have dreamed of spiders. Fat-bodied mothers crocheting silvery wombs for eggs. Paul Klee angel spiders, composed blind, with legs as thin as a pencil-line. Dock-spiders, brown and sinuous. The black widow I once pulled from a bag of grapes at a sleep-over, long-dead stowaway that I kept in a small Tupperware and took with me to class the next day much to my teacher’s horror. Pinprick spiders tracing constellations on the textured ceiling of my bedroom, each one a moving star in a shifting cosmic architecture. Red spider nebulas. Arachne, hair like cornsilk, purple threads of wool sifting through her fingers like rain through grass, a delta of cloth spreading out behind her.

According to Ovid’s version of the myth, the young Arachne’s father was a famous purple dyer, Idmon of Colophon. I keep thinking of this as I peer through a web lacing shut the corner of my kitchen window that looks out on apple trees, fields, mountains.

Summer’s rainbow display of wildflowers has flattened into a world of purple and yellow. Chicory and aster against ragweed and goldenrod. Every stem draws its last translated sunlight down into the roots, leaving its aboveground body mauve. The fields foam with lavender shadows, the silvery violet of red leaves eaten by mildew on the ground. The grasses purple. The sky around a buttery moon tightens its purple skin. Do moments of transition always wear these colors? I think of the dawns and dusks – bardo hours – that love to settle in this little cup of valley I now call home. Always purple.

Arachne’s purple. Her temptation. Perhaps purple is not just a liminal color between seasons and times of day, but between species. Athena transforms the Lydian maiden into a spider in jealousy after the goddess is bested. The purple outside is an invitation to weave and unweave, to become a different type of being, to grow six more legs, six more eyes. Purple of Tyrian dye, sea snails crushed with heavy rocks, blood and shell stung silk, the color of the world making a decision to tip from ripe to rot. Purple is the color a body sings after impact. The field outside my window is mottled by a summer of heavy flowering. I imagine each sinking seed pod and mugwort spear gently pressing the skin, coaxing up the bruise color.

I write about spiders a great deal. Their webs. Their extended cognition. Their association with writers. Their ability to “balloon” and travel on electromagnetic currents. Their often violent mating rituals. I’ve always loved them. But since moving to my new home, they have asserted themselves boldly and insistently in both the real and the dream world. The previous tenant left a collection of geodes and quartz on the porch and I wake after a full moon night to find that some industrious spider has sewn together the stones into an elaborate web.

I look up Lenape myths about spiders and only manage to find a suspected retelling of Arachne’s story. The colonizers threads overtaking the cobwebs left behind after genocide. Weaving and unweaving. I read that Cellar Spiders (Pholcus phalangiodes) do a distracting death dance, shaking another spider’s web to imitate caught prey, and then toss their own silk over the spider, consuming it and stealing the original web.

The house I am living in first shows up in town records in the 1830s and it is tailored to this landscape in a way that most modern constructions are not. Its windows have been carefully chosen like frames for living painting that live, not on the wall, but in the world beyond the wall.  This home knows how to find the sun. How to frame the stars and the mountain. This home belonged briefly to my friend who is now dead. I did not weave this home – this web. I did not steal it either. But like a spider thinks with its entire extended web, I now feel my own mind distributing into the entangled weave of this house, this landscape.

I wake from a dream that two spiders are suspended from the ceiling above me like a living chandelier, providing not light but vibratory life. The next morning, going to make my bed, a jumping spider, almost mammalian with its wide face and furred body, streaks from below my pillow.

Am I dreaming of spiders or are spider’s dreaming me?

The land says, This is Spider Dreaming Country. It’s been a long time since anyone thought to ask.

I suspect it will take my whole life to understand what that means.

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All above images are from the 1889 book American Spiders and Their Spinningwork available here.

Hello my closer-knit web. My kin who make my life practically possible. Thank you for showing up. For helping me pay for food, for my home, for my increasingly complex healthcare. You are keeping me alive and writing and I am hoping I can send some love and nourishment back through the threads to you. It’s been a bit gnarly lately in the body/health realms. But also, there has been just a bounty of real-life love and community. I’d love to share a more intimate update about all those things in October if that is something you are interested in receiving? Let me know in the comments? Also let me know what animals, plants, fungi, insects have been dreaming you? And how is your heart? Your animal-body? Your green-spirit-pith?

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