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.
Sep 23, 2023·edited Oct 1, 2023Liked by Sophie Strand
Lovely observations, thnx for your words.
Do they dream? As a river ecologist, I often ask this question of riverine lifeforms in the Catskills. The science suggests that at least all vertebrates dream, and also at least some invertebrates, like bees, right? Brook trout, slimy sculpin, dace... nightmares of predators, like me? Do mayflies dream of their life in previous instars--maybe 15 to 25 in all!--before reaching their imago? Like I do?
Mary Powers, who did groundbreaking work on stream food webs, showed that the webs of riverine spiders get more and more elaborate the further, laterally, from the stream, because near the stream, the abundance of stream invertebrate hatching provides plenty of nourishment with minimal investment in their capture (evident in the Catskills). Her work helped show how food webs weave stream and forest ecosystems into one.
I wonder if other species' dreams weave any narrative structure, a wholeness? Do mine?lol
Is the integrity created by narrative structure "anti-microbial", making the webs woven by their/our dreams more resistant to predation and decay? ?
So many gifts here Mark. Thank you for sharing! That’s fascinating about the complexity of riverine spiders and ecotones. I’m going to have to read Powers research
Yes please to a more intimate update in October if that's what you're feeling called to share!🤲🏻 Love receiving whatever is moving through you, it is always such potent medicine.
Turkeytail mushrooms, butterflies and the soft velvety plump milkweed, stags and staghorn sumac, snake and their lithe erotic movement and their embodiment of shedding, jewelweed, hawthorn, rowan . Fiery ones. Thank you for this invitation, I feel so much abundance in reflecting on those who are dreaming me.✨
Thank you for this poetic, watery, liminal medicine. I needed it to cool and soothe my firey nerves as I too am moving, remodeling, settling in, unpacking and im rather exhausted by it. Still not feeling at home in our new home. So many months of feeling the grief of displacement & of doing it as a mama. Yes spider medicine. Yes invisible webs that hold us. Ive been dreaming of and being dreamed by orca whales. I had a dream I was walking the beaches barefoot and they were beached and needing my help. Id stand on their bellies and their fins would lock with my arms and elbows and id swim them back into the ocean to their freedom. It was such a fantastic feeling!
I love summoning the orcas. They are deeply maternal and guided by post-menopausal grandmothers. Loved reading about this in Lucy Cooke’s book Bitch. I am hoping they usher in a season of recharge and beauty and nourishment for you Marysia. Much much love to you and all your wild kin
I have also been dreaming of orcas - free and swimming alongside a boat I am sailing on, with little ones in tow! I hope they bring you the healing and freedom they've been singing to me in my dreams
As always your words inspire,enlighten, soothe, educate, awaken but mostly heal. May you find as much healing in their offering as is received by your readers.
Hi Sophie - always a pleasure and transformative experience to wake in the morning to see/ read what you have so beautifully and generously offered us through your words/ insights/ brilliance/ kindness/ authenticity and love ❤️
And the more intimate, the better.
Sending love and deep appreciation from the wild beauty of Point Reyes, California where I’m blessed to commune with red shouldered hawk, deer, fox, hummingbird, butterfly, bobcat, and raccoon while being surrounded by redwoods and kissed by carpets of flowers and cool foggy breezes off the Pacific Ocean ✨
Good morning from California Sophie - Intimate sharings from you are always welcome. Cats: lynx, bobcat, panther, leopard, lion, tiger, feline, frankincense and cassia. That's the pleasant dreaming. Something else though too... I cannot name .... like a virus I do not want to spread.... with such momentum in my thoughts that it is alarming and requiring much muscle to neutralize. Perhaps the nature of the times. Much respect and love for you.
Thank you for this feline and scent scape. Also re: “the unnameable” - I think many people have had intense dreams or a heightened sense of anxiety lately. The energy is high-pitched and anxious as our earth is desperately trying to correct and adapt to our unsustainable behavior. Whenever I feel this energy lately, I remind myself that it’s me tuning into the larger body of the earth dealing with its own wobbling nervous system.
I appreciate your insight Sophie and thank you for writing it for me. Reminding myself that I am part of a larger body, a larger nervous system, used to help me but now it compounds my grief... and in fact, I feel I would be relieved if it was "just me" experiencing this. If I take it steps further (which I inevitably do) then I recognize also that a strong healing/soothing force comes from somewhere I know not... and if it is happening in this localized spot it happens large scale as well.
Thank you for this beautiful weaving of the web, Sophie! Waking up to this Equinox here in the land of Rnchantment ( New Mexico) and listening to the birds ( blue jays, finches and later on crows and ravens, I relish the honey of your writing! I am entering soon into the mystery of hip replacement surgery, and navigating the anxiety surrounding that initiation. Living it spiritually and feeling supported by a collective of friends in physical form and others unseen. Sending you warm hugs and love ❤️ Isabella
I am sending mycorrhizal fungi to knit back your connective tissue and help in whatever post-surgery healing you need. Much much love to you and your council of birds Isabella 🪶❤️🔥
Love hearing about your life Sophie, how it weaves and is woven by all that is around you. Dreaming with you, where our worlds are interwoven among the flowers, spiders, and mycelium. And what is dreaming us in return. ❤️
Yes, please to a personal update. I worry about you, which I hope isn’t presumptuous. I hold you persistently in the Light, and being able to also hold current realities for you as well feels like a more potent prayer.
Thank you, Sophie! I would also love to receive your update in October.
There is such a palpable feeling of returning home when I read your words. I have such trust in the threads you weave that I feel myself surrendering the weight of my whole body into them. There is one moment in my life that comes to mind when I feel this kind of release and trust. I once performed as a dancer at the Met Opera in the Berlioz opera Les Troyens, a retelling of the Aeneid. In one scene I played a character called Laocoön, a priest who tried to warn the Trojans that the Trojan Horse was a ruse and was summarily banished to the sea with his two sons. A couple of dozen dancers enacting the sea where whipping me and my sons around the stage while we tried to reach for one another. The culminating moment in the scene before the final death was me standing on the shoulders of one of my tallest castmates and falling backwards to be swallowed up by the sea. It was one of those moments where time seemed to stretch and I felt the back surface and flesh of my body stream away from my spine like a waterfall before my skeleton was forced to follow by the push from the membrane of the skin of the opposite front surface of my body. The exhilaration of having such a deeply embodied somatic moment, in performance and center-stage in that gigantic theater is one of the most memorable moments in my performing career... and my body falls into resonance with that memory every time I read your words. Thank you for all that you manifest, Sophie.
Lately, snakes and I have been dreaming one another. Particularly, many little Kukulkans, mystic connectors between the inner and the outer, the sea and the land, known and unknow, seen and unseen, reason and dream - weaving and weaving inside of me. I especially feel them when my body spontaneously cracks and releases some joints that often get fused together. I've been joking with the bodyworkers that give my being so much support that I think I was the bust of a statue in a past life. The bust of my body always finds itself fusing together when I look away for too long.
I can feel these words unfurling in my own organism. I am so glad my writing summons them to body-mind. Thank you so: " It was one of those moments where time seemed to stretch and I felt the back surface and flesh of my body stream away from my spine like a waterfall before my skeleton was forced to follow by the push from the membrane of the skin of the opposite front surface of my body. The exhilaration of having such a deeply embodied somatic moment, in performance and center-stage in that gigantic theater is one of the most memorable moments in my performing career... and my body falls into resonance with that memory every time I read your words. Thank you for all that you manifest, Sophie."
Snakes are arriving here too. A copperhead lives under my porch. Intense protector.
Spiders and purple are where I live. In the process of creating a puppet show about Spider and the Moon, I'm pretty sure I mentioned to you before. It's a slow process as it is being birthed from dreamtime. Listening for songs long forgotten. And oh yes, the human body and all of their adventures in being. I'm always here to listen to your experiences and perspectives on what your body is going through and how it is shaping the rest of you...and vice versa.
Spider and the moon! I can’t wait to be in the audience for that show. And I’m here too for all the bodily weather systems, the cosmic wondering and wandering from your ecosystem Lindsay. So much love on this just tipped last equinox to you
Would love an update when you can. I love spiders too but have felt most visited by deer - a family of two does and two fawns especially- and pollinators of all sorts including earwigs I find illuminated in my flashlight on sunflowers. They give me the shivers! My animal body heart and pith have been tired and unmoored from routine with travel and visits but achingly open to new experiences - biking and hiking, daily tarot and therapy, dreaming up a scifi story, on the apps for friends 😅🦌🐛🌻
Wishing you a season of regeneration and rooting Bri! And sending love to your 🦌 there is a family that sleep behind my home and I can feel the softness of their collective dreaming every morning when I wake up and peer out into the half light.
"The sky around a buttery moon tightens it's purple skin" ... omfg. Lines like these melt me. Break me in two. Open me up. Crack me. ... Amazing. (I will never forget "A mute octave of moonlight" either.
Oh, it means a lot to hear that some of these images "work"!! I'm always struggling to describe beauty that feels beyond language. Thank you for reading, Taj
Sophie I just love your deep connection to nature and your beautiful gift of communication. Sharing a little bit of Native American Animal love, “Spider’s body is made like the number eight (infinity symbol, too!) connected by two lobe-like parts connected at the waist, and eight legs. Spider is the symbol for the infinite possibilities of creation. Her eight legs represent the four winds of change and the four directions in the medicine wheel (Rites of Passage learning the skills of Integrity. Humility. Dignity. Wisdom. ... among others.)” ~ Jamie Sams 🌈🕷️ 🌊💨🔥🌎🕸️🏳️🌈
Lovely observations, thnx for your words.
Do they dream? As a river ecologist, I often ask this question of riverine lifeforms in the Catskills. The science suggests that at least all vertebrates dream, and also at least some invertebrates, like bees, right? Brook trout, slimy sculpin, dace... nightmares of predators, like me? Do mayflies dream of their life in previous instars--maybe 15 to 25 in all!--before reaching their imago? Like I do?
Mary Powers, who did groundbreaking work on stream food webs, showed that the webs of riverine spiders get more and more elaborate the further, laterally, from the stream, because near the stream, the abundance of stream invertebrate hatching provides plenty of nourishment with minimal investment in their capture (evident in the Catskills). Her work helped show how food webs weave stream and forest ecosystems into one.
I wonder if other species' dreams weave any narrative structure, a wholeness? Do mine?lol
Is the integrity created by narrative structure "anti-microbial", making the webs woven by their/our dreams more resistant to predation and decay? ?
https://asknature.org/strategy/spider-silks-antibacterial-power/
So many gifts here Mark. Thank you for sharing! That’s fascinating about the complexity of riverine spiders and ecotones. I’m going to have to read Powers research
And this, a trailer for a great film I've used as part of intern trainings. If you want to see the whole thing, I can loan you the dvd. https://www.freshwatersillustrated.org/riverwebs
You might try this as intro/overview:
https://youtu.be/DRjfe6gsU14?si=aO1bCHUTHvIADHMx
Yes please to a more intimate update in October if that's what you're feeling called to share!🤲🏻 Love receiving whatever is moving through you, it is always such potent medicine.
Turkeytail mushrooms, butterflies and the soft velvety plump milkweed, stags and staghorn sumac, snake and their lithe erotic movement and their embodiment of shedding, jewelweed, hawthorn, rowan . Fiery ones. Thank you for this invitation, I feel so much abundance in reflecting on those who are dreaming me.✨
This feels like a poem!!!! I’m tripping through these beings alongside you. Guided by their puffs of spore, curls of insistent pollen.
Thank you for this poetic, watery, liminal medicine. I needed it to cool and soothe my firey nerves as I too am moving, remodeling, settling in, unpacking and im rather exhausted by it. Still not feeling at home in our new home. So many months of feeling the grief of displacement & of doing it as a mama. Yes spider medicine. Yes invisible webs that hold us. Ive been dreaming of and being dreamed by orca whales. I had a dream I was walking the beaches barefoot and they were beached and needing my help. Id stand on their bellies and their fins would lock with my arms and elbows and id swim them back into the ocean to their freedom. It was such a fantastic feeling!
I love summoning the orcas. They are deeply maternal and guided by post-menopausal grandmothers. Loved reading about this in Lucy Cooke’s book Bitch. I am hoping they usher in a season of recharge and beauty and nourishment for you Marysia. Much much love to you and all your wild kin
I have also been dreaming of orcas - free and swimming alongside a boat I am sailing on, with little ones in tow! I hope they bring you the healing and freedom they've been singing to me in my dreams
Every time I read what you have written a mantra wells in me... I love your writing....I LOVE your writing.... I LOVE YOUR WRITING ✍️.
Oh thank you so so Vicki! 🕸️ 🌺
As always your words inspire,enlighten, soothe, educate, awaken but mostly heal. May you find as much healing in their offering as is received by your readers.
Thank you deeply 🕷️🌄💚
Hi Sophie - always a pleasure and transformative experience to wake in the morning to see/ read what you have so beautifully and generously offered us through your words/ insights/ brilliance/ kindness/ authenticity and love ❤️
And the more intimate, the better.
Sending love and deep appreciation from the wild beauty of Point Reyes, California where I’m blessed to commune with red shouldered hawk, deer, fox, hummingbird, butterfly, bobcat, and raccoon while being surrounded by redwoods and kissed by carpets of flowers and cool foggy breezes off the Pacific Ocean ✨
I can almost taste those briny breezes! Thank you to you and your dancing holobiont coast Lizzy 🦋 🪶 🦊 🦝
Good morning from California Sophie - Intimate sharings from you are always welcome. Cats: lynx, bobcat, panther, leopard, lion, tiger, feline, frankincense and cassia. That's the pleasant dreaming. Something else though too... I cannot name .... like a virus I do not want to spread.... with such momentum in my thoughts that it is alarming and requiring much muscle to neutralize. Perhaps the nature of the times. Much respect and love for you.
Thank you for this feline and scent scape. Also re: “the unnameable” - I think many people have had intense dreams or a heightened sense of anxiety lately. The energy is high-pitched and anxious as our earth is desperately trying to correct and adapt to our unsustainable behavior. Whenever I feel this energy lately, I remind myself that it’s me tuning into the larger body of the earth dealing with its own wobbling nervous system.
I appreciate your insight Sophie and thank you for writing it for me. Reminding myself that I am part of a larger body, a larger nervous system, used to help me but now it compounds my grief... and in fact, I feel I would be relieved if it was "just me" experiencing this. If I take it steps further (which I inevitably do) then I recognize also that a strong healing/soothing force comes from somewhere I know not... and if it is happening in this localized spot it happens large scale as well.
Thank you for this beautiful weaving of the web, Sophie! Waking up to this Equinox here in the land of Rnchantment ( New Mexico) and listening to the birds ( blue jays, finches and later on crows and ravens, I relish the honey of your writing! I am entering soon into the mystery of hip replacement surgery, and navigating the anxiety surrounding that initiation. Living it spiritually and feeling supported by a collective of friends in physical form and others unseen. Sending you warm hugs and love ❤️ Isabella
I am sending mycorrhizal fungi to knit back your connective tissue and help in whatever post-surgery healing you need. Much much love to you and your council of birds Isabella 🪶❤️🔥
Love hearing about your life Sophie, how it weaves and is woven by all that is around you. Dreaming with you, where our worlds are interwoven among the flowers, spiders, and mycelium. And what is dreaming us in return. ❤️
Thank you for dreaming with me Mary 🌿🕸️✨
Appreciated the language, the imagery, the color. Goldenrod and asters here and a single turkey traveling the landscape.
Turkey season! Have you ever seen them fly Victoria? It's absurd and miraculous!
And fly their mass up into a tree to roost - many in one tree.
The wildest thing!!!
Yes, please to a personal update. I worry about you, which I hope isn’t presumptuous. I hold you persistently in the Light, and being able to also hold current realities for you as well feels like a more potent prayer.
I really appreciate that care Asha. And I send it back with the migrating monarchs, taking their last sips of nectar in the field behind my home
Thank you, Sophie! I would also love to receive your update in October.
There is such a palpable feeling of returning home when I read your words. I have such trust in the threads you weave that I feel myself surrendering the weight of my whole body into them. There is one moment in my life that comes to mind when I feel this kind of release and trust. I once performed as a dancer at the Met Opera in the Berlioz opera Les Troyens, a retelling of the Aeneid. In one scene I played a character called Laocoön, a priest who tried to warn the Trojans that the Trojan Horse was a ruse and was summarily banished to the sea with his two sons. A couple of dozen dancers enacting the sea where whipping me and my sons around the stage while we tried to reach for one another. The culminating moment in the scene before the final death was me standing on the shoulders of one of my tallest castmates and falling backwards to be swallowed up by the sea. It was one of those moments where time seemed to stretch and I felt the back surface and flesh of my body stream away from my spine like a waterfall before my skeleton was forced to follow by the push from the membrane of the skin of the opposite front surface of my body. The exhilaration of having such a deeply embodied somatic moment, in performance and center-stage in that gigantic theater is one of the most memorable moments in my performing career... and my body falls into resonance with that memory every time I read your words. Thank you for all that you manifest, Sophie.
Lately, snakes and I have been dreaming one another. Particularly, many little Kukulkans, mystic connectors between the inner and the outer, the sea and the land, known and unknow, seen and unseen, reason and dream - weaving and weaving inside of me. I especially feel them when my body spontaneously cracks and releases some joints that often get fused together. I've been joking with the bodyworkers that give my being so much support that I think I was the bust of a statue in a past life. The bust of my body always finds itself fusing together when I look away for too long.
With lovingwarmth.
Kayvon,
I can feel these words unfurling in my own organism. I am so glad my writing summons them to body-mind. Thank you so: " It was one of those moments where time seemed to stretch and I felt the back surface and flesh of my body stream away from my spine like a waterfall before my skeleton was forced to follow by the push from the membrane of the skin of the opposite front surface of my body. The exhilaration of having such a deeply embodied somatic moment, in performance and center-stage in that gigantic theater is one of the most memorable moments in my performing career... and my body falls into resonance with that memory every time I read your words. Thank you for all that you manifest, Sophie."
Snakes are arriving here too. A copperhead lives under my porch. Intense protector.
Thank you for this outpouring of your incredible experience. It is truly inspiring 🥰
Thank you for receiving so generously and openheartedly.💛
Spiders and purple are where I live. In the process of creating a puppet show about Spider and the Moon, I'm pretty sure I mentioned to you before. It's a slow process as it is being birthed from dreamtime. Listening for songs long forgotten. And oh yes, the human body and all of their adventures in being. I'm always here to listen to your experiences and perspectives on what your body is going through and how it is shaping the rest of you...and vice versa.
Spider and the moon! I can’t wait to be in the audience for that show. And I’m here too for all the bodily weather systems, the cosmic wondering and wandering from your ecosystem Lindsay. So much love on this just tipped last equinox to you
Let us sing together with the spiders!!!
Would love an update when you can. I love spiders too but have felt most visited by deer - a family of two does and two fawns especially- and pollinators of all sorts including earwigs I find illuminated in my flashlight on sunflowers. They give me the shivers! My animal body heart and pith have been tired and unmoored from routine with travel and visits but achingly open to new experiences - biking and hiking, daily tarot and therapy, dreaming up a scifi story, on the apps for friends 😅🦌🐛🌻
Wishing you a season of regeneration and rooting Bri! And sending love to your 🦌 there is a family that sleep behind my home and I can feel the softness of their collective dreaming every morning when I wake up and peer out into the half light.
"The sky around a buttery moon tightens it's purple skin" ... omfg. Lines like these melt me. Break me in two. Open me up. Crack me. ... Amazing. (I will never forget "A mute octave of moonlight" either.
Oh, it means a lot to hear that some of these images "work"!! I'm always struggling to describe beauty that feels beyond language. Thank you for reading, Taj
Sophie I just love your deep connection to nature and your beautiful gift of communication. Sharing a little bit of Native American Animal love, “Spider’s body is made like the number eight (infinity symbol, too!) connected by two lobe-like parts connected at the waist, and eight legs. Spider is the symbol for the infinite possibilities of creation. Her eight legs represent the four winds of change and the four directions in the medicine wheel (Rites of Passage learning the skills of Integrity. Humility. Dignity. Wisdom. ... among others.)” ~ Jamie Sams 🌈🕷️ 🌊💨🔥🌎🕸️🏳️🌈