Spider Wisdom: Living the Spiral
An intact web seen on Sauvie Island this Fall
Orb weaver spiders create strong, spiral webs suspended in space and wait for what they need to come to them. What can we learn from them as we travel further into the darkest time of year, when we’re asked to let go of our pursuits, ambitions, linear thinking, and Summer ways of being in the world?
We explore all of this in the latest episode of A Wild New Work.
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Welcome to A Wild New Work, a podcast about how to divest from capitalism and the norms of modern work and step into the soulful calling of these times we live in, which includes the call to rekindle our relationship with the earth. I'm Megan Leatherman, a mother to two small kids, writer, amateur ecologist, and vocational guide. I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I'm your host today.
Hi friend and welcome. I'm so glad that you're here. So honored that we're sharing this space together today. Happy Samhain. Happy Halloween. Happy All Souls Day if you celebrate. Happy Dia de los Muertos if you celebrate. I hope you're finding some authentic ways to connect with this time, whatever that means to you, whether it's simple or ornate.
You know, in Northern Europe, in the British Isles, this time, Samhain, would have been celebrated on the full moon. After the new moon, after the equinox, so that would have been October 28th this year.
There was a full moon and a lunar eclipse in Taurus, and you know, that would have marked the beginning of the winter season. In Northern Europe there were two sort of major seasons, winter and summer, and here in the Pacific Northwest and in the sort of wheel of the year that we have now, we celebrate four kind of distinct seasons.
And October 31st to sort of become popularized as Halloween. But all that to say, if this was the beginning of the winter season, then I think it's a nice permission slip to not feel like you have to do... all of your introspecting or, um, working with beings on the other side of the veil or contemplation of death on this one day.
You have the entire winter season. The days are getting darker and darker. The weather is bringing us in a more internal place. And so I encourage you to just go with what feels right at this time, whether that's, you know, celebrating on Halloween, or, you know, later, um, and all throughout the winter. These festivals would have been occurring throughout the winter months, not just on Halloween or Christmas or any of the major holidays that we honor in dominant culture these days.
I know that many of you have been impacted by and are processing the tragedies occurring in Gaza and Israel and the West Bank right now, and I just want to say that In my experience, working with our dead, with helpers on the other side, with the wisdom of the autumn season and the seasonal shifts, that all of that can really help us increase our capacity right now. Our capacity to not shut down in the midst of this, but to really hold it tenderly and to let it activate our caring, our commitment to creating communities that can begin to understand and unwind patterns of colonization, both abroad, but also right here in the United States, where the project of colonization is very much not over, but is ongoing.
And so I think this Time is sort of highlighting that part of our work right now is to see what that conflict, what colonization does and what it sort of means for us right now, what it's asking of us. To have the courage to sort of live into those questions, to live into the responsibilities that it brings up, and so I hope you will, you know, light candles today or this week, spend time in the dark, really embrace this season, contemplate your own death, invite your beloved dead close to you, and do what you need to do right now in order to keep going in a good way.
And I'm hopeful that this episode is going to help you do that. We're going to be talking about spider wisdom. It is Scorpio season, and of course that's symbolized by the scorpion, which is an arachnid like its spider cousin. It is their time right now. It has been their time, especially since the late summer.
And today I'm going to be talking about orb weaver spiders in particular. And these are the spiders that you see creating these circular webs that are sort of suspended between vegetation or between things. There is a reason the spider is at the heart of so many creation myths and myths related to how the universe works.
We sense the web of which we are a part. And these little beings come and give us a literal embodiment of that. They show us, they remind us of the web that we are a part of. I think they are very important teachers, especially right now. And so I'm going to share more about them and what they might have to show us about how to live and work in a good way, in a spirolic way. And I know spiders can be kind of creepy, and they're sort of a taboo creature in some ways, and that is Perfectly in alignment with Scorpio season and the themes of death and darkness that we're working with, that these things that sort of give us the creeps actually have a lot of medicine for us.
And so I'm excited to dive in with all of that today. I want to say thank you to Rosa for sponsoring the show on my new sponsorship website, buymeacoffee. com slash Megan Leatherman. Thank you Rosa for opting in for the year membership. That's a huge, um, gift and I'm really honored to receive your support and if you are listening and have benefited from the show and would like to chip in financially and show your support that way, it means a lot to me.
I'll put the link in the show notes, but again, it's just at buymeacoffee. com slash Megan Leatherman. Thank you. All right, I'm gonna bring us into our opening invocation and then we'll dive in to all things spider. So wherever you are, you can just notice your body and time and space, whether you're moving or still.
You might see what it's like to feel the ground or the air around you. May each of us be blessed and emboldened to do the work we're meant to do on this planet. May our work honor our ancestors, known and unknown, and may it be in harmony with all creatures that we share this earth with. I express gratitude for all of the technologies and gifts that have made this possible, and I'm grateful to the Cowlitz and Clackamas tribes, among many others, who are the original stewards of the land that I'm on.
Okay, well I want to start by just sharing some facts about spiders so that you can get a sense for how incredible these creatures are, and then I'm going to weave a lot of that into the rest of our episode.
So like I said earlier, I'm talking specifically about a type of spider called the orb weaver, and there are many species of orb weaver spiders, but these are the ones that you see in your garden out here in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. They are forming these circular webs, again, between branches or between, you know, your porch post and the chair. They are very creative. They find many ways to suspend in space. All spiders make silk, but only about half of them make webs, and not all of them make circular webs, so we're talking about a very specific subset of spiders today, these orb weavers.
And spiders make different types of silk for different uses. Some of it is really strong and forms the framework for a web. Some of it is sticky and forms the inner parts of these orb weavers. They are sticky so that they can catch prey. Some of the silk is for wrapping their caught prey, some of it is for making their egg sacs.
So there's different kinds that they can actually create with their bodies. And their silk, if it was sort of, if we had a human equivalent, their silk is five times stronger than steel. So, the fact that they are, Literally creating this substance, this material, from their bodies and can recreate it their entire lives is incredible, I mean, really, like, imagine if you could, like, create steel with your body and build You know, whatever you needed to with it.
That's amazing. The silk comes out of what are called spinnerets at the tip of the spider's abdomen. And it's made out of proteins that are created by the spider's body. So the web is an extension of of their body. It is their body in a way. And so these orb weaver spiders have this capacity to create silk, and they use it to build their webs.
And how they do so is that they start on one end of a solid thing, again like a branch or a post or a chair. Something usually relatively high up and they start by sending a line of silk out from their spinneret called a bridge line and this line of silk is very strong and they send it out and it catches on the wind until it connects to a branch or an object on the other side.
Spiders can't see well, so they're not like at a post, you know, and, you know, on this edge of something, and then they see, oh, there's another post over there, I'm just going to send this line out. No, they can't see, they send it out not knowing where it's going to land. But once they feel it land, they crawl over the bridge line, and then they emit another line about the same length, and then they crawl halfway across their bridge line with that other line there, and they use their weight to bow it down halfway so that there's a triangle that gets formed.
So the bridge line is on top, and then the second line they've created is sort of put in half by the weight of their body. And from that point that's pointing down, they send another anchoring line down, so that you create a big Y shape with the bridge line at the top of the Y. So it's like an upside down triangle with a line connecting the point of that to something solid on the ground beneath them. And from there, the spider creates radial threads, like the spoke of a wheel, connecting it to the surrounding vegetation and really solidifying it in space. And then from there is when it starts to create what's called the capture spiral. The inner circles where it will catch its prey.
And so they are creating these spirals, these inner loops around the radial threads, and those parts, that spirolic part, gets covered in a glue that makes catching the prey easier. And the spider can create this web on average in about an hour, um, which is kind of incredible if you have seen how large and ornate these can be, the fact that they're doing this in the midst of the weather and the elements and human and animal disruption.
Many of the orb weaver spiders will rebuild their webs regularly. Some even do it every dawn. Other ones who don't do it every dawn might do it if their web gets a lot of dust or pollen on it and it's not really effective at catching prey anymore or if their web gets destroyed. Um, so some do it regularly and some do not.
Some of them will also eat the web. to dismantle it, and so then they'll reuse the proteins in it to create new threads. Um, some don't eat their entire webs, but will eat areas that they want to sort of redo. And again, they, these beings can't see very well. They can see light and dark and some movement, so they have to be very, very sensitive to vibrations on their web, and they can tell the difference between wind that's blowing through the web or a raindrop landing on it versus a fly caught in their trap, and they will stay at the center and they will wait, conserving energy, until they sense the right type of movement, when of course they will go and paralyze their prey with venom and kill it and wrap it and then feed on it for as long as it will last.
And most of the spiders that you're seeing in these webs are females.
The males generally don't build webs as much because they're out. trying to look for females to mate with. And so these females will lay their last eggs in the fall, and they will die at the first frost. And the eggs will sort of incubate through the winter and hatch when things are warm again in the spring.
So these spiders arrive in the spring, but we don't often notice them as much because they're so small. We really notice them in the late fall, late summer and early fall when they are larger and creating more substantial webs. And I think something about dying with the first frost is really poetic. So there's a lot of intelligence here and I encourage you to hold on to any bits of it that stand out to you and act as if they are a message for you. So if something about how the spider builds its web stands out to you or if the fact that they have to be very sensitive is meaningful to you right now, to trust that that stands out to you for a reason and can be medicinal for you. I also want to encourage you to keep an eye out for these spiders in your garden for as long as they're around or on your next nature walk and just see what you notice and approach them as the real teachers that they are.
I want to pull out some significant themes that I have noticed and have been thinking about since learning more about these creatures and sort of sitting with them. The first is that the spiral is how they meet their needs. Their lives, what they create with their bodies, where they live, what they work on, what feeds them, is designed in a way that mimics the great wisdom of nature.
Spirals are all throughout the natural world. We see them in snail shells, galaxies of stars form spirals, snakes coil into spirals, storms form spirals in the sky, DNA, if looked at from above, is a spiral. The center of a pine cone can be looked at as a spiral. The center of a sunflower with all of its seeds forms what's called a Fibonacci spiral.
The spiral is a key way to grow and a key way of designing in nature. There can be, in one article I read about the Fibonacci spiral in particular, and I'm not sure if all, I don't believe all spirals are Fibonacci spirals, but the Fibonacci is a type of spiral, and it's an excellent way to pack a lot in to small Spaces, rather than if like every seed had its own, if it could lay down, you know, that's different than if you look at a sunflower, you can see all the seeds are sort of standing up in a spirolic shape.
That's a very efficient way to use space and to ensure that there's more seeds to proliferate. And it's also very beautiful and geometric and pleasing and, um, symmetrical. It's a beautiful design. Spirals are also how we move through time. Right? The seasons are a spiral. The movement of the sun is a spiral.
The moon goes through a spirolic cycle every month, every 28 days. And so these orb weaver spiders aren't out chasing prey. They aren't collecting acorns and storing them. They work really hard to make something sturdy that mirrors the wisdom of the cosmos, that mirrors how things have been done for Billions of years and they make it and then they wait and what they need will arrive to them.
The other really medicinal piece that I want to pull out is that the web is the spider, and the spider is the web. It is their body. It is an extension of their body. They can ingest it. They can recreate it. There is really no end to the possibility of that until they die. Their consciousness extends beyond their body, just like ours does.
We exist beyond these bodies. We can travel places in our dreams at night. I don't know what you believe, but I don't believe that our consciousness ends when we die. I believe consciousness extends. We exist beyond these bodies, and, you know, we may not create our homes or our places from... of work from our literal bodies, but you could argue that they are an extension of us, that there is a dynamic interplay between our internal and individual experiences and the spaces that we occupy and build.
Your energy fills your home. You have a consciousness and energy that you take into. the workplace with you, or into a gathering space, or into, you know, the doctor's office, or wherever you go and inhabit, and those spaces become a part of you, you know, I'm reading a book right now about intention, and, um, the author is sort of starting with physics and quantum physics, and demonstrating that when when you're isolated away from people it's very difficult.
I don't have all the right, I'm worried I'm going to like get it wrong. It's called the Intention Experiment by Lynn McTaggart, and I'll put it in the show notes. But essentially, subatomic particles, when they collide or come into contact with other particles, become what's called entangled. And that they impact each other, even if they are never together again, across time and space.
And so if that's true on a subatomic level, We might be able to deduce that that's something that can build and be true on a larger level. And so I think we can play with the idea that your home, your office, the ecosystems around you, that all of that is part of a vast web and an extension of your consciousness, that you make meaning in those spaces, and those spaces make meaning through your presence and your engagement with them. So what if your home is a place where some of your consciousness is actually stored? And what if we extend your web even further so that whatever enters into your consciousness, no matter how far away it is, actually reverberates within you and becomes part of the structure that you make your life on?
It really opens a lot up, doesn't it? In some ways, it strikes fear in me because then it's like, well, I'm influenced by so much. But I think that's already true, even if we don't acknowledge it. And so, remembering that we are the webs that we weave, and that the webs that we weave are us, and that we're not really separate from them in any meaningful way.
The third point that I want to pull out is that life is a process that can be rebuilt every dawn. Again, some species of orb weavers dismantle or move off their web and build a new one every dawn. And so each night as we sleep, the strength of our webs is tested. The holes might appear in your dreams, your body repairs the tiny tears that you sustained in waking time, you leave your body and travel in the dream world, you may lie awake and ponder what feels untenable or scary.
Really important work is happening in the night. Many of these spiders are nocturnal and so they're most active at night. And us, we're active in a different way and in a way that is absolutely necessary to live in a good way and to have meaningful awake time. And so every night, something gets cleared, worked on, reintegrated, the holes get repaired, and then with each dawn, you can rebuild your web anew.
And most of the time it looks the same as the old one. You know, our lives don't change so dramatically usually from one day to the next, but you can put down new anchor lines. You can travel to different places. You can build your web on a sturdier area. You can eat and digest the center of the web and give yourself a sturdier seat in the middle of everything.
The spider can create and recreate and repair and rebuild for as long as it is alive, with nothing except the materials within its own body. And you can do that, too. Every night, if you can respect the cycles of sleep and darkness that are necessary, you are rebuilding and re understanding how you want to structure your web, and every dawn you have the potential to do that, to either build a new one completely in a different area, or to repair and digest and, you know, Reassess the structure that you want to exist in.
The fourth one is that there are many reasons to repair. Again, some spiders only create new webs if their current one isn't catching prey, or if it's been destroyed by the wind, or, you know, one of us blowing through a trail or through our yard and accidentally destroying their web. And capitalism creates many holes in our webs too, many fragilities.
It's really difficult to sit at the center of your life, surrounded by a sturdy, web that you have created in the image of cosmic order and to stay there and trust that what you need will come. That is really hard to do inside of this economy and society and so we are rebuilding constantly. We are approximating the balance and the spirolic rhythm of the natural world as best we can.
There's no need to try to get it perfect. We're not purists. What we can do is we pay attention. We use our sensitivity. We notice where there might be damage to our web, where we have become unanchored or unstable. And for many people, The jobs that we do or the projects we undertake or the way that we meet our material needs do create a significant burden on our webs or significant holds or it can make it feel like there's not the stability that we need, that we have to be very active and we can't just relax in the center of our webs and feel the breeze on our stomach and on our backs.
And so we do our best. We sense what Like, what the state of the web is, how far is my consciousness extending, am I anchored to the things that are sturdy enough for me right now, do I need to rebuild, and how we sense and we digest, we eat the parts of the web, we metabolize, we make sense of them, and we repair where we can.
And we're doing that every day. And that's not a problem, it doesn't mean that anything is wrong, we may not be creatures that... Create a home and then live in it forever. No day is the same. And the final piece of medicine or wisdom that I want to very humbly pull out from what I think we can witness from the spider is that spinning and weaving a web is a feminine art.
Female spiders are doing this, and that doesn't mean, I'm not talking about like the female body for us humans, or the male body, I'm talking about the feminine art that lives in each of us, no matter our gender. Spiders can't see well, so they sense. They have to sense, they have to use their other faculties. It is intuitive, experimentational.
It is diligent, it's slow, it's instinctual, and it's impermanent. The spider understands that the web, even though it's very strong, can be destroyed at any time. There's no guarantee that it will catch prey. And they know that they can rebuild it if they need to.
And I think building a life that is so of you, that feels as if it actually comes out of your body, your abdomen, your womb, your heart center. That the life you build is so of the intelligence of your body that it can catch what you need and bring it to you is a way of being that many of us have forgotten, but that we still have the potential to embody. Again, capitalism is so about going out and getting what you need and hunting and capturing or tricking and manipulating.
And the spider, I think, comes in and reminds us that there are other ways to meet your needs. You can build something that is strong and sturdy, that is of you, of your body, that is actually really beautiful to look at and witness, and that that can be a way of just very gently catching what you need in this life. I'm not saying that there's any one right way to live, but I want to, I do think there's some serious wisdom in this approach.
So what might it mean to live spiralically? I want to talk about this for a little bit longer. Creating a life that is a spiral, what does that mean? I think first it means, most obviously, that you honor the cycles of life, death, and rebirth.
You honor the dying time, especially right now. Most of us are really good at honoring the lifetime and when things are born and celebrating that and, you know, being gentle with new life. We can sort of map onto that more easily. We're not always well versed in what it means to honor the dying time, seasonally and in our own lives.
And I think in terms of how we live and work right now, that means really committing to less. Doing less right now. Saying yes to fewer things. Clearing more space in your day, in your home, in your car, in your mind, wherever it feels, uh, generative. You might clear space in your body by fasting for a morning or a day.
Clearing space, even though you're not sure what will come in its stead. Really not pushing anything right now. Taking a wait and see approach. Considering that you might have actually done enough for the year. That maybe that was it. That was your growing season. Of course, we have to remake our lives every day and feed ourselves and bathe and, you know, sleep and do all the things that we have to do to live each day, but what if all the extra stuff could start, like, what if that, what if you have done enough since the winter and spring and summer?
And I know that we don't often have the power to actually really stop and just focus on feeding ourselves and drinking enough water and going to the bathroom and all of that. I know we often Just have to do more in these jobs and in the way that we feed ourselves in this economy. But it's a really interesting thought experiment and it can change the chemistry of your body, of your nervous system to imagine that actually you could be done right now. That what if that was enough? That was it.
I think living spirolically also means that you grow slowly, that you grow thoughtfully, that you You know, while it might be slow and thoughtful, it can be very rich. If we think about all of those sunflower seeds really packed into the center of this flower, it can be very full and delicious and prolific.
But that it doesn't have to be this sort of manic, growth. The spiral reminds us that it can be at a different pace and a different rhythm.
Living spirallically also means that you use all of your senses, not just your mind or your eyesight, that you can really sense with your intuition and with your gut and your body and your heart.
To really understand the state of your life and your web, and what you need, where there's holes, where it's really strong. Do you need more glue to attract and catch what's coming through? What you have, the anchors that are working, the anchors that are not. I think it also means that you understand that your environments are also you to some extent.
And that you keep your web small enough right now to really tend to those places well, especially those close to you, like your home, your immediate places of community or work or your car, that you treat those areas, those places, those physical manifestations as extensions of you and sort of, you can imagine just sending them your good energy, your gratefulness, your faith that they can be sturdy and strong enough for you.
You can send them, you know, help or assistance. You can nurture them well, tend to them, really remembering that you are a part of something so much larger than just yourself, this body or your internal experience and not making that so big that you can't move or that you feel paralyzed, but really appreciating the web that is your life and the spaces that you occupy.
There's also this piece of really needing to stay at the center of the spiral where you can sense all of the spiral. When you need a break - and spiders do take breaks sometimes and they can go into the bushes or into the ground nearby, but they still keep a trap line attached to them so that they can sense when a prey, a fly, or another insect hits their web and is there ready to feed them.
So you can absolutely step away from the areas in your life that you need to right now and just keep an intuitive thread to sense you know, when something is activated. This is your life. And what happens when you come back and you can really be at the center of it? All eight of your legs spread wide.
The wind at your belly and your back swaying in your web and not fighting the breeze, not fighting the cycles of the day or the night. Can you suspend there and really trust that the intention that you have put into your life will feed you? That if you make the time to be of your body, respect the cycles of your body and what you need, and if you imbue your life with that, with the wisdom of your spirit, the unique gifts that you have, the questions you have, the way of being in the world that you are, can you sort of send all of that out into your web and then rest inside of it?
I would really love to see that for more of us right now, this fall and winter.
The last thing I want to say about living spiralically is that I think it's really about living according to sacred truths, the way things are, not how we're told they are or how they should be by civilized culture. Dominant culture would tell us that we are at the height of human ingenuity right now, even though most of us are not getting nearly enough of the sleep, healthy food, community, medical care, ease that we need, that humans deserve, that all creatures and beings deserve. Dominant culture would tell us that working at a job or inside capitalism, that the pursuit of capital itself is a noble endeavor when we can see that the spider's work is its home. The spider's work is its consciousness, its closeness to the cycles of life and death.
It doesn't make a web in the morning and then go to an office all day hoping that the web is intact when it's back around 530, hoping that there's dinner caught in the web. It's much simpler than that. It's much more sacred. It is attuned and aligned with how things are. This being has the chance to make a home in the image of what is sacred and then reside at the center of it.
And I think that is something that has been true for humans before, and is still true. There is the potential, the seed of potentiality in each of us. But right now we have created ways of being in the world that are not aligned with how things really work in the natural world. We are fighting against the natural sort of rhythms and spirals of which we are a part.
And I'm open to being wrong about that. Maybe maybe capitalism is a... you could argue that it is an expression of nature because nothing is not nature, right? But I think the fact that it causes so much suffering and is moving against core natural principles like diversity, uh, sustainability, energy use, the fact that it's so antithetical to how the rest of the natural world works, Either means that it's like something else that is not exactly nature, which I don't know if that is possible, um, or it means that it's like another expression of nature and we get to decide if we want to let that continue to play out or if we want to try and bring in some other type of harmony.
So that's like a big tangent, um, on what capitalism might be. And I don't want to set it up as like, you know, I, I view myself as an anti capitalist, but the truth, if we like zoom way out, is that capitalism is, is still nature because nothing is not nature or natural. So. I don't know. It's, that's a big question mark for me, but I think living spiralically does give us a much greater Opportunity to live simply, to live really richly, to create beauty with our lives, which many of us do already.
Life is inherently beautiful, even inside of capitalism, but there's something really poetic about these spider creatures and what they weave together and how they live and how closely they live to creative wisdom. With all that said, I think there is this sense of grief about what capitalism costs us.
Even if capitalism is an expression of nature, we can hold the possibility of that. But if we come back to the idea that capitalism is something that we have sort of created out of a Disconnection to nature and the natural cycles and an appreciation for the feminine and the earth and seasons, if it's an outgrowth of that, then there is this real grief about the time that it takes away from us, the stress that it imparts upon us, the violence that is perpetrated in its name.
And so this mid autumn period, I want to encourage you to really divest as much as you can from capitalist ways of living and being. To live naturally and spirallically in any way that feels resonant and courageous to you right now. And that is not easy. It's not meant to be comfortable all of the time.
But I do hope that you will... reclaim your life a little bit more this autumn season and that you will hold the possibility in your heart that one day capitalism will die. It will not exist anymore. Civilizations will die. They will not exist anymore. These ways of being in the world are dying and they will not outlast life.
And so, if you can just hold a little bit of space to imagine that life could become as simple, as strong, and as beautiful as the life of a spider who understands its place in the vast web of everything, I think you'll be well served this autumn. So, that is what I have for you today, my friend. I hope that this felt fortifying in all the good ways.
We have a little bit of time here in the Pacific Northwest to learn from these creatures before the first frost comes and before the... Go Dormant and Are Reborn in the Spring, and I hope you'll take a few minutes to appreciate them if you come across their path.
If this show is supportive to you, I want to invite you again to check out buymeacoffee. com slash Megan Leatherman and either contribute once or monthly. Um, that means so much to me and helps make this work sustainable. I hope that you take such good care. I'll be back with you next week with an interview. I think you're going to really, really love. So be well, be as well as you can right now and I'll see you on the other side.