The Bold Jumper Spider
I manage the uncertainty of life as if I am tying together a clutch of strings, though, increasingly, I question the purposes for each one. In so many ways I feel like every day I am reliving March 16th. Only the seasons change; only I find my first grey hair; only the news changes daily like tides. I am waiting; waiting to graduate; waiting to go to that writing residency; waiting to hug my friends and family; waiting to find a home; waiting to know what’s “next.” All that was promised slips away. But I hold the threads, wondering if any of them will carry and not snap through this portal.
We wake up early some mornings to run in the park. Looking for a place to run, we took a side road down to a valley we found quite miraculous with a man-made hill separated from the path by a fence that had been broken and led to an inlet of man-made stream. (At what point does man-made just become, “other-thing-made” there seems to be a range of neglect that actually becomes collaboration.)
We sat in silence - in meditation there on the hill over the pool of water - I imagined someone standing before us. And then I felt a tickle on my arm. I opened my eyes to find a tiny spider with dark brown and white stripes along its button back. I gently pushed it off. But in a moment I felt it again. This time it was on my leg. I watched it crawl in the floating way spiders do. And then as quickly as it was there it disappeared.
In the search to find the name and nature of this spider, I began a journey through the internet to explore bugs of New York State with the disclaimer:
“Please note that insects do not adhere to man-drawn borders on a map and as such they may be found beyond their listed 'reach' showcased on our website”
Bold Jumper spiders don’t make webs. They are very small and have several large black eyes and, as the name implies, jump to their prey and depose a paralyzing venom. The jumper spider that found me was immature as it was lighter in tone.
Paralysis sounds apt as we wind around this relationship, these blocks in spirals with no end. Paralysis and the ghosts of our haunted lives that seem to have continued on without us as we wait for things to “start”. I dream I am watching the shadow, wishing it would speak, but knowing it doesn’t use English. It’s language is the language of the dead I suppose. After March was over I kept thinking this would end, late spring, I thought, summer, September and a parallel me lived on as if the pandemic never happened. Paralysis is quite inescapable. Unless it was put into the perspective of the mind. The body stays on this couch, in these blocks, closing up to keep as many people safe as possible.
But inside. The bold jumper asks the body to begin paying attention to itself in a larger way, a larger systemic, or a spiritual way. It is not intimidated by large prey, as it can jump four times its body length. I think about paralysis and ecstasy, which is the experience of being outside of one’s body. From the outside it looks like stillness, but the inside is a terrarium with full life growing and pressing against bone.
It’s true, I suffered from sleep paralysis for many years growing up, and it was in these states that I saw and heard creatures and voices that, in “normal time” would not have been there. Maybe it was sleep. Maybe it was a glitch between my body and brain. But these glitches, however technological, or biological, don’t change the affect of the experience. I looked out, all eyes in the darkness, to make out the details of each shadow.
Instead of grasping the threads of consistency, maybe submitting to paralysis, allowing for stillness, the ghost door right beside you, a portal itself.
image from: https://gnvspiders.wordpress.com/3-salticidae-jumping-spiders/
