How To Save a Spider

Since I was young, I’ve had a passion for investigation. Journaling, photography, documenting, writing, art, noticing the moon phases, shapes of the shadows from the sun when I would wake up, fantastic sense of direction and spatial awareness, drawing my own maps & calendars… these were all ways I constantly loved to check in with the world around me, and analyze myself in the process.

I had a little Princess Jasmine reporter’s pad when I was 8 or 9, and every day after school for a few weeks, I’d investigate and record the activity of the neighbor’s outdoor cats in that journal. Just… for fun. (…totally low key creepy, I know. I was 8, and a very curious cat-loving child, obsessed with solving pet mysteries.)

This is to say, I STILL always like to ask “what’s inside there?” “I wanna see in there” “what’s going on NOWWW? And…HOW ABOUT NOW?!” I’m very curious. I can be impatient. I’m stubborn. I’m deeply empathetic. And I can be rebellious.

Currently, I’m healing my fear of indoor spiders, and setting them free. I don’t like killing animals.

I’m trying to apply loads of curiosity and empathy to something requiring a lot of patience for me with this whole spider thing…

So imagine my personal challenge when I turned on my bathroom light a few nights ago to see a gigantic Huntsman spider hovering on the wall above my toilet. (obviously, near a toilet makes it a strong NOPE SITUATION for me and I could not let him freely roam any longer.) In the last year I’ve been challenging myself to “SAVE NOT SQUISH” more often, despite my pretty strong fear of spiders. So, I nervously caught him in a mason jar, covered him with a little napkin to take him outside (terrified he’d crawl out onto my hand like a tarantula before I got him outdoors), and found a perfect spot to set him free into the night. He was massive, and extremely fast, so I laid the jar down, and dashed inside.

When I went out in the morning, it was raining hard. The glass jar was covered in water, and soggy leaves.

There he was.

The spider was still inside the rim, now waterlogged and dead. Why didn’t he crawl out?! I wondered. I felt sad as I shook him out with the leaves, back into the earth.

BUT, WHYYYYY DIDN’T HE CRAWL OUT!? My inner investigation journalist from years gone by couldn’t figure it out. I sat with this question and thought all day about my failed attempt to save this spider.

The lesson I came to within myself is:

Sometimes, without explanation, the open door and endless possibility is right in front of us and we don’t walk through it. An awakening opportunity missed. And that sometimes, we’re are not always meant to awaken to what’s possible, even though it’s presented for us on a silver platter.

We must simply do our best at every moment to decide for ourselves when it’s time to live, and go free, or flood ourselves in the rain squall. We have to do our best to reprogram and investigate our own selves, cultivate a deep knowing and intuition within our own hearts, and act in accordance with the change we wish to see.

I believe setting ourselves free from jar means we must first get back to the spiritual truths of who we are, and discern when it’s time to scramble out of the jar.

Somebody else built up the empathy and courage to set aside their own fears to lovingly guide you into a dry cup (off of their freaking toilet wall), collect the research for you, AND THEN they set you down outside to run free! And yet: sometimes we still paralyze ourselves in the jar, and drown in our own fears and inactions. Sometimes we drown in our judgments of others. Sometimes we become the very thing we’re trying to avoid. Sometimes we drown in the programming that tells us it’s better and safer to stay inside the jar. For whatever our own reasoning is… we do not escape the jar.

No one is coming to parent you, and no one is coming to coax you out of your little glass.

No singular entity (or administration) on this earth is more responsible for you than YOU. YOU are responsible for your own decisions, words, actions, behaviors, happiness, and causes you care about.

You have a choice every single day to let the world make decisions FOR you, or, YOU make decisions FOR YOU.

I refuse to buy into the misbelief that our own struggles are someone else’s problem. We can kindly help each other see the wide open world in front of each of us, and we can even be “saved in a jar” to have the best possible chance at escape, but ultimately: we each must take the steps to awaken ourselves. I can show a spider the path to leave the jar, but they gotta be curious about it, deeply desire it, and do it themselves.

Saving a spider requires immense courage. Being a spider leaving the jar requires immense courage, too.

So when will you step forward? When will you stand up for what you believe in, even if you’re trembling to leave the jar??

x

Riana

P.S. I would not have this perspective without my Princess Jasmine college-lined notepad, and an insatiable initiative to ask: “but, why?” So, thank you to my mother for encouraging my weird creeper journalistic tendencies which has led me from Hello Kitty highlighters to now, to writing this, and to saving spiders in mason jars.

header photo credit: Photo by Dustin Humes on Unsplash