It’s been the year of insects out at the farm. This summer the fields were filled with grasshoppers and crickets peeped out of whole under my plants and in the crevices of rocks.
This fall has given way to spiders.
They are everywhere and this weekend, when a cold northern wind blew in, there in the late afternoon, as I stood out under the pines, enjoying fall, I saw them, at least ten gossamer threads, floating past me, catching themselves on the roses and the turning leaves of the old gnarly pear trees.
Do you know what gossamer threads are?
They are the special, finest filament of spider silk that a spider will spin. He doesn’t make his web with them and she doesn’t catch a fly. It’s this silk that gives flights to spiders. Because when they deploy, that finest gossamer finds the wind and parachutes its spider to a new place. Kiting themselves along, they find their way to a new place where food is more plentiful or there are fewer birds to prey upon these gossamer makers or just a place that is new and different.
In that beautiful fall sun, I saw the gossamers floating and looking for a new place, their tiny spiders hardly visible. I saw them because the sun revealed the tiny, gossamer filament, shiny and glinting their way through the fall sun.
There was something fine about that and there I found myself thinking, perhaps like spiders, we should take a chance and deploy our gossamer threads, trusting that although we might not be certain where we will go, we are certain that we are following the plan of nature, to try, to do, to change…to accept the challenge of what lays ahead, wherever life takes us.
There are some things that can only be captured by our minds eye, at least it was not for me to capture these gossamers on film. But perhaps, just perhaps you might use a little imagination and consider that there are gossamer threads floating through the tree leaves of this old pear tree. And while you do, consider that you too, for whatever the challenge, might need to make a change. Spin your own gossamer thread. And trust.
