spiders and the creative process

I have a fascination with spiders, a huge fascination. The way most people feel when a butterfly lands on their shoulder is the way I feel when I cross paths with a spider, especially if it’s a big hairy one. I can picture people cringing this as they read this (hi Mum ) but I have just never been able to understand the fear people have of spiders. I give Australians a little leeway here because there are some pretty dangerous spiders out this way but the simple reality is that spiders are a fact of life and fearing them is like fearing a hot stove that could potentially burn you– yes, it’s something to be aware of but nothing to live in constant fear of and defiantly not grounds to eliminate every stove you come across! There are over 40,000 species of spiders around the world, existing on every continent bar Antarctica, and they are particularly common around homes and heavily used outdoor areas like barbeque pits and wood piles. I heard recently, in fact, that the average person is no more than 6 feet away from a spider at any given time. I’m not sure where they got this statistic but I don’t doubt its accuracy. Spiders are all around us and that’s a pretty cool thing.

In the past couple of years I have been doing a lot of writing and have noticed that in the couple of days leading up to a real writing purge (I say “purge” because it is as though the words tumble out of me like vomit), I see spiders everywhere. Typically, in these periods, that usually last 2-3 days, at least one person each day will point a spider out to me and I will usually see a few more on my own, as well. Often, also, I will walk into discussions other people are having about spiders or will hear them mentioned on the radio or see references to them on TV. And because a writing purge for me is less like sitting around dreaming up wonderful stories and more like scrambling desperately to record the thoughts that come to me before they disappear back to wherever it is that they came, its good, then, that the spiders warn me a few days beforehand so that I can clear my schedule and make sure I have some time to record the thoughts as they show up. There have been times a writing purge has hit me full on while at work and once even, while talking to my boss, I’ve had to cut him off and say “hang on!!!” and quickly jot down on a scrap of paper dot points for future writings – luckily for me that particular boss found the whole thing more entertaining than rude, less understanding employers could have fired me for this behavior!

In trying to understand the relationship in my life between spiders and writing, I have been investigating the symbolism of spiders and it turns out that spiders have been representing creativity for a long time. The word “arachnid”, in fact, comes from the Greek word “Arachne”. In Greek mythology, a young maiden “Arachne” was a very talented weaver who challenged Goddess Athena to a tapestry weaving competition and won. Athena was enraged and in her fury destroyed Arachne’s tapestry. Arachne was distraught and tried to hang herself but Athena turned the rope to silk and Arachne into a spider, dooming her to an eternity of weaving. This may be a fairly bleak depiction of the spider’s artistic roots but does demonstrate its ancient association with creativity.

In pagan circles, also, spiders seem to be very closely related to creativity. Dr. Steven Farmer, a shamanic practitioner and best selling author, speaks of a strong correlation between spiders and writing. In his “Messages From Your Spirit Animal” oracle card deck he says that that seeing a spider is a sign that you must “trust the creative spark you’re feeling and express it through writing stories that inspire and enlighten” – and of course none of us can forget the eloquent words Charlotte wove into her web in EB White’s “Charlotte’s Web” – fittingly the first novel I ever read.

It’s a fascinating world we live in. Everything in the natural world – and human society is not separate from this – is interconnected. For some people, seeing a bunch of spiders would be nothing more than a weird, annoying set of coincidences but for me the same situation represents a beautiful synchronicity and is something I pay attention to. So often animals are our teachers (anyone who has ever owned a dog will attest to this) and they have important lessons for us humans who tend to pay more attention to our noisy egos than the more subtle messages of nature. The animals of the world are just like us, just simpler, and in our thousand mile an hour world, sometimes it’s the simple messages we most desperately need.

Tagged as: animal, animals, arachne, arachnic, arachnid, australia, carly, creativity, greek, meaning, mythology, power, spider, spiders, symbolism, symbology, totem, totems, wildlife, wilson, write, writing