SPIDERWOMAN
Grandmother Spiderwoman is the divine spinner among Native Americans in the Southwest. Her Web is a shining web of spiritual, human and ecological relationships that has too often become invisible in the contemporary world. That's why my mask weeps.
When we work with the Spiderwoman, we are inviting Her to weave us back into the Web, strand by strand, story by story, re-membering our connections, finding our way back to the Center. As I developed my website, I remembered a legend. They say that when Spiderwoman returns, the world will enter a new age. It occurred to me that the World Wide Web is probably Her latest appearance.
"One morning I discovered a little miracle. The kind we're given every day, and usually don't notice. I sat in my garden, drinking coffee at my table, and there, stretched exactly across my line of vision, was a perfect spider web, spun so that, unless I looked in a certain way, it was invisible. But if I shifted my viewpoint, there it was, overlaid on the horizon, my table, the landscape, my new day. A shimmering, transparent web. Spiderwoman's reminder."
Joyce Winter
"In 1987, the last Dusky seaside sparrow disappeared from the earth. Imagine the people of Merrit Island, Florida, gathering to hold vigil on the marsh's edge each June 15, the anniversary of it's passing. Or imagine the citizens of San Francisco gathering in the spring, beneath rustling eucalyptus trees at the Presidio, to remember the Xerces blue butterfly. That was where the last one was seen in 1941. Can you imagine the California condor, it's wings circling in the desert air? Can you hear a Mexican Grey wolf, howling in the night? Psychologists have not begun to ponder the emotional toll of the loss of fellow life. Nor have theologians reckoned the spiritual impoverishment that extinction brings. To forget what we had is to forget what we have lost. And to forget what we have lost means never knowing what we had to begin with."
Mark Jerome Walters
THE NATURE CONSERVANCY, 1998
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SPIDERWOMAN SPEAKS |
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It used to be quiet around here. Peaceful. That was in the long
ago time You could see the Web, plain
as day, Just me, and all my Relations.
All one Maybe it began with one little
fray, Crevices opened. Cracks. It doesn't matter what you call me. I've had a lot of names. These are my children. Some of them got lost along the way, buried by the years. Some have returned, some are beating like hail on your roof, some are voices howling like coyote in the wilderness, Some are your own ghosts, wandering through your sleep. They want to come Home.
for more about Spiderwoman, see: "Hands of the Spiderwoman", 2007.
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