Spider Walk

I walked along the path and couldn’t believe my eyes. There, amongst the weeds along the bank was a Dream Catcher—like those made by Native Americans.

In the Native American tradition, the design is a large circle, often made of a bent stick, filled with a woven web. At the center of the web is a small hole, often decorated with special stones or crystals. The idea is that if you hang a Dream Catcher over your bed, the web will catch the bad dreams and only the good ones will get through the center hole.

The concept is one that has meant a lot to me, as my business is named The DreamCatching Company. To me, the concept is more about catching the dreams that speak to you within your soul, rather than specific to nighttime dreams or necessarily the Native American design.

Yet, here, as I was walking along the river’s edge, I couldn’t help but be captivated. The Dream Catcher there wasn’t made by humans, but rather by a spider.

Craftily created, the spider had taken it upon herself to weave together the tops of a grassy weed. It was one of those weeds that has a tall stem and then a few sprouts, usually two or three at the top, almost like a long tuft at the top. The stem stayed intact but the tufts had been woven together to meet at the top into a large circle. Within the circle was a web, a perfect Dream Catcher, the center hole marked by one of the spider’s prey, a dream caught.

As I walked further, pondering this “miracle” along my path, I noticed ahead a leaf suspended in air, at least twenty feet above the ground, dangling twenty feet from a tree’s branch overhead.

I blinked, blinked again. Was I seeing things? When I arrived, I noticed that again it was the spider’s handiwork. The leaf was suspended from the long invisible filament. The leaf had curled a bit, like the sail of a boat when it catches air. Within the front of the leaf was another net a spider had crafted to catch its prey, the leaf acting as a backboard for any dream morsels that might accidentally slip through.

I realized on this walk that spiders (who represent the writers of the animal world as well as “the infinite possibilities of creation,” according to the book Medicine Cards by Jamie Sams and David Carson) reminded me that to catch our dreams, we simply have to open our eyes and creatively use the gifts right under our noses.