Morning Meditation

Morning meditation 1: seeing what we cannot see.

Before the hummingbirds arrive, before the mockingbirds begin their trill, before the bees begin their dance, a moment comes when the earth is in meditation and reveals itself to us as morning rolls around the globe. Just such a moment passed through my yard a couple of hours ago.

Under the avocado tree hangs a plant that I water most days. I bought it at a local hardware garden shop several years ago and found an amiable branch willing to bear it. There it has hung since. I’ve not re-potted it nor done much else besides giving it a passing glance on my morning rounds. But this morning, the sun found me too early. I opened the windows and doors to let the cool morning air flow through and wandered out into the backyard, still in my pajamas.

There under the boughs in distilled light, morning revealed what I had never seen before, a spider’s highrise. It had covered the top of a hanging succulent plant with a blanket of silk and then climbed to the top and flew down into the blanket before climbing up and doing it again, and again, and again. And again.

The light slid among the strands like tiny rainbows laid out on silk wires. What was this spider doing last night? Was it work? Or play? It looks like the trails of a spider bungie-jumping. I have seen long strands of spider silk floating from tree branches on the morning air, like maps of where the spiders have climbed hundreds of times their height and waited for a shift in the air current to paraglide on delicate eddies down to the grass below, or to a plant ten or fifteen feet away, or from branch to branch to branch. But here all those silken tendrils filled the frame of the plant hanger. What was she doing?

And why, in this quiet hour, was this strange web visible this morning, and not before? It could be that it has been visible other mornings and I just wasn’t there to see it. Or maybe I stopped long enough this morning and could see it, meandering more slowly than usual. Or maybe there are wonders all around us, waiting for us to find them as we hustle and plod through this world of woe in which we find ourselves today. Perhaps it doesn’t matter how I came upon this delicate castle of light. Perhaps what matters is that I stepped into the morning’s meditation and shared in the wonder it shares with us as it slides the horizon in spiral after spiral around this earth, day after day, year after year, eon after eon. It’s always been here, perhaps waiting for us to slow down enough to find it.

The light has shifted now, moved on, and the delicacies of the silk are no longer visible. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll slow down again.