Lets start from reverse: I was a toddler. Mother and I lived somewhere west, perhaps we were in Idaho, I don’t know. I know only I was young from the multiple times I have heard the tale told. Sitting there on the kitchen floor, I had been found with half a spider hanging out my mouth. Mother screamed, this scene is sometimes in my dreams, her fear enveloping her. Of course, this is where I caught arachnophobia, though I worked through it with exposure therapy and now dawn a tattoo of one on the back side of my arm as the fear is behind me and yet woven into my known ability to overcome even me. I remember her calling it a brown recluse, but who knows, just that I bit it first…

Now onto the dreams, only a few nights from each other. The first was me lucid as I searched my pillows for a spider to eat. The corner of my bed held a cave that got larger upon my crawling into. This is what woke me.

The second came short and strange. My bed was in the cave this time. The spider shrunk smaller as she grew closer, until she crawled into my mouth cautiously, instructing me not to bite. I opened my throat and felt each of her feet as she climbed deep within me. I awoke still feeling her within me.

Oh just a half: a trip’s visionary play. Myself the spider long before these dreams. I was dancing on the web of life, each strand brought forth a face, some known other’s strange, yet tied to my web intricately. Some came with music and other’s with colors, but all had pains that resonated with my path’s gain. Just another piece motivating me to share my life’s journey, as none of them were close with me and yet I felt a responsibility to share my healing publicly so that any hurting similarly might find relief from my strife and attempted triumph. Knowing in that space and now this that even when it seemed I was alone, I was not as the web is ever connected even in bleak silence.