Night Wisdom Collage 2012 by Nathalie Dignard

I woke up to a Daddy Longleg trying to get out of the bathroom sink. It kept sliding down the side back to the bottom and started all over again multiple times.  I saved the poor thing by throwing it out the window in the chilly morning air.  What’s a Daddy Longleg to think going from a cozy warm apartment, dropping 5 feet and falling into wet grass at 4am?

That brought me back to my childhood in the country and my little brother chasing me around with one of those spiders dangling between his thumb and index finger going, “RRRaaaawwwww!”. What about that spider’s perspective?  Hanging out in the sun on a summer day, living life and feeling good when out of the blue, this giant red headed freckled faced human kid grabs one of your very long legs and… off you go for the ride of your life! Weeeeee!

If this little creature can sense the world with its legs the way we do with our ears, nose and tongue, what a ride that must be!  What would often happen is that one of the spider’s legs would break off and after a long fall, it would be free again.  Life is like that sometimes.  You get picked up by the unexpected to get on a ride you never wanted to get on in the first place.  Sometimes it’s great fun but other times it’s terrifying.  Oftentimes, it’s not even the ride you thought it was going to be in the first place.  To survive, you lose parts of yourself and along with it, your ability to sense the world around you.

When you find your way back and regain the parts of yourself you thought were lost, you can see that even a ‘spider’ in the bathroom sink at 4am is a reminder of how far you’ve come.  The Daddy Longleg is free… and so am I (and neither one of us lost a limb in the process).

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