One morning I decided I would take my breakfast down to the garden summerhouse. It was warm and sunny after a long period of cloud and rain in a summer on the British Isles. I opened the double doors and hooked them back, noticing how cobwebs had accumulated again after my previous thorough clean of the place in the late Spring. The pine structure still smelled deeply of nature, enduringly so despite the unoccupied passage of weeks in which I had hoped and planned to rest there for inspiration in writing or leisure.
I moved a chair onto the staging, facing east into the morning sun rising over some middle distant trees – Monterey pine, Bramley apple, larch, and ginkgo. My thoughts turned through nature, spiralling like the sun and its rotating planets into the inner heart of movement buzzing around the pond bordering flower beds. Less insects this year, I thought. That means problems are coming, even though there are less problems managing insects today.
My life has become a deeply spiritual adventure. The Celt in me celebrates the fact that I am part of this. I breathe. I reflect on where my muesli and yoghurt and coffee have come from, the people involved who gave, and those who took, the shrinking world and the growing population struggling to find land and water. I enjoy tasting the food and drink in a prayerful connection with all, wondering further about the potential and possibilities that fill my place now in its movements of life. I am not a great one for formal prayers, as relatedness is prayer enough for me. But I do ask. In those moments of peace – I call them gaps in time – I cast out a question sometimes about which of life’s many possibility would next be most life-enhancing… and curiously I often hear a reply moving mysteriously in my heart. Some people I know will say I am talking to myself, to my inner psyche, drawing out from my subconscious what I secretly want to hear. But I have come to know, in the utter depths of my heart, that the ‘between’ of relatedness is more real than material. It is life’s potential bursting forth within me from among all of life, even to the uttermost growing edges of the cosmos, as if it were a garden here and now. And this growing cosmos is personal. It welcomes me and my presence along with all the others, you, us.
So, sitting on that veranda staging I asked… and in my heart I heard, “Go inside. I want to welcome you into my heart.” I looked around behind me at the inner space of the summerhouse, the prayer shack in the garden as we had called it. Sunshine illuminated the pine walls casting shadows from the window slats. A multicoloured crochet squared blanket lay slung over the back of a compact and comfortable easy chair with its curved dark-wood armrests. I moved to put my breakfast bowl on the writing table, and hesitated. Illuminated in the sunlight was a cobweb from the side of the armchair to the side wall. In the same moment two ‘things’ registered: ker-ching. I saw how the cobweb glistened as if radiating its own light; I felt an inner urge to clear it away before I sat there. I moved around the table and its nearby second hard backed writing chair, noticing while doing so that, since my last clear through, small cobwebs had started to accumulate everywhere – walls, cushions, edges of the worn and faded carpet, coffee table, edges of books.
I was about to start sweeping more of them away from around the armchair with my hand, indeed had even done so for one of them as I am not afraid of spiders even though I sometimes feel shocked when I realise they are seeing me from inside their exoskeletons and watching to know what I am going to do next, timing their next move.
I had swept one cobweb away from the side of the armchair, when I felt or heard my inner heart speak again, “What are you doing?”
This was a call. I have known calls before. I have had enough experience of them by my seventh decade to know that it is wise to listen. Here was another call from the between. I have had enough experience of them to know that I now need to enter a gap in time with discernment to exclude any distracting spirit and to hear only the inner heart of our living Creator God. And as I did so, I saw the cobwebs again as if glowing with their own inner light. I looked, and looked… and I sat down on the armchair with its filaments of suspension in space and time, and I rested.
The depths of peace I experienced went beyond awe. It said, “Welcome.” I belong in this.
There was timelessness. I noticed detail. Everywhere I looked I noticed detail. There was movement… slow, gentle movement; birds hopping among fallen leaves, slight sounds, aroma, warmth from the sun on my foot. And then I saw it. From the Formica edge of the writing table to the back of the wooden writing chair about 50cm from it was a single thread of cobweb, glistening. And as I looked along its length and its delicate thinness, to my surprise I saw a miniature pale green (I shall avoid saying the word so that those with fears do not get shocked at this delicate point in the narrative), no more than 1.5 millimetres long, weaving busily a second thread along beside the first. It ignored me, I think. It seemed so intent on its task that I was, perhaps, an irrelevance. But as I watched its detail in movement I found the depths of mystery opening before me once again. I could understand how it was working its way along the first thread, full of energy and delicate mass wobbling slightly along its tensile wavelength; but I could not see how it had strung out that first thread. The gap between table edge and chair back was 33.333recurring times its own length. And it would have been hundreds of times its own length if it had walked or scrabbled down the table leg to the floor, across and back up, dragging its light sabre behind all the way. These are the sorts of questions that have driven scientists to science for centuries, and we still do not have an answer for how these creatures think.
These reflections in my heart and mind were not disturbing or motivating. I was there.
In time, time returned as inner change moved me to take what I had learnt from this joy-filled place back up to our home, where I could share the story with Marian. The betweenness endures. My love of intelligent life goes through and beyond the luminosity of cobweb threads to some shared source. In that source there will always be some mysterious desire for self-revelation and recognition. We are. And I honour and trust the one who opened a door through our hearts so we know how to love our ever-renewing source of life.
I took my breakfast bowl and cup back up, reflecting that the spiders were hoping for their breakfast too in their ways, and the burgeoning population of the world is hoping too in its own ways. Perhaps we all need more gaps in time to slow down and stabilize our relatedness. It is a curious paradox that a catalyst accelerates life-enhancing chemistry by slowing down free-floating chemicals so that they have a greater probability of meeting each other, and recognising what they do for each other. That prayer shack was a catalyst for me.
