This was on my van's mirror this morning. My first thought was, of course: "When was the last time I washed this van?" My hand automatically moved to sweep this annoying reminder of my slovenliness off the mirror and into oblivion. Then I stopped.
Why? A spider, poised in the center of the web. A tiny life that meant nothing to me, but then, did it mean more than my desire to avoid being judged for driving a dirty vehicle? Did I have more right to feeling smug in my human superiority than that spider had to strive to build and exist?
I stopped my hand. I imagined how, some unknown powers to be are deciding whether they need to get rid of me and my loved ones just because they can! What if we are in the way of someone impossibly stronger, who can sweep our puny lives away with one stroke of the finger or one line of ink on the paper?
Roberta, my 81 years old charge, came back from the store. I had a sore foot, and she asked me to drive car to a shopping cart in the store's parking lot, got out, took a hold of the cart and went in to buy a couple of things. Now she was standing at my door, also looking at the spider web. She moved to get rid of it, but I stopped her. Without explanation she understood, why. Both of us feel particularly fragile these few weeks. We know how to take care of ourselves. We - are no victims. But, - we identified with that spider, hanging on to his precarious place in life.
As I drove, I looked at the web on my mirror. In a short while, it became frayed and was carried away by the wind.
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