Do You See The Web?

One late summer afternoon, I was sitting on my porch sipping tea. It was a break between intensive online process painting sessions. In the midst of my inner contemplation, I saw that my good friend the spider was a few steps away from me, doing its thing in its web. The sun was going down and the angle of light falling on the web was changing quickly. I was still in the same chair, with the same view, but now the web was invisible. I could see only the spider as if hanging in mid-air.

It struck me then about truth itself. It’s right in front of us, ever-present and all-pervading. We’re looking at it directly, but we can’t see it. The true Self doesn’t hide. It’s there in the midst of the simple and the mundane, on just any ordinary day and for everyone.  But what does make it visible is a slight shift in the angle that allows that beam to reveal the unseen. In the same way, the unconscious is right there, awaiting that ray of light to make it conscious.

A spider’s web is perfect without the spider having any ambition to contrive a goal for its existence. The web takes form itself because the spider is as it is. How is the web of our lives different from that?

When a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spider’s nature. It’s instinctive beauty. How much of the beauty of our own lives is about the beauty of being alive?

Joseph Campbell

By Zainab Zoeb