In light of my leaving Facebook, I pulled this one out from the cob-webbed attic of blog posts. It was Lesson 211 of 365 Lessons I wrote in 2012. Maybe connection does not require us to be hooked up to internet or on Facebook or anything else. Maybe it just requires us to really see. When I'm really tuned in, all the right people and things show up. This has been my experience. Here's the post that fits my feeling these days:
Something very strange happened today. My husband commented a few days ago about a book he's been reading about a matrix. I didn't think much of it until the subject came back today. We decided to go down to the woods near our house. It was foggy and the air was full of moisture. As we walked through the dense forest, I could feel a dewy film on my face. It made my hair practically wet. It was like we were walking through a cloud. At times, we couldn't see far in front of us. The air was mixed with the smell of salt from nearby Puget Sound. It felt like we were in a mystery book. Like we were about to unearth something no one knew about. And we did, sort of.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw this intricate dome, or matrix if you will. It was glowing white. And then another one and another one and another one. They were everywhere. Intricate webs, even domes like little universes hung in the trees and bushes. They seemed to float there, almost like ghosts. The cloud we were in illuminated all the spider webs in the entire forest. The moisture of the clouds caused a dew to form on the webs which cast them all in a glowing light. How many times had I walked that forest never knowing that hundreds of spider webs were all around me, invisible to my eye? They were intricate web networks, each spider spinning its own universe and there each spider sat, right in the center.
These webs all around us blew us away. It was like we were in a strange Lord of the Rings movie or, more appropriateley, Land of the Spiders. It made my husband think of a matrix. I, instead, thought of the World Wide Web. I like how those words just glide off my tongue. Those words, of course, refer to the internet, but perhaps they mean something even more than that. Perhaps there is a web we cannot see connecting all of us, just like all the webs in the forest that we were only able to see due to the cloud coverage.
Thousands of tiny spider threads were all connected to one another. They weren't random in their design. They seemed purposeful. There seemed to be a reason for each pattern cast. Like snowflakes, each one was unique and intricate.
I started to think about all the people I have connected to; about how, when I let go, the right people always seem to appear. Was this random? Or was there something I couldn't see going on? Was there a web? Why were we seeing all these webs in the trees? Is there something happening under the surface of what we see?
I don't know the answer, but I was in awe of this beauty in the forest today. My husband and I walked through a wonderland of these webs. It was hard to believe they were for real because I'd never seen them there before.
