A little spider, with long green legs, has crafted a web between a porch beam and a potted plant of organic basil.  Delicate in scale, it's a marvel, the circular part rising at a forty-five degree angle above the plant, with countless guy wires in all angles.  There are young shoots of the plant from which to harvest a leaf or two, and today, the original spider has been joined by a larger one, also with green legs.  The web supports them both.  The spider that made the web has a body almost like glass, with some dots I would need to inspect with reading glasses to describe more.

The writer's life is the same.  Each day, 'hmm, I guess I need a new strand.'

How the spider attaches a filament to the post, then runs it back to the basil stalk, back and forth, is mysterious to me.

Like a lot of people in different businesses, for a job, the restaurant business in my own case, I wake up, with a  few hours to use, wondering what I am doing in it.  What am I doing here?  "The son of two great educators...  and I'm a bartender..."  But, you get up, do what you can as far as keeping things tidy, and maybe, at some point, you look for meaning.  So, as any reader might see, some of us read up on the subject of Buddhism and its myriad wisdom.  Do a little yoga, meditate, try to put some of the enthusiasm and the interest into practice.

Day by day, another strand.  Who knows what it all means.  And basically, you're trying to improve your life, to prune away the selfish habits, to join in with a greater Universal will or aim, of which one might not be so consciously aware of or be able to put into terms.

The spider's web is a long haul for it.  One a season?  One a lifetime, if not disturbed?  After the incredible creation of the web then it becomes another game, one of vigilance and the craft of securing the insects caught in the filaments.  Where do spiders come from anyway?  How did the one with legs the perfect green just so come to the porch and the well-timed basil plant?


Perhaps the trick the spider's mastered
is simply staying calm.
Something we can only do
in meditation.