Without being told, I know that the month of August is present when the spiders' silk fills the open eastern window. I watch the fine filament tracing the outline of the aperture asymmetrically, creating the mystery of a web. Traversing the space with steadfast strands of precision, the creature and many like it begin a place to lay their offspring every August. The August webs are more striking, whiter, more luminescent. They glitter with dew in the early dawn, and glimmer through the daylight hours, radiate with the moonlight. I look out the kitchen window, admiring the spider spin and I know August has begun.
At one time I thought that the webs caught the spirit of midsummer, hovering and distinct from each other in their design, a splendid metaphor for catching the bounty of summer's thoughts, the web of fulfillment, the intricacies of life's peculiarities ordered into a useful mode of expression. Now I just envy the spider's relentless power to know what and when to produce - its life's oeuvre. Driven to make what is required to fulfill its destiny, the web is profound sanctity, the embodiment of spiders' purpose in nature. Doing is knowing.
Oh, for a web to weave.
Not to practice to deceive
Place me in the azure sky
Let me know what to defy
this lifetime.
Here's acknowledging Sir Walter Scott (Marmion, 1808)
"Oh what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive."
