One of my great shadow figures in this life is the spider. Like, all of them. Except Lucas the jumping spider. But I’m pretty sure jumping spiders are the arachnophobe’s idea of My First Spider. They barely count. Still, it’s a good first step for me. I blame my father who told me scary tales of The Midnight Spider when I was a small child. He once told my sister and I that in the winter he comes on skis. You have no idea how that warped the mind of a little kid. So, I avoid spiders whenever possible. I ask my partner to take them out of the house or to kill them if they are poisonous.

When I dream about spiders, the dreams are generally dark and frightening. They typically show up to warn me about something terrible in my waking life that I need to address. That’s not a bad thing, but its petrifying in the dream. Literally, I can’t move.

Not long ago, I was lying in bed meditating and I had a strange vision of spiders all over the place. I wasn’t dreaming, just meditating but I wasn’t afraid. I knew they were not physically real; thought mentally they were definitely there. I was calm and I waited to see what happened next. Then I saw the Spider. Like the archetype of Spider. The Great Weaver sort of spider, that you don’t expect on a Sunday night. Well, there she was. In retrospect this could have been a Robert Smith Lullaby moment, but it wasn’t. She approached as a friend and told me to cast my web to help me capture what I want. I thought the word “weave” and she said, no. Cast your web. It wasn’t profound or deep. The message was simple, clear and direct.  I’m using words, but they were more thoughts or feelings. But the weird thing was the correction of “cast” over “weave”.

Something I feared had showed up as a friend and there was never a reason to fear it in the first place. Was it more shadow integration? I suspect so. I’ve come a long way. She was telling me to put myself out there and start creating my own business. Get out of the gig of working for others, cast my web and see what I catch. Maybe a spider version of “If you build it, they will come.” Sometimes the demons we fear are really angels in disguise.

So, I’m going to cast my web and see what happens. Wish me luck!

And just in case I started an ear-worm with The Cure’s Lullaby, go ahead and satiate it.