Loving the unlovable things
When I was younger, I was terrified of spiders. My grandfather, who was of the generation to have grown up in the fields when cars were a luxury for the rich, found this fear pitiful. He had no patience for my "acquired urban anxiety". One day, when I refused to sleep because of a spider at my window, he had enough. He took my hand and sat me down on a chair next to it.
"Take a good look at it; really look at it. Don't you see it? Don't you see the magnificence with which this creature was built? How does it know to make its web so symmetrical? One of the strongest natural materials that string, created by one of our smallest cohabitants. See it wait, ever so patiently through wind and rain, trying to catch the bugs coming through the window. How could you ever be afraid of something so useful?".
And man, did he really mean it when he said I had to look at it. Only when he noticed I really understood, he let me get into bed. He took the spider softly in his hand, opened the window, and released the creature back outside. After closing it, he paused and gently said, "There will be a lot of things you might not like in this world, but they all have the right to exist. Weeds are, in the end, nothing more than plants we decided we did not want in our garden. That makes them not worth less than the ones we do want."
…ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ
That day left a deep impression on me, and I remind myself often to look for things outside my own view of appreciation. To this day, I still place the spiders I find in my home gently outside.
Let us celebrate the unlovable things like when it rains and the sun shines at the same time, or the damn jackdaws of my neighbourhood yet again up to no good, or the way your tongue tingles when you slightly burn yourself when the food is too hot. Let us celebrate the little worms in our compost, eating away our garbage, and let us appreciate the way water always finds a way to make our socks wet, even when wearing knee-high boots.
There is a lovely poem that talks about just that.
May we raise children
Who love the unloved
things - the dandelion, the
worms & the spiderlings.
Children who sense
the rose needs the thorn
& run into rainswept days
the same way they
turn towards sun...
and when they're grown &
someone has to speak for those
who have no voice
may they draw upon that
wilder bond, those days of
tending tender things
and be the ones
-Nicolette Sowder
…ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ
May the start of the gray days come rolling in soft and gently,
Rat