As the season turns toward cooler colors & becomes typical more rainy I realize that the birdsong so abundant in the mornings several months ago has quieted. I’ve been missing that early morning music, while wistfully appreciating the singers’ capability & choice to fly south…
It is now the time of spiders. One cannot walk through doorways or along garden pathways without destroying hours of diligent web spinning. I feel quite badly even if I thus only can see my carnage through newly web blurred eyeglass lenses… all the while reflexively doing yet more damage as I flail to rid myself of the tickling on my pate & in my ears.
Chagrined, I still must suppose that makes me just a common vandal… finding my conscience too late.
But I have been enjoying continuing to learn from watching them, reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel The Fountains Of Paradise which I read at least 25 years ago, in which he speculates the possibility of a “space elevator” begun by spinning a single lightweight strand of hyper-strong filament out beyond earth’s atmosphere, quite as do these spiders between doorposts & bushes, dancing with air currents to seemingly fly… spanning between otherwise improbable distances & thus gradually building a series of intersecting strands to support their web structures in the spaces I must walk through.
His fantasy of then similarly adding more filaments, increasing the strength held “up” or “out” from earth’s gravity, just as one can swing a ball on a string, to then lift material up such an “elevator” toward a building satellite like our space station — without the complicated launch system we use now — doesn’t seem so preposterous to this observer!
Well, I’ve destroyed a lot of arachnid art once again this morning, just going down to the studio, even as I know it is being rebuilt, albeit not to the desired specifications of their original beauty & organic symmetry,,