Spidey sense. I keep thinking about it and what it means. How the web weaved is safety and comfort but also sticky and sometimes I can get trapped there. In my own weaving of the stories I tell. The connections I forge, the patterns I see.
I used to see patterns in the form of milligrams and millimeters. Amplitude and intervals. I titrated and measured and calculated the level of Co2 exhaled from pairs of lungs. I watched the potassium levels rise, replaced the magnesium, counted breaths and charted the warmth or chill of skin.
Now, when I walk into a room, I can tell you the frequency. The charge of emotion, the calm before the storm. I can read the lines across your face like a fortune teller and know before you do what’s about to erupt. I hear it in the tone, the tenor, the map of your muscles twitching in subtle syncopation.
My spidey sense is phenomenal. It is life saving. It is survival honed to an exact science.
It is also trigger happy. Calibrated to the warning signs. Hair on the back of my neck raised at the slightest deviation.
But oh, life deviates. Takes so many unpredictable paths. The body is an instrument, not a machine and how often we confuse the two. One plays music and the other makes noise. Spits out charts and graphs and formulas. Measures and calculates, forgets about things like pleasure and playfulness and patience.
Sometimes, a stray wind will make the whole web shake and all of me tremors and shakes with it, retreating to the edge, waiting, watching. Like a meteorologist I gaze up at the sky and try to predict the movement of the clouds by their shadow.
Angles and altitudes and pressure.
And where can I find shelter? When the cold front comes and a hurricane threatens to destroy what I’ve created so carefully?
No shelter but to watch it rip and wave. Strands broken, hanging loosely in the breeze or the tumult. Oh, the fear of it.
But then I remember. It was I who built that web. And I can build another. And so there’s no need for paralysis. Or analysis. I can just weave and catch sunlit dew drops in the clarity that comes after a storm.
And let the lines of your face be. And the fortune teller rest. And the music of thunder and sunlight both sing Grace.
I can drop into this present cold and cohabitate with peace. I can make a home and a shelter in the midst of my own fear. And I can sit inside of that shelter and radiate love.
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