Wednesday, July 15, 2009

no! not there!!

leaving my night class. two steps out the door, one little golden thread caught the late delta breeze and so, my eye. i traced the six foot thread left to where a large golden spider with a white underbelly was spinning. the web was already constructed in its major tethering lines and gridding spokes and the big ol spider, oblivious to the giant face of my wonder, was working around expeditiously, six lines in by now, every pass, stitched in, quickly and perfectly equidistantly. seven. the wind again and the web bent a bit diagonally but was sound and straightened, taut, golden against the warm, black night beyond it.

i asked two people to go around but couldn't stay all night sitting on the walkway: resident eccentric teacher.

perfect thing. perfect design. but in the perfectly wrong place:

outside of an art school where inside the simple concepts can be sometimes hard-conveyed: form follows function, the wedding/webbing of form and space, unity, harmony, repetition, the inevitable beauty of irreducible simplicity.

i'm sure by now someone has blundered through it and trailed web and spider for a spell on a sloppy backpack containing books containing some version of those ideas inside.

i suppose we likewise can't know if we are building our lives right across the pathway of inevitably obliterating forces.

we can always start again.
and surely again.
the beauty of our practiced efforts unwitnessed.
maybe we ourselves can't even appreciate the spectacular craft we are born to execute through our living.