I'm sitting on a dusty couch in an old trailer perched on a hill near our house. It is a lovely old trailer, our sometimes guest house, and the kitchen is very small, so small that two chairs placed face to face make a perfect platform for a small person to stand on while he moves around and 'cooks' to his heart's content, banging pots and pans with gusto.

My son, hereinafter (or until he changes his mind) known as Poopy, says he is making me, hereinafter known as PeePee, a pizza. And while he works, we talk about the black widow spiders that live around our property, about the web that wraps around the tow ball on the outside of this trailer and reaches all the way to the ground.

Last night, in the darkness, Poopy (AKA Sam) and I went out walking with a flashlight and came upon a large black widow tending to that web. We talked about these sleek, dark spiders, and looked at the red hour glass on her underbelly, and Sam studied her carefully without going too close because, as he says 'we have to respect her distance'. Black Widows, you see, are solitary creatures who like to be left alone. If they must share the planet with humans, these spiders appear to ask only that we don't stick our big fat fingers and toes within their reach. In the daytime, while we clatter around in the world living our human lives, they stay politely out of sight in their little dens, waiting for nightfall, for the time when they can spin and weave and eat and drink in peace.

What we know about these spiders is this--that they will bite if we come too close, and that their bite contains a venom that can cause us incredible pain and agony if it doesn't kill us. Knowing this sometimes makes us fearful, makes us want to stamp out this threat, this possibility of death, illness, misery.

But, of course, you can't stamp out a possibility. You can, if you wish, run around knocking down the fierce webs these spiders weave (so strong that a small person can get seriously tangled in them, as Sam can atest), and spraying poison all around the place and smushing unsuspecting spiders with a long handled broom. But still, in the morning, you will find more webs wavering in the wind, catching the desert debris.

The thing is that the possbilitity of misery is something that only exists in the mind, in the thoughts, in the dialogue of the chattering monkeys. Killing any amount of spiders can never make that possibility go away because there are always more spiders.

Last night Sam became so enamored of these black widows that we walked around all the buildings on our property and found four more out and working on their webs. We could have killed all these spiders, and torn down the other webs we found, and sprayed and did all the other exterminatorish things we could think of, but eventually there comes the moment when we step beyond the boundary of our property. In that moment when we leave the piece of land inhabited by humans and journey into the desert that lives its own life, it will serve us better to know how to walk among the spiders than how to eradicate them.

I get that sometimes, despite our best efforts at living at peace within the material world, we are going to clash and bang up against other creatures, human, spider, whatever. I get that sometimes this hurts, sometimes it hurts really badly. But now, the other thing I get, is that I don't want to live my life worrying over the possibility of these moments.

I just want to live my life right here, right now, spiders and all.