I Quit Social Media And Made Friends With A Spider

I shut it all off on July 1^st and went outside. Long, slow walks around the farm pastures with eyes down toward the edge of the fields, looking for purple, looking for yellow. Things to tincture, things to infuse, things to spit out and things to chew. And nowhere to post pictures I wasn’t taking. The ground sprawling dewberries were a nibbly sweet treat, a baby blackberry not worth picking but for the memories. And the self heal lived up to its name simply by being found on the logging road, not far from the violets – I found myself feeling better already.

I wished to live my summer deliberately. It was a Whitman summer: “To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!” In tune with my body. In tune with my soul. In tune with the sun. I woke up at 4:30 every morning and wrote in my diary or read. I kept my daily cell phone usage below 2 hours (mostly article reading and work-related use). I sat in a church service for the first time in over twenty-five years. I ran a lot. No, I ran a lot! On the 4^th of July, I decided to run a 5k four times – four on the fourth, a challenge set by a friend, who knows I feed off such dares. Then I dipped into the Squam at sunset and read Men Without Women by Hemingway on the beach, tan as a Beauregard sweet potato. God bless America.

For the most part, my social life was quiet. I was enjoying summer solace with the dogs and my inner self. I found connection with other people in different ways. I sat in an audience of strangers while my favorite folk singer Joe Pug sang to us, “As long as you’re not finished, you can start all over again.” I ran some trail races in which we don’t talk together, we pant together. I went to the Sandwich Farmer’s Market where I chatted up my friends who sold ground beef and ice cream. I kept my profile low and my hat lower. I did not miss my internet life; I forgot it existed.

As the summer rolled along, I began noticing a spider under the front door light fixture, a bulbous brown little thing, not quite an orb weaver but probably in the family. She had an egg sac in her web and a few fresh meals hanging out. She wasn’t grotesque and squishy like a tennis ball-sized orb weaver, and her web was simple and pretty. She seemed rather dutiful – she offered me value as a front door bug catcher. I decided to leave her be.

Sometimes I’d see her out, sometimes I wouldn’t. I didn’t really pay much attention, she was just there. But one day I noticed all the baby spiders, a few dozen specks scattered about, many inside the glass of the light fixture. This channeled the famous ending of Charlotte’s Web when Charlotte “goes away” but three of her babies stay to keep Wilbur company. I realized someday this mama spider was going to “go away” too, and I began to adore her. I even bumped her rump with my finger while she wrapped a mosquito in her gossamer to-go bag. She didn’t seem to mind. Sometimes if she was dangling in a stupor, I’d blow gently on her to check if she was alive. She’d wiggle a little bit and settle back in. Occasionally, she’d shake awake and scurry to her hiding place behind the front door frame, which I could never quite find.

One morning I cracked open my Mary Oliver book while laying on the couch and learned she also liked to watch after spiders. "Of course she does!" I exclaimed to the dogs, who tilted their heads at me and rolled their eyes. "Duh," they seemed to say. In her essay Swoon she regales her spider in a tiny little food coma:

“Now the spider, engorged, was motionless. She slept with her limbs enfolded lightly – the same half clench of limbs one sees in the bodies of dead spiders – but this was the twilight rest, not the final one. This was the restoration, the interval, the sleep of the exhausted and the triumphant.”

If I could sit down to dinner with Mary Oliver, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll eat sandwiches and walk around the pasture’s edge at dusk. Then we’ll sit on the front step and I’ll introduce her to my spider friend. We don't need to talk much, just sit. I think we’d all get along.

To watch a spider wrap her prey is mesmerizing. She works and works and has no time to be bothered. Some evenings I would find her wrapping her catch and the next morning it would be entirely gone – cut to the ground and her web rebuilt. Other times I’d come out in the morning and a bug would remain mummified. Some fish get fried; some fish go in the freezer. On occasion I’d catch a moth that got into the foyer and toss it into the web – a gift for the Other Mother.

Yes, that was what I named her. Among the books I read this summer, I cruised through a favorite children’s classic Coraline by Neil Gaiman. It's about a bored little girl who discovers an Other world through a portal in her house. She dislikes her life – she is simply bored, mind you – and in this Other life, everything is entertaining and interesting, although just a bit off. A bit artificial. She has an Other Mother and an Other Father. They have buttons for eyes. They want Coraline to stay with them, but she will have to let them sew buttons over her eyes. The Other Mother is, of course, actually a monster, and she takes the form of a spider. And this world is her web. And Coraline is her prey.

Social media is a web, too. It’s an Other world. It’s filled with Other Mothers and Other Fathers with buttons over their eyes. We often don’t see the real thing, but the artificial versions thereof. Posed pictures and ideals. Other Rich has buttons over his eyes, too. I like going onto Instagram as much as the next person, but I try to remind myself it’s just another channel on the TV. It’s not real. What’s real is my spider friend braving the cooling nights for her meal and coming to terms with her fate that some night soon she might not go back out. What’s real is the full moon triggering me into a soft mood as summer falls off the trees in piles of brown and yellow and red. What’s real is the bittersweetness of the low-hanging sun blurring with crisp autumn winds while puffed out goldenrod flowers dance back and forth, birds and bumbles stealing hungry bites of whatever is left. For every photo of Wilder looking like the golden sunshine boy on Instagram, there’s a thousand thistle brambles I’ve pulled out of his fur full of swear words because he can’t help himself but jump right into them like a pile of leaves. What's real is Coraline's absolute boredom, and her appreciation for the authenticity of her feelings. She puts on her coat and goes outside to explore....

It’s in this pasture, resting in the grass while the dogs wrestle and cover themselves in ticks and brambles and the seed heads of narrow plantain, black-eyed susan, and red clover, that I wonder about the spider. Will she die in the frost? Will she return in the spring? Will her babies overwinter or are they doomed in such exposure while their siblings who flew the coop hide under cozy leaf cover? But I’ve made it this far without even knowing what species of spider the Other Mother is. Again, Mary Oliver comes to mind:

“All the questions that the spider’s curious life made me ask, I know I can find answered in some book of knowledge, of which there are many. But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus.”

And I too have been a Copernicus (a Coraline) all summer in more ways than one. Not just on the edge of the Something Wilds, but in polite society as well. Real life conversations, especially with strangers, some leading to new friendships, are exciting and almost daring and dangerous. Being social in real life is hard for a lot of people (like me), especially when we’ve been online for a fifth of a century hitting “like” as a means of affection. It can require lots of vulnerability and exposure that we seem to be increasingly less comfortable with in our society. There’s nothing more refreshing than feeling the race of a heart rate calm down after shaking someone’s hand and seeing them smile when we make introductions. Internal reward systems go off and casino chips spill everywhere. The warmth of new friendship, the eye contact, the connection. Whitman was there at the beginning of my summer, and he is here at the end:

“I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,

To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,

To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,

To pass among them, or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment—what is this, then?

I do not ask any more delight—I swim in it, as in a sea.”

I turned the social media back on in mid-September. It felt like walking into a big box store and being covered in LED lights and packaged ultra processed foods and cheap plastic everything. I could smell the chemicals in the detergent aisle and felt queasy. It took a few weeks to dial in good social media scrolling habits. I even deleted it again and was committed to staying off. I might delete it again. Social media can be a place to go insane; it's junk food for the soul. But it can also be a rolodex, a marketplace, a soapbox, a laboratory, a community board. Sometimes on the news, we see the story about the black bear that breaks into a convenience store and eats all the Snickers bars. Then it goes back to the deep forest, happy and fat. It can be that, too.

Soon thereafter, I went off for a week-long road trip to Ohio to attend a conference and tour some farms. I staggered home at eight p.m. after a sixteen hour drive and found the Other Mother on her web, but she seemed different. She was facing out, rather than in. Her legs and exposed belly faced the elements. I blew on her gently, my little way of giving her a hug, and she wiggled a bit. The dogs crashed through the freshly fallen leaves and stole my attention. When I returned to the light fixture, the spider was gone.

I haven’t seen her since. A small fly hangs in the ruins of a web, dangling like bait she isn’t going to bite. I’ve since counted three baby spiders all growing slightly larger. I've begun calling them the little buttons. One has moved closer to the light fixture with a confidence that only exists in the real world. I shall enjoy getting to know her.