I was gifted a vision yesterday while holding a friend of mine deep in my heart. In this vision, I was taken to an ethereal and foggy land. I scanned the horizon line looking for something to stand out, something familiar. It only took a moment before I saw her, Grandmother Spirit, nested in the wisps of clouds. She waved at me and motioned to join her.

As I approached, I noticed that she had situated herself before a large hole dug through the cloud cover. I peeked through its center; galaxies spun, planets moved, and stars shone as bright as our sun. Grandmother Spirit surprised me by branding a fishing pole. With a flick of her wrist, she cast its line sending the hook into the infinite cosmos below.

“What are you doing?” I asked curiously.

“Fishing for hope.” She replies. “Just as we fish for compliments, for problems, for troubles and strife; just as we fish for what’s heavy, overbearing, and familiar, so too can we fish for possibility. Hope is a holding space so that the goodness of life can move in and touch our hearts.”

“Is that what we need?” I ask. “Hope?“ She nods.

“Do you remember in the beginning of your spiritual journey when you could only perceive what was frightening and scary at first? When spiders and snakes were ominous instead of medicine? It took time for you to see the positive. Just as a river carves a canyon from a mountain and a stream smooths a stone, so too must your experiences create change in you so hope can flow like sacred water.”

She reeled in her fishing line and held up her catch: a ‪small, shadowed mass‬ hung lifeless from the hook. After inhaling deeply, she and blew. The black scattered like ashes caught in the wind. No longer darkened and no longer weighted, a bright, shiny star glistened and danced on the line. Grandmother looked at me and grinned with the joy of a five-year-old. She was quite proud of herself. And I couldn’t help but return her smile.

Throughout my life, I have become burdened with the weight of my experiences. Just as my bones gained in density, so too did my energetic system become weighed with my unresolved memories and emotions. We can hold Hope like a container, but first, we need to be hollowed. This is what can make the transformational spiritual journey so painful.

Muscle memory is the ability to reproduce a particular movement without conscious thought and built upon frequent repetition. Behaviors and thought patterns become embedded in this same manner. The seeker striving for healing becomes witness to the restrictive, the painful, the repressed, oppressed, and sodden spaces within in subconscious. My liberation had to be earned through my willing participation. In my own experiences, there has been no free-pass given.

Hollowing of the self only occurs by the light of consciousness: conscious thought. Conscious action. Conscious change. We can all be conduits of Hope. We all have it in us to see the eye and the storm, the light and the heavy, the star, and the shadow. My own hollowing wasn’t so that I could witness the positive first, but rather, to carve out space within me so that all expressions of the experience have space to exist. And no matter how scared or uncomfortable I feel, I can ground myself in the moment with an unwavering steadiness that only time and experience brings and know that sometimes all it takes is a few, deep exhales to let Hope shine.

Be love, loves.

Black Widow bit me. She stood 10' tall in my living room, her back grazing the ceiling in rhythm with her breath. She hunched downward, bending her massive frame to meet me face-to-face, perhaps to show me my image reflected a thousand times in her own.

"This is sacred space here," I state firmly. "Only those of the highest and the best are welcome." She didn't move. She didn't flinch an inch. Instead, she held her ground and commanded that I get on her frequency. Her level. I understood very quickly that I had a guest in my home.

"Okay, Grandmother Spider, I see you and I acknowledge your presence. What is it that you want me to know?"

Satisfied, she shrank to the size of a penny and began to climb a single thread of gold.

"All stories of the ancient ones are stored in the threads of the Spider,” she said. "Like strands of your DNA, we hold the records of these tellings and help spin the strands of thoughts into a complex but cohesive structure.

All the great tellings are retellings the Story-makers adapted. The Story-makers must learn to come forth in new ways to reach the people of their times."

The widow spider reached to top of golden silk, a thread tied to the finger of an Abuela in the sky. Grandmother Spider climbed into Abuelas palm; Abuela swallowed her whole. As she opened her mouth a long, pink tongue unfurled. Hundreds of thousands baby widow spiders poured from her belly, crawling down her arms and hands. Each spun their own golden thread and dangled from her fingers, lowering themselves onto the people of the earth.

With the spiders bite, a human would become intoxicated by a gift of Creation; an idea, a solution, or story new to them. Where some acted on this inspiration others stagnated, lulled into stagnation from a false fantasy of perfection, followed by fear of an unjust lost due to theft by the unscrupulous or just poor timing. 

To those who chose to store the idea in fantasy or in fear, the widow spider would bare a red hourglass: their time was up and the intensity of the medicine began to wane. No longer were the perfect words present. No longer was the idea whole. The Spider's toxin, a gift of creation and innovation, had begun to wane from the mind of the living.

To those that honored Spider’s medicine with actions to shape the dream, they would receive more attention and more inspiration until all the singular strands of thought had been spun into a beautiful web capable of nourishing life on its own.