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.