Namaste

A little help from my friends, a seven dog day, and the Shower Spider

Here we are in the last days of fall, that echoing, liminal space before winter takes hold. The meadow around Serenity feels empty without the tanagers and hummingbirds and goldfinches, all gone south with their chatter and joyful colors. I’m itching to follow, but I’m still not ready.

I’ve started this post five or six times, then had to drop everything for some essential task, including camper cold-weather prep, and truck research. And each time I sat down to write again, everything had shifted. I guess that’s the challenge of this kind of writing—life keeps happening, whether or not you can keep up.

Right now, I’m sitting inside Serenity at my desk while rain patters on the roof. The weather has turned suddenly cold, but I put up the window coverings I made, and I’ve got my little radiator heater on, and Lyra is curled up on the bed in a tortoiseshell swirl of contentment.

And I, too, am feeling content. Finally, after eleven months, I’ve found my truck. It’s a ¾ ton Silverado, dark blue with the clear-coat wearing off in misty layers and an army-green tailgate; a perfect New Mexico poem of a truck. I named her Artemis, after the goddess of the hunt and wild nature and the moon.

zeeeeeeee!

Every morning for months, I’ve been waking up, reaching for my phone, scrolling through Craigslist and FB Marketplace, saving all possible trucks, then texting seller after seller with questions. I’ve been researching gas vs. diesel, specific models and engines, and googling things like ‘what is ‘blow-by?’** and ‘how high can a truck be lifted if you want to use it as a tow vehicle?’***

Twice, I thought I'd found one, but both fell through at the last minute, and with winter coming, I’ve been moving through the days in rising panic. But I finally found that fit my needs one up in Colorado and asked a friend to drive up with me to look at it. It ended up being a wonderful road trip through the gorgeous high desert of New Mexico and Colorado, the trees all decked out in gold and orange, and along the way, we got to pet no less that seven dogs.

I’ve learned a lot of valuable lessons these past few months, but many of them have come hard, and I’m ready for a break. My heart is aching for the day I can wake up and start a new sculpture, or spend hours working on my novel, or go for a long hike without worrying about time. That’s what Quartzite has become for me at this point—a refuge on the horizon where I can rest and reconnect with art and writing. All I have to do is get there.

But even though it’s been a massive project, as I move around Serenity, I feel this deep, resonate gratitude for our sweet little home. It’s a beautiful space and there’s a deep satisfaction in seeing all the innovations and repairs I’ve made, and in thinking about how much I’ve learned. I’ve definitely gained a lot of confidence this summer, especially in learning to tackle things that intimidate me a little at a time, something I’m sure will come in handy down the road.

One reason this transition has been so time-consuming is that I’m not just moving into a tiny house without a fixed address, but I’m also setting it up for life off-grid. So a lot of work has been going into figuring out how to make Serenity as self-sufficient as possible. My last big project was to find an inexpensive solar set-up that will allow me to play music and charge my laptop and burn toast while I’m boondocking. I calculated my power needs and spent a few days looking for a simple kit that I could install myself, slowly realizing, to my frustration, that the whole thing was more complex than I had time for this late in the game.

This was a problem. I need to be able to generate my own power. Then I remembered a recent text from a friend talking about a solar generator, something I hadn’t even known existed. It took another day of research, but now I have a Bluetti, PS54 700W Portable Power Station and a 110 watt solar panel, my very own source of clean, renewable energy, no set-up required. It will supply me with all the power I need**** until I get a regular solar set up, and then it will be my back-up.

making bread with solar power!

Every time I plug something into the Bluetti, I feel a thrill of happiness. Such a little thing, I know, but I can’t do anything about the island of plastic in the Pacific ocean that’s twice the size of Texas, or the world-wide, human-caused species extinction that’s happenning, or the massive hurricanes and wildfires and that are the direct result of our warming planet, which is also human-caused. But this I can do.

For years I’ve struggled with anger and anguish at what’s being done to the Earth, at the anthropocentric blindness of western culture which treats all other beings on this planet as if they exist only to be exploited or disposed of according to human whim. But when I try to write about these things, I get upset and angry. I want to rant and place blame, but when I do, I lose access to the love for the natural world that keeps me from despair.

And I believe that the last thing we need is more blame and anger, particularly here in the US where there is so much division and when so many of us are on edge with the election tomorrow. So I'm going to tell you about the shower spider.

One morning last July, I was halfway through a shower and covered in soap, when I saw that the quarter-sized, brown spider that lives behind the curtain had fallen into the water at the bottom of the tub.

I still haven’t figured out Serenity’s water heater, and though I could be using my solar shower, it takes more time, so I’ve been showering in the empty mobile home I'm parked next to for months. When I first went into the bathroom to clean it, the spider had been sitting at the back edge of the tub behind the curtain, with its badger-striped head and oak-leaf patterned back, plain as a small, brown fact.

I’d stood there with a rag in my hand and thought about evicting it, but I was just a summer visitor. The bathroom was the the spider’s home and it wasn’t a threat to me, so I left it alone.

At first, it startled me whenever I pulled the curtain aside, and I suppose I startled it as well, but it was a calm spider, and just trooped patiently back into its white plastic tent. After a week or two, it stopped hiding when I came in, and it got so that I expected to see it there on the side of the tub and enjoyed its silent company.

As weeks passed, this grew into genuine affection on my part, and sometimes the hilarious desire to offer it treats like I did the neighbors dogs, or to stroke it’s back, neither of which I indulged. But its presence was a sweet reminder in a difficult time, an invitation to leave my lists and plans and problems for a while and be fully present to the living world in which millions of other lives were unfolding all around me.

It was a wolf spider; not a web-spinner, but a wandering hunter, a nomad like I’m becoming. I pictured it leaving the tub each night and venturing into the vast, dark wilderness of the mobile home—slipping through caverns of old furniture, climbing mountains of boxes and buckets of paint as it hunted for dinner, evading predators, perhaps searching for a mate, then returning at dawn to the safety of the tub, exhausted from the night's adventures.

Once, when I was washing out a cooler in the tub, I forgot about the spider and swept the shower curtain aside, knocking it into the water, where it flailed helplessly as it was carried it towards the drain. Not quite daring to touch it, I fished it out with a wad of toilet paper and set it on the edge, watching in relief as it struggled free of the sodden tissue and staggered back into its shower curtain tent. I was more careful after that.

But this morning, by the time I saw that it had fallen in, it was floating just below the surface, motionless as an insect in amber. I scooped it out immediately, but it lay shapeless in my hand like a scrap of brown felt. I blotted the water from its body with a corner of toilet paper, then lay it on the window ledge and stroked each delicate leg back into place. When I was done, it looked like a spider again, but it still hadn’t moved, and I could feel something sinking inside, telling me I’d found it too late.

Still, there have been times in the past where I’ve fished a seemingly-dead insect out of water and it has recovered, so I nudged the spider into a patch of sun and finished my shower.

But when I got out, it still hadn’t moved, and I knew it was dead. I got dressed, reminding myself it was an accident and that it’s not my responsibility to take care of every living thing I encounter, but it didn’t help much. Why hadn’t I checked to make sure it was in its usual place, out of reach of the water that always pools in the tub? Why hadn’t I noticed it had fallen in sooner?

I’d been wrestling with gloom and anxiety all morning, but the rising sun and the blue blue sky and the excited chatter of nuthatches and jays feasting on pinon nuts had soothed me. Then I’d tidied up Serenity, something I enjoy because it usually fills me with gratitude, which had also helped. Before going to the mobile home to shower, I’d found a sort of equilibrium and was feeling, if not a hundred-percent connected, than at least steady and capable.

But now as I walked back to Serenity, there was a gray slant to everything. I was thinking of all that I still had to do before I could head south, of Helene and Milton—the smashed houses and tides of hungry brown flood water, of soaked, frightened people being pulled from floating cars, of how the anniversary of a dear friend's death was a week away and I didn’t want another thing to feel awful about.

I got to work replacing a hose on Serenity’s freshwater tank and tried to make peace with what had happened. I decided that when I was done, I’d take the shower spider outside and put it somewhere beautiful, maybe under the hollyhocks or by the yellow flowers that grow next to the cedar, so that it could be taken back into the earth.

But when I went to get it, the windowsill was empty. There was a breeze coming through, and I figured it’s body had been blown to the floor, so I knelt and searched under the window, but found nothing.

I was on my knees by the sink when I saw it. It had climbed the molding and folded itself into the corner, legs piled together in front of its body like a tiny monk bowing over his folded hands. In an instant, everything felt possible again.

“Namaste,” I said for both of us, and grinning like a fool, went back to my work with new energy.

The next morning, the spider was gone. Over the next few days I peeked behind the shower curtain a few times, but, perhaps wisely, it never returned to its old home. The weather had gotten cooler and I assumed it had retreated into some warm nook for winter the same way I was getting ready to retreat to Arizona.

I missed seeing it every day, but even its absence was a reminder of our wordless camaraderie and the spider’s surprising resurrection, and how often I think the worst of a situation and end up being wrong. Once again, I’d been trusted with something precious—a few months of overlap with the life of another being where I was invited to consider the world from a completely different perspective, thus making my own that much wider, that much clearer.

I thought the story was finished then, and I wrote it down. My only regret was that I’d never gotten a photo. But this afternoon when I went into the mobile home for a sweatshirt, I saw a dark spot on the wall above the back door.

A moth, I thought, walking toward the door, or some random spider. It can’t be. Its been weeks.

But it was the shower spider, its badger-face and the soft browns and grays of its body as familiar as the smile of a friend.

*

Namaste.

May you find calm and support and peace in these challenging times. May you find solace and companionship in friends and kin, whether human or non-human. May you feel heard, valued, loved.

May all beings on this planet, both human and non-human, have good food and clean water and a comfortable home and the space to live out their lives in freedom and peace.

May the Earth feel the depth of my love every time I pick up a piece of trash, or make bread with solar power, or stop at night under the black dome of the sky, struck dumb by the glittering dance of stars above me, and remember to say thank you.

And may each of you, sometime soon, have a seven-dog day.

**’blow-by’ is what happens in a diesel engine when a mixture of air and fuel or combustion gases leak past the engine's piston rings and into the crankcase, increasing pressure, which can damage the engine.

*** generally no more than 4 inches, though you have some wiggle room because you can get something called a ‘drop-hitch’ that will even things out.

**** the Bluetti cannot power my fridge, stove, or Serenity’s heating system, which all run off propane

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