Sunday, September 27, 2009

Strange Webs

Yesterday, while waiting for my boys outside of religious school, I peered upward and saw a small stick hovering in midair. It floated eight feet above the ground, mostly lost in the background of the tree. I grew curious, and came closer.

It was not, fortunately, floating on it's own. That'd have been a bit too freakish. It was suspended from two threads of spider silk. I followed the strands upwards, and saw that they were connected to the triangular web of a mid-sized orb spider. The weight of the stick was providing the tension that gave the web it's form.

I stood there for a while, marveling at it. How could this have been made? The stick was twenty times the size of the spider, and more than 100 times it's weight. Arachnids are strong, but not that strong. It was far too high above the ground to have been pulled up by the spider, and too heavy. It could not have been intentionally cut from a branch, as spiders generally don't have access to power tools.

Perhaps the stick had been part of a prior web, and had broken off and swung down, inverting the existing structure. But it was perfectly balanced and level, with the two connecting strands neatly placed...and there were no branches directly above it.

I attempted to take a picture, but couldn't capture it with the puny onboard camera of an iPhone. So I drew it, in my clumsy sketching way.

Creation can be an marvelously odd place.