Giant Spider Walks the Red Road

(Friday, January 15, 2015) moon: first quarter Aries / tarot: Spiderwoman (Wheel of Fortune, Fate)

Chris and I are exploring a house we have just moved into. It is a big old house, in need of some attention. The floor plan feels perfectly square. The house is a single story, built over a full basement.

We have entered the house through the very large kitchen. Country kitchen. Fields of tall prairie grass are visible through every window. No trees. The floor is covered in worn linoleum, deep red with flecks of grey, black and white. (The ambience of the room reminds me of my aunt Bernadine’s farmhouse on Snake Creek, at the edge of the Whitewater State Park, near Minneiska. Bern and my uncle Lawrence never made any changes to the decor of their home in all my childhood visits. The furniture was from the forties, probably all purchased right after their wedding. The floor beneath the chrome-legged dining table was covered by an old grey sheet of linoleum. The edges of the room were exposed planks of wood that had lost their sheen years before.)

I decide to get to work. I peel up the dusty linoleum, uncovering rough-hewn and aged wooden boards. I will have to hire someone to repair and refinish the floor. Then I notice a thick, rectangular pane of glass that is fitted into the floor and subflooring. Chris and I peer through the glass, into the lower level, which is filled with antique furniture. Was the previous owner a collector, an antique dealer?

Intrigued, we head down the stairs into a square room with a square wooden table covered in large sheets of drawing paper. I examine the pencil drawings and recognize them as the work of a local, well-known artist. I say his name. Chris doesn’t know him, and I forget his name when I awake. I look about the room and notice plenty of small spiders and their webs. Dust everywhere. I will have to hire someone to clean up the basement.

I raise my eyes to look at the wall farthest from me. It is curved, made of cinder-colored brick, with a small black oven in the middle of it. The iron oven door is open. I look to my right. The wall continues to arc. A second oven door is visible. I look left, and behind me. The brick wall creates a full circle that surrounds us, with four oven doors at 90 degree angles to each other. Like the nodes of a compass or a medicine wheel. The room is no longer square. Squaring the circle, circling the square.

Now Chris and I are intrigued by the circle of ovens. The brick wall runs from the basement floor to the ceiling, like a medieval tower or turret. We wonder if the formation is present in the upper story, if there are fireplaces upstairs as well.

We bound up the stairs. But my awareness shifts left, to the outside of the house. An enormous spider, tall as a building, iridescent colors shimmering on her black shell, is walking carefully, slowly along the clay road.

Day notes:

Unbelievable to me that I draw the Spiderwoman card in the tarot this morning. And when I shower, I notice a pea-sized red mark on one of my ribs (left side). Spider bite? Generally, online dictionaries say spider dreams are about being ensnared in the web of a mother’s power. To the Hopis, spider is about weaving and the creative force. I have been reading Connie Kaplan’s  “The Invisible Garment” which defines aspects of our beingness as the warp and weft of our spirit garment.

Another dream of home. Today I get an email from Wisdom Ways (Sisters of St. Joseph Carondelet). Kevin Kling is giving a presentation in April about home: “In life’s journey it seems home has gone from a place that is, to one I remember, to one I create.” The email also includes a phrase from the Irish scholar John O’Donahue: “the clay that forms us.” I recently checked out one of O’Donahue’s books from the library (“Anam Cara, A Celtic Book of Wisdom”). Every line of that book is a poem.

I have started painting the upstairs bedrooms, which were last painted 18 years ago.

Second dream of ovens this week. I have not recorded the other dream. In that dream, my mother-in-law works at a huge iron and brick oven that takes up one whole wall in her kitchen. Handmade ceramic pots cover the floor around her. That oven must be a kiln. I have been considering going back to school and getting a sculpture degree. State credits are $10 after the age of 62. My mother-in-law Kay’s deathbed message: “Don’t wait to do what you love.” The tarot card I drew the day of this dream was the three of pentacles, which in my deck is called Claywoman. The image is a woman making pots outdoors, with an adobe kiln/oven behind her.

According to Z. Budapest, the colors associated with The Fates are black, white and red.