An Amazing Way Nature Taught Me To Be Patient

All my life I’ve heard, “Be still. Listen.”

I can’t stand that saying.

Who in this day and age can be still? Listen to what? All the noise around you that you? For a week now I’ve been trying to write and with a million things on my mind to write about I just can’t find it.

Tonight though, sitting outside with a rainy chill in the air and my cigarette smoke spiraling into the blackness, I caught a glimpse of a tiny thread. Following the thread down to the concrete patio I noticed a large spider.

I’m not particularly afraid of spiders, yet I’m not fond of them either.

My first instinct was to call for someone to kill it. Yet as my smoke hit the string that I now realized was web, it triggered something in the spiders internal ability to be patient.

It quickly began retracing it’s woven web up to the top of the patio awning. I watched in awe. For days, I’ve been sitting here patiently waiting for the words to flow from my fingertips onto the keyboard so easily as before. Patiently.

The spider reached the top of it’s creation only to find emptiness.

There is no doubt it thought a meal had finally landed upon its web of chaos, only it was smoke. Instead of tearing its web up and treating itself as a failure it slowly began to weave it’s intricate string of moist wonder back down to the ground. Patiently awaiting again for that trigger of delight.

That’s what writing does for me.

Words float in the air above my head at any given time. I watch them with my minds eye but can’t seem to grasp them when I want them. It’s not because they aren’t within reach, as the spider showed me tonight. It’s that they are there but have yet to hit that trigger of delight that releases the emotions that run from my brain to my fingertips.

As I learned patience tonight from the spider, I know inside that tomorrow I will begin to weave my web of words again in my mind. I will be frustrated again because they will not rattle my web of excitement, of need.

At least not until the time is right.

I do know however that tonight these words I type are worth not tearing down my web. The creation that is my mind. For tonight I will keep myself whole. Tomorrow and the dew that this evenings will leave, is another day.

Another day for patience.