I cultivate a porch full of spider webs.
It’s best to have a place where the spiders can be, on the edge of porch.
From there, they can wrap around the railings and form a protective netting, a food web. These spired know that they can only make tepid incursions into the middle of the porch. They can then expect to be flicked or to have their webs swept away from chairs. This is our arrangement.
Food and space for filtration.
They don’t obscure my view and I don’t removed their productive art. I think this is the kind of arrangement all creatures should find. One where there is a mutual harvesting, mutual aid of some kind. The little green mosquitos might not agree. The sapling gets annoyed with the daily web-clearing and would prefer to be bigger and unaffected by the dead green mosquitos in the hanger-on webbing.
So it was a little to hasty to say “all creatures ought”.
All the people walking by on this street might wish the spiders worked a little harder.
When the street is empty, for the length of it anyone coming down the street feels watched by me and I feel watched by them. It is the rare person who looks up and acknowledges that they are being watched, and I usually avert my eyes.
But if the spiders covered the railing and went a few feet further up, suspended by the trees, I would be inside and the street would be outside and everyone would be a little more comfortable.
But everyone likes to be watched a little bit, as long as it doesn’t extend to leering. And glances are the key to leering-avoidance, so the spiders tell me.
They try not to look me in the eye and I try not to wonder which eye they’re looking through.
Roman Ryan 