The Spider Prey Paradigm Shift

As a kid, I was immensely allergic to mosquito bites. The Hives of Wrath reached the point that my mother was once wrongly suspected of abusing me.



Suffice it to say that I grew up loathing them. For a kid in a family of campers, mosquitoes were the Enemy. This massive monstrosity in Manitoba no doubt would have sent me into hysterics:



In my mind, a flyswatter was actually a mosquito-squisher. It was justification to me that the world hated them as much as I did. Or more - because, despite how much I despised them, I was rarely able to kill them myself.

During my teenaged years, when my skeeter-hunting skills (e.g. height, eyesight, and reflexes) should have been at their peak, I once enlisted my grandmother to take down a mosquito in the bathroom because I couldn't bring myself to bare my flesh in the shower knowing that that sucker was out there.

Even then the irony of that scene did not escape me.



Just the same, it was her attack model that I attempted to replicate years later. One fateful day, I was alone in my apartment and a sizeable mosquito happened along, hovering near the ceiling.

I knew it was only a matter of time. It was either me or that mosquito - and I wasn't keen on letting it be me.

I put on my big girl panties and wielded a rolled-up magazine, dreading what I would have to do as soon as it flew within reach. I tried in vain to talk myself into a murderous rage. That blood-sucking beast was going down. I had to believe it. I took a breath and raised my weapon.

Suddenly, a stealthy spider that must have been waiting in its super-secret Spider Cave in the corner of the ceiling launched outward and snatched the mosquito mid-air.

One wrestling mass, together they plummeted down to the ledge below, where I had an art print and some handouts I'd recently received.



I don't usually keep crucifixes or images of Christ on the cross - I think this may be the only one I've ever had, certainly the only one I've ever placed somewhere readily visible. And now it was serving as the backdrop to the scene unfolding before me.



Once it ascended to the center of Jesus' body, the spider turned the mosquito corpse over and over to embalm it and secure it there.



Of course I could appreciate the natural, biological drive for a spider to kill a mosquito, and I don't hold it responsible for any malicious act.

But you've got to admit that this spider looks vaguely villainous:



And it could have carried off its kill anywhere. Really, it could have. But instead, it had an acute sense of biblical irony.



I learned at an early age that "spiders are the farmer's friend" and that we were to permit them to live in our home, or else release them to the wild. I was a really big fan of spiders when I made the connection that they killed mosquitoes (see above illustration of childhood), and by college I was nominated resident Spider Liberator.

But this experience was by no means a matter of sympathizing with the poor little once-living creature that served as another living creature's food and sustenance. That lesson is a story for another day.

Rather, I was filled with a bizarre and personally unprecedented reverence for the mosquito as an innocent.

Yes, I understood that its death served a delicious purpose for the spider that was brazen enough to catch it mid-air. (P.S., I'd never seen one do that before, but I guess it beats the presumably painstaking process of web-weaving.) But witnessing this entire interaction - and remembering what I had set out to do - rendered me stunned.

Perhaps not for the first time, but the first with such impact, I realized the power I held as a human; realized my inability to comprehend the consequences of the actions I was physically capable of doing. I remembered that the people who actively killed Jesus were people nonetheless; that the people who actively do any harm are people nonethless. I envisioned countless victims of violence in cases in which the offenders had somehow justified their actions: genocide, hate crimes, revenge, retributive human justice.

This experience did not mysteriously transform me into a perfectly harmless being incapable of inflicting pain or making errors in judgment. But something happened that day that forever altered my perspective on the human impulse to judge, to speculate, to assign value, to take fate into one's own hands.

And I just can't erase the image from my mind - a creature whose species has only caused me discomfort and taken my very blood from my veins, hanging lifelessly on a cross alongside the savior of my soul.