Connections

Connections

 

How do you stay connected, I wonder as I watch the spider dangling from her sticky silken web.  She climbs up to the roof overhand and then free falls back to the rosemary plant, only to ascend again and repeat the action over and over, moving a millimeter over each time, until the web stretches six inches wide.  She never loses her place, weaving with infinite patience, spinning the threads into fine design. 

 

At sunrise, a bee hovers around the purple salvia on the deck, bending her furry body to the thin slender stalks.  This bee roams the earth on its own, seeking flowers, honey, sweetness.  There is no roadmap other than the scent of flowers, the color that lures with its bright promise.  With connection to a distant queen in a hive hidden somewhere under an eave, behind a shed, on a piling at a deserted marina, the little insect savors the wild purple, leaving a smudge of yellow pollen on the drooping leaves.  Intent on its work, it sips until sated and then flies home. 

 

Pelicans beat languid wings as they fly along the shore line, connected to the flock by some silent language.  How do they, or the geese, or the osprey, know at migration time which way is north, how to aim for the polarized star that guides them?  How do they know when to lead and when to follow, when to drop down by a cooling lake and when to rise again, in one fluid motion, wings beating toward the sun?